The Arch Linux team has announced on its public mailing list that it will be entering into a direct collaboration with Valve.
As primary Arch Linux developer Levente Polyak discloses in the announcement post, “Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.”
Polyak continues, “This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors […] We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on the mailing list as work progresses.”
These quotes go to show how bigger corporations like Valve can still be a helpful, desirable influence in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community. While the rules of FOSS dictate that Valve was under no obligation whatsoever to give back to the community in any way, it’s had a great track record so far through Proton and is now directly funding the continued development of Arch Linux, which forms the foundation of its own SteamOS 3 operating system. It’s true that volunteers in FOSS make that part of the tech world go round, but it’s always nice when these projects can actually afford to pay people to get the work that needs to be done for the rest of our enjoyment.
Can’t wait to see the “Arch btw” splash screen when I’m loading the Deck in the future.
I’ll wait and see what comes of it. Valve have been singlehandedly responsible for evolving Linux gaming by leaps and bounds, to the point where the only real hurdle right now is anti-cheat compatibility.
Their direct collaboration with Arch is massive for that reason alone
They have a battleeye proton build that devs can choose to ship with if you use that, but for some reason most (including GTA V online) just… Decide not to use it.
Eeh… I’d respectfully disagree on the anti-cheat being the only real hurdle right now.
Modding is still a massive pita and janky compared to windows, as an example.
Don’t get me wrong, Linux gaming has advanced entire geologic eras compared to where it was 10 years ago, 5 years ago, hell… even last year. I dont even have to reference protondb anymore, I just expect things to work in general, and they usually do, outside of the minority of games with asshole anticheat (most of that can even be run on linux, they just refuse to enable the option)
As much as it frustrates me that this is the best option for various reasons, there is at least now a native nexusmods client.
Granted, if your game isn’t supported by it and given that it’s early days, I do still agree with you.
the new mod client from nexus will be great, but I’d wager it’d be another year before its in a non-test state.
Doesn’t it currently only support like one or two games? I have a grandfathered premium account. It’s a must for me for the few games I used to mod. Not to mention all the other mod utilities that outright don’t work. Things the community has built. Not mad at them for not making another version of their apps.
Maybe one solution is for most games to have some kind of built in mod support? Bg3 basically did it. CP77 also kinda tried.
Still very early days, yes. R2modman supports more games also.
It’s definitely helpful for games to support their own modders also, and I can understand why most don’t put in the effort.
r2modman supports 4 games, 3 of which are relatively obscure.
https://thunderstore.io/c/lethal-company/p/ebkr/r2modman/v/3.1.45/
Edit, for convenience:
- Risk of Rain Returns
- Hades II
- Among Us
- Ale & Tale Tavern
- Screw Drivers
- Nine Sols
- Goodbye Volcano High
- Gloomwood
- Below the Stone
- Back to the Dawn
- Supermarket Together
- Betrayal Beach
- Arcus Chroma
- Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor
- Gladio Mori
- Slipstream: Rogue Space
- Panicore
- Magicraft
- Another Crab’s Treasure
- Bopl Battle
- Vertigo 2
- Against the Storm
- Lycans
- Castle Story
- Balatro
- Content Warning
- Plasma
- Palworld
- Voices of the Void
- Cult of the Lamb
- 20 Minutes Till Dawn
- Sailwind
- Meeple Station
- Void Crew
- Cities: Skylines II
- Lethal Company
- DREDGE
- Last Train Outta’ Wormtown
- Wizard With a Gun
- Atomicrops
- Erenshor
- Sunkenland
- Wizard of Legend
- Will You Snail?
- Garfield Kart - Furious Racing
- Techtonica
- Thronefall
- We Love Katamari REROLL + Royal Reverie
- Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
- Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend
- Sun Haven
- Wild Frost
- Shadows of Doubt
- Receiver 2
- The Planet Crafter
- Patch Quest
- Shadows Over Loathing
- West of Loathing
- RUMBLE
- Dome Keeper
- Skul: The Hero Slayer
- Sons Of The Forest
- The Ouroboros King
(Emphasis mine, one of them humorous. There’s more, but formatting this on my phone is tedious and frustrating.)
They only had 4 on https://r2modman.com/
edit
I dont say that argumentatively, to be clear. Just pointing out where I got my info
Fair
It only supports Stardew Valley and Cyberpunk at the moment iirc.
Cyberpunk is a good one though, cause it requires running external .exe files for some of the mods to install/run. Which I hope they get working, cause thats also kind of a problem games Skyrim/Fallout/Starfield have, in that the most essential mod is Script Extender, and trying to find a way to launch it on linux that will launch the game.
Tbh, you’d think modding would be easier with Linux’s file system, but no, it’s pretty bad. I really do wonder why that is.
Linux is really good at sandboxing and containerizing things. Not to mention the display manager/server changes from system to system and is optional.
As someone who spent 2 hours fixing Reloaded II on steam deck for Persona 5 Royal, because Sega pushed an update that broke mods, I can agree with the statement “modding is still a massive pain in the ass” 200% my Reloaded II session on Windows was fixed in minutes.
Yeah, I’ve spent so much time smashing my head against the wall trying to resolve issues that would be very simple to solve on windows, largely cause windows is the native platform for a lot of this shit so its just inherently easier there.
The best example of that was setting up Stalker Anomaly. Good god was that a fucking nightmare. Cyberpunks not to fun either trying to get the mods set up.
I wonder how much Arch-derivative distros like Manjaro or EndeavourOS will benefit from this, aside from Proton improvements.
Endeavour will benefit from it directly. There’s nothing proprietary in the distribution, except for a repository with their theming, a keyring/mirrorlist, and a few alpm hooks for nvidia and dracut installs.
With Manjaro it’s a little different, but who knows. They have other issues to worry about
As an EndeavourOS user, this pleases me greatly.
I use SteamOS (btw)
