Game development is STILL a highly underrated field. Plenty of advancements/optimizations (both in software/hardware) can be directly traced back to game development. Hopefully, with RAM prices shooting up the way it is, we go back to keeping optimizations front and center and reduce all the bloat that has accumulated industry wide.

Over time they're going to touch things that people were waiting for Microsoft to do for years. I don't have an example in mind at the moment, but it's a lot better to make the changes yourself than wait for OS or console manufacturer to take action.

One would've expected one of the many desktop-oriented distros (some with considerable funding, even) to have tackled these things already, but somehow desktop Linux has been stuck in the awkward midway of "it technically works, just learn to live with the rough edges" until finally Valve took initiative. Go figure.

I do agree. It's also thanks to gaming that the GPU industry was in such a good state to be consumed by AI now. Game development used to always be the frontier of software optimisation techniques and ingenious approaches to the constraints.

I low key hope the current DDR5 prices push them to drag the Linux memory and swap management into the 21st century, too, because hard locking on low memory got old a while ago

Yeah, it's a great example of demand-driven open source work actually landing in places that matter

My favourite is the Windows futex primitives being shipped on Linux: https://lwn.net/Articles/961884/

I wish valve didn't abandon mac as a platform, honestly. As nice as these improvements are for linux and deck users they have effectively abandoned their mac ports as they never updated them to 64 bit like the linux and windows builds, so they can't run on new macs at all. You can coax them into running with wine on mac but it is a very tricky experience. My kegworks wine wrapper for tf2 is currently broken as of last month because the game update download from wine steam keeps corrupting and I'm at a bit of a loss at this point how to work around it. Even when it was working performance was not great and subject to regular lag spikes whenever too many explosions went off.

Next thing I want them to work on is Linux suspend(-to-RAM) support!

They needed less stuttering in games and we got an optimized shader compiler for the open-source graphics stack.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...

To be fair proton is based on DXVK which is some guy’s project because he wanted to play nier automata on Linux.

The guy is Philip Rebohler.

> Valve is practically singlehandedly dragging the Linux ecosystem forward in areas that nobody else wanted to touch.

I'm loving what valve has been doing, and their willingness to shove money into projects that have long been under invested in, BUT. Please don't forget all the volunteers that have developed these systems for years before valve decided to step up. All of this is only possible because a ton of different people spent decades slowly building a project, that for most of it's lifetime seemed like a dead end idea.

Wine as a software package is nothing short of miraculous. It has been monumentally expensive to build, but is provided to everyone to freely use as they wish.

Nobody, and I do mean NOBODY would have funded a project that spent 20 years struggling to run office and photoshop. Valve took it across the finish line into commercially useful project, but they could not have done that without the decade+ of work before that.

I have a feeling this will also drag Linux mobile forwards.

Currently almost no one is using Linux for mobile because the lack or apps (banking for example) and bad hardware support. When developing for Linux becomes more and more attractive this might change.

If I'm not mistaken this has been greatly facilitated by the recent bpf based extension mechanism that allows developers to go crazy on creating schedulers and other functionality through some protected virtual machine mechanism provided by the kernel.

In game development, you encounter most hard computer science problems.

They also sponsor bcachefs.

If anything it’s crazy that a company as large as meta is doing such a shitty job that it has to pull in solutions from entirely different industries … but that’s just my opinion

Let's be honest

Linux (and its ecosystem) sucks at having focus and direction.

They might get something right here and there, especially related to servers, but they are awful at not spinning wheels

See how wayland progress is slow. See how some distros moved to it only after a lot of kicking and screaming.

See how a lot of peripherals in "newer" (sometimes a model that's 2 or 3 yrs on the market) only barely works in a newer distro. Or has weird bugs

"but the manufacturers..." "but the hw producers..." "but open source..." whine

Because Linux lacks a good hierarchy at isolating responsibility, otherwise going for a "every kernel driver can do all it wants" together with "interfaces that keep flipping and flopping at every new kernel release" - notable (good) exception : USB userspace drivers. And don't even get me started on the whole mess that is xorg drivers

And then you have a Ruby Goldberg machine in form of udev dbus and what not, or whatever newer solution that solves half the problems and create another new collection of bugs.

Gaben is our lord and saviour.

Man, if only meta would give back, oh and also stop letting scammers use their AI to scam our parents, but hey, that accounted for 10% of their revenue this last year, that's $16 BILLION.

Gaben does nothing: Wins

Gaben does something: Wins Harder

> This is the best kind of open source trickledown.

We shouldn't be depending on trickledown anything. It's nice to see Valve contributing back, but we all need to remember that they can totally evaporate/vanish behind proprietary licensing at any time.