It's great that Valve is willing to pay them for it. It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary, but I can live with that.
As someone who has just switched to Linux gaming, I've got to say it's working great. Maybe it's slightly less stable, but not by much, and performance is excellent.
It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary
by now the linux ecosystem has received to much commercial investment to separate out what is community effort and what is not, but i believe that most of the polish that went into linux desktop applications and interfaces have some commercial investment in them.
the problem is that for most volunteers 90% of usability is good enough. if it works for me, my work is done. on the other hand the imperfect is almost necessary to attract contributors. a perfectly working application is more likely to attract users but less contributors. and as soon as contributors work on something it becomes imperfect again.
this is not to say that contributors mess things up, on the contrary, but most do just enough work to make it work for them, leaving the work to polish it up for other users to someone else. and i think that is perfectly fine. contributors should not be expected to do work that is of no benefit for themselves. the benefit of a polished application is almost always for non-contributing end users, which in turn is almost always a commercial interest.
That's absolutely true. Valve has added significant value and I love them for it. And the community is still doing great work tuning configurations for each game.
One particularly great thing about Valve's support is that it benefits all games, and not just those on Steam. It's absolutely a great example of how open source helps everybody.
> It's a bit sad that such capital investment from a commercial party is necessary
I think it's great that someone invests. That investments are necessary is no sadder than that salaries are necessary for your work. It's just a normal part of work/life where the alternative would be to do it for free, out of passion. But you also have to make a living.
> That investments are necessary is no sadder than that salaries are necessary for your work.
Well, that's also sad.
I just wanted to say it would have been nice if the community would have been able to get this working more easily. But clearly it's too much work to do it without some dedicated fulltimers.
fully agree! I'm biased because I also work for pay on open source products but I think it's a great "rising tide lifts all boats" model of software development.
Well, yes. But what I mean is that it would have been nice if hobbyists were able to accomplish this without needing the help from a commercial entity.
I'm a bit at a loss why some people here prefer commercialised open source over community-driven open source. I mean, I'll take it, and Valve did an amazing job, but there have been plenty of attempts to make this work before Valve stepped in, and it just didn't work that well back then, and it would have been nice if we didn't have to rely on Valve for this.
This sounds the same as you wanting other people to do things for free. I don't know about nice, but I certainly wouldn't lament people being paid to do something.
You're missing my point. The issue isn't money, it's dependency.
Using Steam and the whole Valve-supported infrastructure still doesn't cost me anything. But what if Valve decides the Steam Deck isn't commercially viable for them?
Then we'll be a lot further ahead than if Valve had never paid for this work to be done. I don't know what better alternative you're after. Isn't this open source work? There's no ongoing dependency. If Valve shut up shop tomorrow we're in a better state than if they'd never funded development, aren't we?
it was the opposite for me, I was tempted into getting the steam deck because it seemed like a fun device and an exciting new frontier for linux, and it's gotten me into gaming in a way I haven't been since college.
When I got my SteamDeck, I thought I was going to do a lot more tinkering than I did gaming. I planned on getting NixOS working on it. I ended up just playing games and having fun just using the stock install.
I'm tempted to get one, but it's going to be sitting on a shelf, along with my Oculus Quest. Gaming is a thing that sounds nice in principle, but I rarely can get into it in practice.
i was in the same boat - i wanted to enjoy games again, especially indie games, but i was mostly just buying them during steam sales and then never playing them. i bought the steam deck in order to see if it would be a more fun gaming experience than my laptop, and if not at least i'd have a fun linux device to tinker with. but it absolutely did get me back into playing (maybe an hour or so a day) and i've been enjoying it a lot.
Hmm, that's very interesting. I'm exactly the same as you, I really like indie games but it's always "meh, I'd rather do something else". Maybe I'll borrow a friend's Deck for a weekend to try it, thanks!
That's how reality works. In order to do something, resources must be invested. In order for resources to be invested, people must perceive value in the thing they are investing in.
In order to do something big, many people must invest many resources, and they would only do so if they all see great value in the thing.
In order to have resources to invest, all of the people must have excess resources that they have generated from previous endeavors.
Remember, capitalism is merely the most efficient system we have for assigning limited resources across society.
As someone who has just switched to Linux gaming, I've got to say it's working great. Maybe it's slightly less stable, but not by much, and performance is excellent.