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It appears that Valve aren't stopping their push to improve Linux gaming, as they just recently hired another developer to help improve open source graphics drivers.

The new hire is Tony Wasserka, a programmer with a lot of experience. Looking over their resume, Wasserka previously worked for the likes of Imagination Technologies where they worked on the Vulkan driver for PowerVR graphics chips. Additionally they also help to found the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra, they're a contributor to the GameCube and the Wii emulator Dolphin, they also contributed in the past to the Wine compatibility layer and more. It's pretty safe to say they know their way around some complicated code.

After posting for help on Twitter only a few days ago, today Wasserka posted a surprising new update to mention this:

It's settled: Going forward I'll be working with Valve on improving the state of open-source graphics for Linux, starting with the RADV AMD driver!

Note - RADV is the Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs with the open source Mesa drivers.

Considering all the resources Valve are putting into Linux gaming across a number of developers to work on the actual graphics drivers, the ACO shader compiler, the Steam client on Linux, the Linux Steam Runtime container system, working with CodeWeavers on the Proton compatibility layer for Steam Play and more they must be pretty confident in their plans for Linux gaming as a whole. No matter what, everyone on Linux ends up benefiting from all their work since it's largely open source.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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31 comments
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gradyvuckovic Jul 28, 2020
Thanks Valve!
Beamboom Jul 28, 2020
One can only feel love.
Shmerl Jul 28, 2020
He could be working on ACO, since it's using C++. Great to have more developers working on it!
x_wing Jul 28, 2020
And that's why Valve always gets my money.
Vulphere Jul 28, 2020
Another reason to love Valve.
seven Jul 28, 2020
all hail Gabe!!!
ziabice Jul 28, 2020
There's also this juicy news here about Proton: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/4093.

A user asked to implement deduplication of Proton prefixes and the reply is:

QuoteWe are working on this. Should be in an upcoming major release. Stay tuned.

Currently the implementation uses symlinks, so it should work on all filesystems which support symlinks.
Shmerl Jul 28, 2020
I agree, that should be optional. But I wouldn't mind prefixes sharing the same version of Wine to use symlinks for all objects that don't require overrides. Like dummy dlls and such. If override is present, then it naturally shouldn't be deduplicated.


Last edited by Shmerl on 28 July 2020 at 6:28 pm UTC
elmapul Jul 28, 2020
Quoting: Patola
Quoting: ziabiceThere's also this juicy news here about Proton: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/4093.

A user asked to implement deduplication of Proton prefixes and the reply is:

QuoteWe are working on this. Should be in an upcoming major release. Stay tuned.

Currently the implementation uses symlinks, so it should work on all filesystems which support symlinks.
I hope the feature is optional. Even though it uses lots of space, I prefer each game sandboxed in its own wine instance. I find it more manageable because many of these games have special requirements.

for those games you can copy the files.
the issue is if you apply an script to fix the game, and the script isnt aware of the sym link, because it was made prior to valve implementing this...

then this will cause an headache in the mean time between the migration of such scripts to an new model and the new scripts being made to take this feature into account.
Shmerl Jul 28, 2020
I wouldn't rely on those scripts anyway. They are not maintained in the long term. You can always analyze what fixes are needed and apply them yourself.
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