Quoting: BlooAlienYeah, I keep seeing people say that Proton is killing native Linux development (or guaranteed to be the death of native Linux games, or already has been/is), then I see on a fairly regular basis native Linux builds of various new (and old) games released. In addition to those native Linux games, I also see more games I've been told will never ever in a billion years run on Linux running on Linux (thanks to Proton).

I highly doubt that Proton's gonna be the death of native Linux games, but it sure does give us all access to a shit-ton of games we'd not be able to play otherwise, and gives publishers and developers a dead-simple way to support selling their games to a platform that many such publishers simply don't understand well enough to give us a native Linux build even if they wanted to. I'm thankful for all the work Valve's put into the WINE project, even if it is totally self-serving and profit-driven. An "everybody wins" scenario still means I win, even if Valve wins also.

There is definitely a market segment that's been completely evaporated by the existence of Proton: third-party ports. Your Tomb Raiders, your Life Is Stranges, your Civilizations, your Borderlands. If you're after an out-house after-the-fact means of making your existing Windows game work on Linux why would you pay for someone to do it when Valve will do it for free? The fact is, though, that the lack of growth in the Linux gaming market since the introduction of the Steam Machines meant that that segment was drying up anyway before the introduction of Proton.

Developers that make a Linux build themselves, because they appreciate the additional insight when bug hunting, because they use Linux themselves, because they're using multiplatform tooling, will continue to do so because it makes sense, regardless of the existence of Proton.

However, there's another segment: new developers, or seasoned developers starting a new project. They could develop their next project as multiplatform from the start, and use cross-platform tooling, and Vulkan & SDL rather than DirectX, and it would benefit them and us if they did so: more users of the software means faster bug finding, faster and more innovative development and improvement, actual testing and support for Linux gaming customers, and a wider recognition that Linux is a valid gaming platform. When those developers are looking around to see how they should proceed, and what the benefits and costs are, the "just use Proton!" mob are going out of their way to discourage developers from even trying to do multiplatform in a way that includes Linux. That is what harms the Linux gaming ecosystem rather than Proton itself.

In principle the growth of Linux marketshare could provide positive pressure for proper multiplatform development at a level that outpaces the negative pressure from people telling developers not to bother, but it's a long way from being a given.

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If they can make sure that it works well on the Deck, that could be a really good experience. Hopefully it will be better polished than the previous one, too.

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Quoting: kaimanPretty conservative Kernel choice, there. I had hoped they'd at least ship with 5.16. OTOH, it will be summer before the .1 release is out and I'll upgrade, and then it's not too long for the first HWE update to materialize. But still ...

There's not really an unambiguously good choice. They've been off-by-one from the LTS kernels before, and it gives them a much higher maintenance burden because they're doing all the maintenance rather than the kernel devs. If they go with the LTS kernel (as they have here) then they either miss out or have to backport useful changes from the next version. Given that they have the HWE mechanism now, it's probably the better choice to use the LTS kernel for those users that aren't on the HWE track (servers, mainly), and have desktop users upgrading on the HWE cycle.

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Quoting: subWell, I guess we're easy to overlook the numbers.
While it seems to be big money, it's actually significantly less compared to Steam sales
and putting all your resources in there.

The figures from the Epic-Apple case suggested that Valve makes about the same amount of money from Steam and from sales of their own stuff.

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Quoting: Mountain ManThe real question is why there's no momentum internally to get those projects rolling.

Shipping a game is really, really hard. Having an idea and knocking a prototype together is pretty straightforward in the grand scheme of things, but getting to a polished, tested, finished product that works and that you can sell takes orders of magnitude more sustained and dedicated work that isn't especially fun. On the bright side, Valve have said that shipping Alyx gave them a nice buzz, so they realised that they'd like to do it again.

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Quoting: amvmonkeyValve didn't upstream the controller drivers to the kernel? I'm disappointed to hear that.

They've upstreamed the Steam Deck drivers but 5.18 isn't out yet.

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Quoting: sarmadYou forgot the most important point, which is that Valve's business model depends on selling games through Steam, not selling the hardware. So, it's in their best interest that the games that work on Steam Deck also works on regular Linux as that simply means more market for them. This is why Valve is trying to support as much platforms as possible just as we recently saw with ChromeOS.

Not just "more market," but survival. They can't make hardware for every single Steam customer, but they need the means to continue to sell to all those customers when using not-Windows in case Microsoft ever goes nuclear. That's what Linux means to them, and it needs to all be available on the computers their customers already have because Valve can't replace all those computers on their own.

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Quake II RTX for example runs on the Steam Deck but as you can tell from the screenshot — not well.

Even with the Windows ray tracing that DF were so excited about in the video, they needed to turn the resolution way way down to get any performance at all.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: setzer22Valve is selling the deck at a loss because they can afford it,

I honestly doubt that.
This isn't a console that can make up for selling at a loss with absurd stuff like costs-to-play-online or generally overpriced games.
Nor is it going to bring it tons of new customers - I'd bet that 99% of buyers are Steam customers anyway.

I suspect that at the scale they're seeing, it probably isn't selling at a loss now because of economies of scale, but if demand had been more tepid (which it absolutely could have been) and they were only making them on the scale of any other niche small-run PC hardware then they'd have been selling at a loss - the cost of all of those is much higher than that of the Deck. But the product is a demonstration device of Linux gaming ("new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements" as Valve described it) for strategic purposes - it doesn't have to make any money.

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Quoting: damarrindo you know what I think about snaps and Canonical's decision to make FF one?

Mozilla's decision.

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