- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. 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.
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 are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.
These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.
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Some extra fun details from the staff discussions around this: Valve is not interested in control of the distro, but are mainly interested in funding work on projects that are chosen by Arch staff, and are already things that Arch staff wants to implement. The projects chosen are indeed things that Valve also want to be part of the distro’s infrastructure, but the process has been totally in the hands of Arch staff.
I gotta say, it’s been really cool to see Valve go through the process of considering OSS as not just a useful tool or worthwhile target, but as a robust collaborator.
First, they build and maintain their client on Linux, and build their games to run natively on Linux, learning that things aren’t actually as difficult as it’s commonly made out to be, and the things that are more difficult than they need to be can be fixed by working with and contributing to the existing community.
Then they consider building their own hardware, but try the half-way approach of building SteamOS on top of Debian, and depending on existing hardware vendors to build machines with SteamOS in mind, learning that there’s a lot of unnecessary complexity around both of those approaches to that goal.
Then they learn how to develop and build 1st party hardware with the SteamLink and Steam Controller.
Then they put the lessons from the Steam Machine project into practice by dumping loads of time and effort into Proton, knowing that they won’t have the market unless they can get Windows games to run on Linux in a reliable and seamless way.
Then they put all that knowledge and effort together to do the impossible: unite PC gamers of both Windows and Linux flavors under the banner of the SteamDeck, a fully gaming-focused, high-quality, and owner-friendly piece of kit that kicks so much ass that it single-handedly pulls a whole category of PC hardware out of obsurity and into the mainstream.
And what do they do with that success? Literally pay it forward by funding work on the free software that forms the plinth that their success stands upon.
Good on Valve.
I love that you can even edit the boot logos. Always a treat to see another one every time.
as, you can randomize them? huh, ill have to look into it
If you place multiple files in the boot video folder you can select them in the system options
Thanks; nice write up.
Valve is a Titan doing incredible work for the open source community and making money while doing so.
Successful open source software business model at work. Way to go.
Successful open source software business model at work. Way to go.
I don’t think FOSS represents a lot of how they make money, the money making is probably all closed source, so I don’t think it’s a good example. It’s more like a for-profit company also doing so good quality charity work on the side. It’s mostly good for their image and a way to tell Windows that they could go without them if they don’t collaborate.
I fully enjoy what they have been doing as a Linux only patient gamer for the past years, but I am realistic.In reality, it’s likely a self-preservation move. Microsoft made what appeared to be a monopolistic move to control the entire Windows ecosystem when they added their own app store and the locked down S edition of Windows. If Valve both hadn’t invested in Linux and Microsoft hadn’t halted going down that path, they would have been screwed.
“Likely”, man I am pretty sure Gaben openly talked about this, they haven’t liked where windows was headed for a long time
Successful open source software business model at work. Way to go.
Their main product is a proprietary software launcher that for decades has pushed videogames and the whole industry into a closed environment making them billions. It’s good that they are now supporting linux and collaborating in open source projects but let’s not forget who they are.
Let’s also not forget how absolutely groundbreaking Steam was for digital distribution.
I really have a hard time accepting that they “pushed” the industry rather than that they offered a platform with features that were worlds beyond what was available at the time for game developers and publishers. No one was bribed. There were no shady backroom deals. No assassinations of competitors (in fact the opposite, doing experiments with cross platform purchases with the PS3 and with GOG). There was no embrace extend extinguish, as there was nothing already existing like it to embrace or extinguish.
Also saying that they are now supporting linux and open source is ignoring a long history of their work with linux. This isn’t something new for them. What’s new is yet another large step forward in their investment, not their involvement.
Look, like you, I am concerned about their level of control over digital distribution game sales for the PC market. But from a practical standpoint I find them incredibly hard to have any large amount of negative feelings about them due to their track record, and the fact that they are not a publicly traded company so they are not beholden to the normal shareholder drive for profit at any cost. I’d love to hear more reasons to be concerned if any exist rather than “proprietary” and “too big”.
On top of that, Steam DRM is pretty notably easy to bypass, with what appears to be relatively little effort from Valve to eliminate the methods. They aren’t doing the normal rat race back and forth between crackers and the DRM devs that you would expect.
Anyway, again I’ll say: I’d love to hear more reasons to be concerned beyond “proprietary” and “too big”.
Beyond being one of the biggest for profits corporations in a rigged as fuck business they also engage in literally criminal activities such as promoting gambling to kids.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation#Anti-competitive_practices
I’d like to see a Sankey graph of where Valve’s money goes before I praise them that much for helping out a Linux distribution a bit.
Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn’t make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.
Gabe Newell is a billionaire, Steam is a defacto monopoly that objectively charges more than they have to, and literally everyone who works at Valve is in the 1%. Let’s not fall over ourselves dick-riding them.
Being cautious of a corporation is never a bad thing, but remember: Valve isn’t a public company. They don’t have the same incentives and fiduciary duties that led to the enshittification of most other companies and services.
Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they’re also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn’t get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they’re going to want to keep their customers happy. It’s good for them, and it’s not terrible for us. Everybody wins.
I would prefer they were a nonprofit, but I’m not going to complain when the mainstream alternatives to Steam are mostly comprised of shitty sales-focused storefronts created by companies beholden to their investors.
Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they’re also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn’t get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they’re going to want to keep their customers happy. It’s good for them, and it’s not terrible for us. Everybody wins
No, they don’t. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.
And they don’t have to hire MBAs because gamers dick ride them like Gabe isnt a self serving billionaire and keep forking over an extra 15% and then thanking them for the opportunity to do so.
No, they don’t. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.
Do you seriously believe that if a developer pays 15% less in platform fees to Valve, that savings will be passed on to us? Epic Games tried that. Guess what: games still cost us the same there as every other platform.
It literally either goes back to the consumer or back to the game developer.
Or, more likely, the publisher. But, that’s beside the point.
As it has been demonstrated when Epic tried the “developers pay less fees here” approach, the average Joe Gamer doesn’t benefit in any way whatsoever. Your premise of the savings being passed down doesn’t exactly pan out.
I’ll tell you a secret: you don’t need a proprietary launcher to run software
I’d like to see a Sankey graph of where Valve’s money goes before I praise them that much for helping out a Linux distribution a bit.
I’d say it’s a lot more than “a bit”. It’s an enormous amount of help that pretty much everyone in the Linux (professional) community can, has, and will attest to.
I don’t agree that they’re a monopoly, because they’ve done absolutely nothing to prevent competition. Other stores do it to themselves.
I do agree though that their fees are exorbitant and their contributions to Linux are a teeny tiny fraction of their wealth, but I appreciate it regardless.
I don’t agree that they’re a monopoly, because they’ve done absolutely nothing to prevent competition. Other stores do it to themselves.
Yes they have. The steam friends network and the fact that you can’t transfer your purchases, friends data, or community data to other platforms is an inherent form of lock in. Just because you’re used to it because Facebook also does it, doesn’t mean it’s not.
What do you expect them to do? Not actively helping your competition is not remotely the same thing as being anticompetitive.
It literally is if you have a monopoly.
It isn’t. And they don’t.
While I disagree with the other commenter’s approach and attitude, he/she/they are partially correct with the comment they left next to this one.
There is no legal obligation for a company to fund or assist its competition, even if it holds a significant marketshare. The companies that do help their competition, like Microsoft with Apple in 1997 or Google with Mozilla today, begrugingly choose to do it so their lawyers can make the argument that they are not a monopoly because they still have competition.
They literally, objectively, have, monopolistic anti-competitive power, largely thanks to blind corporate dick riding gamers like you.
And yes, in literally every single western democracy you have special obligations to actually further competition beyond normal if you’re in a situation without competition, because competition is inherently beneficial.
Lock-in != Monopoly.
The fact that you can’t transfer your purchases […] to other platforms
This is ridiculously unrealistic in a capitalist society.
It costs the platform money whenever a user downloads a game, and a user who didn’t buy from their store isn’t a user that they make money from. No other platform would voluntarily accept a recurring cost like that unless they profit from user data.
Also, it’s not like they stop publishers from doing that themselves. Ubisoft and EA use the cd-key generated by steam to associate the game with your U-Play and Origin accounts.
Not being able to transfer purchases seems like an other-platforms problem. Steam has authenticated API for users’ game libraries.
Oh come on. Mr negativity over here. FFS Valve has been a godsend compared to the likes of EA or Blizzard. I bet you complain when you get ice cream that it’s too cold
You don’t seem to have idea of how much a billion is and how much money is valve making. Enjoy your icecream while it’s cold because you can’t afford too much of it.
Valve has ripped off every single game purchase to the tune of billions and billions of dollars (taking an objective 15% more than they need to from the total cost of every single game), for the past 20 years.
But let’s thank them for that! Thanks Valve for making every single working class gamer poorer. We all love the fact that every single Valve employee is a multimillionaire, at the expense of literally every single game player and developer. What kind generosity! /S
At the expense of literally every single game player
How is it at the expense of the game player? Even if they paid less, the publisher and developers aren’t going to pass the savings on to the consumer. That’s wishful thinking in the same vain as hoping Starbucks would make their drinks cheaper because their rent went down.
If anything, one can argue that the 30% fee shelled out by the publisher pays for the various nice-to-haves that players get on Steam, like: a functional review system, free cloud save syncing, the workshop, game discussion forum, friends system, family sharing, game streaming, Steam input (which is a godsend for accessibility), etc.
How is it at the expense of the game player? Even if they paid less, the publisher and developers aren’t going to pass the savings on to the consumer. That’s wishful thinking in the same vain as hoping Starbucks would make their drinks cheaper because their rent went down.
This is the most dumbass asinine defense. So now you’re pro landlord rent gouging?
Jesus fucking Christ how are people upvoting this flat out landlord simping crap.
It does not fucking matter if Ubisoft remains greedy. Every single independent self publishing dev gets 15% more money. If a landlord gogiges Starbucks, they’re also going to gouge the independent business, and the family needing somewhere to live.
If anything, one can argue that the 30% fee shelled out by the publisher pays for the various nice-to-haves that players get on Steam, like: a functional review system, free cloud save syncing, the workshop, game discussion forum, friends system, family sharing, game streaming, Steam input (which is a godsend for accessibility), etc.
“Oh my corporate landlord might be owned by a billionaire and every single one of his employees might be a multimillionaire, but he’s a good landlord because he gives us a washing machine. It might be old and clunky and never repaired, but hey that makes him a saint, right?”
The fucking fact that you brought up landlords rent seeking as a non issue is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. You need to go outside, give your head a shake, and do fucking better.
Steam has what nobody else does and the only thing I pay for are games that are mostly on sale or from a keys site. It seems you have an extremely biased view, it seems om average Valve employees make about 107k or something close to that. They’re certainly far from a terrible company like Nestle.
Try clicking past the first result next time you “research” something to prove how unbiased you are:
https://upptic.com/valve-structure-employment-numbers-revenue-revealed-in-lawsuit/
Also, stop dick riding corporations.
So now you’re pro landlord rent gouging?
No, they’re anti Starbucks price gouging. It’s like all those companies taking advantage of a little inflation to drastically increase retail prices.
It might be old and clunky and never repaired
It’s the opposite.
Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn’t make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.
Most of those companies actually contribute to the kernel or to foundational software used on servers, but few contribute to the userspace for desktop consumers on the level that Valve does.
So?
People more readily appreciate things that obviously directly affect them.
And the Linux Kernel which powers the whole thing directly effects them, so we should all praise Microsoft and IBM like we praise Valve right?
Userspace affects users much more. I value getting Wayland color management support much more than the following kernel gobblygook lifted straight from https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges:
Summary: This release includes suppor for x86 FRED, which is a new way of transitioning between CPU ring privileves; it also includes support for creating pidfds for threads; support for BPF arenas, which is a sparse shared memory region between the BPF programs and user space; and BPF tokens, which allow delegating functionality to less privileged programs; host support for AMD Secure Nested Paging; support for weighted interleaveing memory policies; support for a FUSE passthrough mode that makes regular file I/O faster; and a new device mapper VDO deduplication target.
So?
Just because you don’t understand electrical engineering doesn’t make it less valuable then paint. If Valve is a saint for contributing to Linux then so is Microsoft and IBM and we should all dick ride Microsoft and IBM like the Valve dick riders in this thread.
Valve: “Yeah, we funded Arch (btw)”
Does it even make sense to keep playing with a Manjaro VM or just go straight Arch?
I’ve been very happy with my Manjaro install on AMD GPU, everything worked out of the box on fist try install without any weird step. I would say you could jump straight to Arch/Arch-based, but first research about your GPU compatibility.
(I’m aware of how Manjaro is perceived and its downsides, please avoid comments suggesting me to switch).
Go endeavourOS if your first time. Manjaro has a bad track record, as shown at https://manjarno.pages.dev
Manjaro worked without issues for me for about 2 years, unlike EOS which broke within less than half a year and their forum is the most unhelpful and toxic clown show I’ve ever seen as they just insulted me to the point where the admins closed the thread and said I should make a new one if I still need help - hiding it in the process so it won’t get indexed and shine a bad light on them. So I find the Manjaro hate very unwarranted and it seems to get way more hate than it deserves. Most of it is just a bunch of “what if” scenarios that never happened.
Could you link to the thread? I had a good experience with the forums. It sounds like they locked it to prevent people from sending more bullying comments and suspended everyone.
Most of it is just a bunch of “what if” scenarios that never happened.
The link lists a bunch of things that did happen, along with the thing on partial upgrades, which is guidance on the Arch wiki.
https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/grub-boot-error-after-update/42928/31
They were at least still able to write in other places. And given that experience I of course did not follow up with another thread, just to experience the same thing.The link lists a bunch of things that did happen, along with the thing on partial upgrades, which is guidance on the Arch wiki.
It lists a bunch of inconsequential things when it comes to the distro. The worst were the pamac DDOSing incidents. The SSL certificates of their websites I really don’t give a damn about but people then keep saying “yeah but if they are sloppy there then…”, without being able to provide examples where the distro was ever affected by it. They also keep arguing about the packaging on the AUR potentially being newer than the ones in Manjaro and thus potentially causing breakage, which is a weak argument - especially with how sloppily a lot of AUR packages are maintained. And if you’re super paranoid, just update the AUR when Manjaro updates.
Overall, hating on it feels like it became more of a meme with little substance, fueled by the general entitlement and elitism within the Linux community regarding their favorite distros.
And given that experience I of course did not follow up with another thread, just to experience the same thing.
If they had commented in the new thread, suspension would be definite. IMO, locking it would be a good choice, since if that user commented on the new thread, they’s very likely to be stalking you and have a concrete reason to get punished. I’m sure the only disruptive user got a formal warning.
As for being unable to report, that’s because of default policies by Discourse, the forum software used by EOS: You can only flag posts after reading 30 posts across 5 topics for 10 minutes. The Manjaro forums use the same forums and configuration. (Not as in exactly the same, just the same on this front.)
It lists a bunch of inconsequential things when it comes to the distro.
You seem to have skipped over the part about shipping the M1 kernel 3 days after its first demo with bugs. They then PR’d a commit they obviously did not understand to archlinuxarm, a much smaller project unaffilated with ARM, causing breakage. This was in October 2022.
The SSL certificates of their websites I really don’t give a damn about but people then keep saying “yeah but if they are sloppy there then…”, without being able to provide examples where the distro was ever affected by it.
The SSL certificate expiring means you are not able to connect to Manjaro servers to update anything. No Manjaro packages at all can be upgraded or installed while the SSL certificate’s expired. That’s pretty big.
And if you’re super paranoid, just update the AUR when Manjaro updates.
But when Manjaro gives you updates from two weeks prior, AUR gives you new updates from today.
Holding updates does not make the system more secure
Holding all updates for two weeks is just a dumb design choice:
- If the concern is breakages, you’ll still get the breakages, just two weeks later.
- Arch Linux already holds updates to core packages, to packages with wide impact, and that are expected to risk breakage.
- Aforementioned deal with partial upgrades. The 2-week long period pretty much guarantees that AUR packages in need of bumping their library versions will have updated before you receive the library update yourself.
They do have a different testing system now—with a good justification of being quite a different system from Arch—where all updates are pushed to a test branch and errors are caught, supposedly. I say supposedly because that did not stop the AUR being DDOS’d for the 2nd time under the same exact system in 2021.
This is all on top on the fact that Manjaro has officially said that they are not Arch, albeit based on Arch. Though at the end of the day, anyone is of course free to use whatever they wants. Manjaro has done some wonderful work for everyone. It’s just I need to wait until at least 2028 to trust it.
alright, time to wipe my Mint test/fun build and try out Arch. I don’t do much with Linux but it’s gonna be fun getting back into it. Who doesn’t love the smell of a fresh OS install
Archinstall is super easy. Just copy a few commands from the wiki to join a wifi network and then it will take everything from there.
Until you reach the part where you want to partition and encrypt your drives.
That’ll be… quite the Leap. I haven’t done an Arch install, but the last time I did, it required a fair amount of reading since the installer doesn’t walk you through everything. It’s not hard per se, but it does take some time for the first install.
If you’re not super familiar with Linux, I recommend holding off on Arch. This isn’t coming from any form of elitism (I don’t use Arch anymore) or lack of experience (I used Arch for > 5 years), just from reading between the lines of what you said, which indicates that you’re probably not super familiar with Linux.
If you really want to do it, go for it! I think Arch is an absolutely fine distro, and I think there are a lot of good reasons to use it. I just don’t want someone who may be new to Linux to get frustrated and end up not having fun. So don’t let me discourage you, but also know what you’re jumping into: probably a couple hours of getting the base system installed, and maybe another hour or two of installing packages to get to a usable system.
man you weren’t kidding hahah. I appreciate everyone’s replies but I’ll definitely just leave Mint on there for now. I didn’t get past the install process when it asked about connecting to a Wi-Fi network. I did some commands but couldn’t find any networks, I think maybe a driver issue with my Wi-Fi adapter? ohh well
I still have the USB install drive if I’m feeling adventurous! and you’d be correct, I have little knowledge of Linux, I’ve only messed with a few simple distros like PopOS, Ubuntu, Mint, and another one I’m forgetting. I can’t even get Steam to start up on my Mint distro haha
Garuda can definitely get Steam working for you quickly, though it abstracts the system more so you may or may not find it harder to fix problems due to not understanding the jargon
Or he could try a arch distro like manjaro.
You mean endeavourOS. Manjaro has a bad record. There’s also a gaming-focused one called Garuda.
Endeavour just gets rid of the install headache
Garbage distro with a garbage community.
dannnnn
Care to elaborate?
https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/1250293/Arch-Linux-and-Valve-Collaboration/comment/7534737#entry-comment-7534737
So the admins do their job and you had an issue
That doesn’t seem like a big deal
Punishing the person seeking help while doing jack shit to the people insulting & trolling while hiding the whole thing so others can’t see is certainly not how I want to see the moderation job to be done. But if you want to circlejerk with toxic trolls, then go right ahead.
The posts you had a problem with were deleted, what more can they do? Leaving them up just encourages that behaviour
Along with the recent Frog Wayland stuff, I’m happy to see Valve is gonna help linux desktop again lol.
From reddit:
Anybody remembers Linus saying “I hope Valve comes and fixes the packaging issue on Linux”? (yeah, on that ancient DebConf)
I hope Valve comes and fixes the very slowness of anything Wayland.
I just heard of Frog today, and I don’t really like it. It just seems like bypassing review. I like the competing proposal of experimental wayland protocols (merged into repository as “experimental” and iterative if 2 weeks pass without anyone opposing) much better.
After 15 years of wayland development hell, I’m honestly open to anything. Problem is I can definitely see an experimental branch being just as scrutinized. One of the core issues highlighted was that features and requests were rejected because of hypotheticals and the maintainers trying to avoid fragmentation like early Xorg.
Basic features from X11 are still missing. Everyone ended up somewhat fragmenting anyway via compositors because weston wasn’t really useful for developers beyond a demo. Wayfire started out as a Compiz redux and now its being considered by several DEs like XFCE to be the default compositor which they should standardize around.
Regardless, I really hope they nail it down in the next year because the halfway migration to wayland is seriously harming Linux desktop, especially when lots of frontend UI has been done perfectly decades ago on X11, and wayland still not properly supporting new features like HDR.
This is a great step for humanity imo
Great news! Crazy to think that Valve is hijacking/liberating the Windows gaming library. You would think that Microsoft would be doing more to prevent this.
don’t jinx it
Ha ha 😂
They kind of tried with UWP apps in the Microsoft Store, but they didn’t catch on.
Valve has enough lawyer money to keep Microsoft at bay.
Actually huge news. Linux as a whole benefits and needs more of this imo.
I hope it ends up similar to OpenSUSE’s OBS, or even better, that they can reuse a lot of the work OBS has done. I use it and think it’s fantastic.
Man it sure is a good day to be both a Valve and Arch fanboy.
I’m just waiting for some FOSS purist to find fault in this.
As per Arch wiki
Arch is a pragmatic distribution rather than an ideological one.
If you’re a FOSS purist, you shouldn’t run Arch ethier way, because providing proprietary software for those who want it is one of the core principles of Arch.
FOSS purists are too busy malding over systemd, and Steam being proprietary DRM, and games being closed-source.
systemd controversy was never about purism. It was about some piece of software unasked for by the majority of users, including absolute majority of desktop users, being pushed with juvenile means and those disliking that being called words like “luddite”.
It still is, believe me or not, I probably wouldn’t find anything wrong in systemd (or pulseaudio, or Gnome 3) were it not pushed with that arrogant Apple or MS like approach of “we’ve rolled out this new feature in our system, and you’re a weirdo”.
Same reason I liked the very theoretical idea of something like Wayland, but Wayland itself I don’t want to even try. Except for the possibility of something like CWM existing for it, that I can set up in 15 minutes with 20 lines of config file without levels of brackets etc (there is actual research as to how many levels various primates can process, chimps can’t go above 3, and I’m apparently as intelligent as a chimp, because neither can I in practice, but so is Linus Torvalds with his famous quote about more than 3 levels of indentation ; the issue is that I don’t want to strain my mind with that either when with a few X11 window managers I don’t have to). There’s none I’ve found yet.
Their politics trouble me. The technical parts may be sometimes arguable, but what isn’t, our world is created with mistakes as building blocks. But I’ve started using Unix-like systems for the feeling of freedom and patience, and while RH stuff doesn’t take away the former, it infringes on the latter.
Steam being proprietary DRM, and games being closed-source.
Better not tell anyone about DRM-free open source games on Steam then. Wouldn’t wanna burst anyone’s bubble.
I want to give the perspective that from a technical standpoint, even free games on steam require the steam client to install and while the license to play the game is free steam is licensing your account to own the game. The game doesn’t require steam after that and usually this means the game is available elsewhere, but for the specific case of “free games on steam”, steam is still acting to manage digital rights.
even free games on steam require the steam client to install
That’s not exactly DRM though, that’s just only supporting one distribution method.
You have to use GOG’s servers to get games you purchased from them as well, that doesn’t make that DRM, it just means that’s the only distribution method they support.
To me, DRM has absolutely nothing to do with delivery, it’s all about use once you have it.
If we’re talking about Digital Rights Management, steam is acting in that role to manage your digital rights on the steam platform. They could allow you to download games without requiring an account login or client download, and they instead do not. They could allow you to download free games from the client or the website without requiring a login, and they do not.
GOG’s website is also DRM for the same reason. It won’t allow you to download games that aren’t licensed digitally to your account, including free games. GOG has DRM-free games and installers fairly universally beyond that first check, and that means you can download them from alternative sources, but downloading from GOG 100% requires interacting with DRM.
To be direct: I don’t care that Steam is DRM because it’s minimally invasive and I currently trust Valve enough to use an operating system made by them as a daily driver. There are very few companies I’d say that about.
The Steam client is DRM at its core, even if it’s acceptable DRM. I think it’s important not to allow your thinking to shift from the reality that it is DRM just because it’s personally acceptable.
I don’t mind it, I will simp for Valve all day long, and if a company requires you to log in to an account with their server to check whether your account has the digital entitlement to then allow you to access a file or not, that’s digital rights management.
The game doesn’t require steam after that and usually this means the game is available elsewhere
Means you can also zip the folder and archive it for later.
They do still have some basic protection. Steam’s default, loose, DRM requires you to launch Steam when you open a game’s executable.
I use OpenRC, and play OpenTTD, OpenRA and Tux Racer.
OpenTTD is on Steam, btw
Don’t you play cdda?
Not really, I might give it a go.
Though I’m not sure it’s a game for me.
hell yeah
Valve are such Chads.
It’s stuff like this that restores my faith in humanity.
Spent a few hours today installing vanilla arch for the first time because of this. Loving it so far.
This comment is missing the mandatory “btw.” :(
