Comment by Fiveplus
21 hours ago
Valve is practically singlehandedly dragging the Linux ecosystem forward in areas that nobody else wanted to touch.
They needed Windows games to run on Linux so we got massive Proton/Wine advancements. They needed better display output for the deck and we got HDR and VRR support in wayland. They also needed smoother frame pacing and we got a scheduler that Zuck is now using to run data centers.
Its funny to think that Meta's server efficiency is being improved because Valve paid Igalia to make Elden Ring stutter less on a portable Linux PC. This is the best kind of open source trickledown.
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.
A number of my tricks are stolen from game devs and applied to boring software. Most notably, resource budgets for each task. You can’t make a whole system fast if you’re spending 20% of your reasonable execution time on one moderately useful aspect of the overall operation.
Yes please! Stop making me download 100+gb patches!
The large file sizes are not because of bloat per-se...
It's a technique which supposedly helped at one point in time to reduce loading times, helldiver's being the most note-able example of removing this "optimization".
However, this is by design - specifically as an optimization. Can't really be calling that boat in the parents context of inefficient resource usage
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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.
I was at Microsoft during the Windows 8 cycle. I remember hearing about a kernel feature I found interesting. Then I found linux had it for a few years at the time.
I think the reality is that Linux is ahead on a lot of kernel stuff. More experimentation is happening.
Linux is behind Windows wrt (Hybrid) Microkernel vs Monolith, which helps with having drivers and subsystems in user mode and support multiple personalities (Win32, POSIX, OS/2 and WSL subsystems). Linux can hot‑patch the kernel, but replacing core components is risky and drivers and filesystems cannot be restarted independently.
I was surprised to hear that Windows just added native NVMe which Linux has had for many years. I wonder if Azure has been paying the SCSI emulation tax this whole time.
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when the hood is open for anyone to tinker, lots of little weirdos get to indulge their ideas. Sometimes those are ideas are even good!
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And behind on a lot of stuff. The Microsoft's ACLs are nothing short of one of the best designed permission systems there are.
On the surface, they are as simple as Linux UOG/rwx stuff if you want it to be, but you can really, REALLY dive into the technology and apply super specific permissions.
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yeah, but you have IO Completion Ports…
IO_Uring is still a pale imitation :(
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Yeah and Linux is waaay behind in other areas. Windows had a secure attention sequence (ctrl-alt-del to login) for several decades now. Linux still doesn't.
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Tbh i'm starting to think that I do not see microsoft being able to keep it's position in the OS market ; with steam doing all the hard work and having a great market to play with ; the vast distributions to choose from, and most importantly how easy it has become to create an operating system from scratch - they not only lost all possible appeal, they seem stuck on really weird fetichism with their taskbar and just didn't provide me any kind of reason to be excited about windows.
Their research department rocks however so it's not a full bash on Microsoft at all - i just feel like they are focusing on other way more interesting stuff
Kernel improvements are interesting to geeks and data centers, but open source is fundamentally incompatible with great user experience.
Great UX requires a lot of work that is hard but not algorithmically challenging. It requires consistency and getting many stakeholders to buy in. It requires spending lots of time on things that will never be used by more than 10-20% of people.
Windows got a proper graphics compositor (DWM) in 2006 and made it mandatory in 2012. macOS had one even earlier. Linux fought against Compiz and while Wayland feels inevitable vocal forces still complain about/argue against it. Linux has a dozen incompatible UI toolkits.
Screen readers on Linux are a mess. High contrast is a mess. Setting font size in a way that most programs respect is a mess. Consistent keyboard shortcuts are a mess.
I could go on, but these are problems that open source is not set up to solve. These are problems that are hard, annoying, not particularly fun. People generally only solve them when they are paid to, and often only when governments or large customers pass laws requiring the work to be done and threaten to not buy your product if you don't do it. But they are crucially important things to building a great, widely adopted experience.
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> Tbh i'm starting to think that I do not see microsoft being able to keep it's position in the OS market
It's a big space. Traditionally, Microsoft has held both the multimedia, gaming and lots of professional segments, but with Valve doing a large push into the two first and Microsoft not even giving it a half-hearted try, it might just be that corporate computers continue using Microsoft, people's home media equipment is all Valve and hipsters (and others...) keep on using Apple.
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Add to that all the bullshit they have been pushing on their customers lately: * OS level adds
* invasive AI integration
* dropping support for 40% of their installed base (Windows 10)
* forcing useless DRM/trusted computing hardware - TPM - as a requirement to install the new and objectively worse Windows version version, with even more spying and worse performance (Windows 11)
With that I think their prospects are bleak & I have no idea who would install anything else than Steam OS or Bazzite in the future with this kind of Microsoft behavior.
"It just works" sleep and hibernate.
"Slide left or right" CPU and GPU underclocking.
“it just works” sleep was working, at least on basically every laptop I had the last 10 years…
until the new s2idle stuff that Microsoft and Intel have foisted on the world (to update your laptop while sleeping… I guess?)
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Sleep and hibernate don't just work on Windows unless Microsoft work with laptop and boards manufacturers to make Windows play nice with all those drivers. It's inevitable that it's hit and miss on any other OS that manufacturers don't care much about. Apple does nearly everything inside their walls, that's why it just works.
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On my Framework 13 AMD : Sleep just works on Fedora. Sleep is unreliable on Windows; if my fans are all running at full speed while running a game and I close the lid to begin sleeping, it will start sleeping and eventually wake up with all fans blaring.
I don't understand this comment in this context. Both of these features work on my Steam Deck. Neither of them have worked on any Windows laptop my employers have foisted upon me.
That requires driver support. What you're seeing is Microsoft's hardware certification forcing device vendors to care about their products. You're right that this is lacking on Linux, but it's not a slight on the kernel itself.
Both of these have worked fine for the last 15 years or so on all my laptops.
Kernel level anti-cheat with trusted execution / signed kernels is probably a reasonable new frontier for online games, but it requires a certain level of adoption from game makers.
This is a part of Secure Boot, which Linux people have raged against for a long time. Mostly because the main key signing authority was Microsoft.
But here's my rub: no one else bothered to step up to be a key signer. Everyone has instead whined for 15 years and told people to disable Secure Boot and the loads of trusted compute tech that depends on it, instead of actually building and running the necessary infra for everyone to have a Secure Boot authority outside of big tech. Not even Red Hat/IBM even though they have the infra to do it.
Secure Boot and signed kernels are proven tech. But the Linux world absolutely needs to pull their heads out of their butts on this.
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Valve... please do Github Actions next
I wonder what Valve uses for source control (no pun intended) internally.
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I’ve heard from several people who game on Windows that Gamescope side panel with OS-wide tweakables for overlays, performance, power, frame limiters and scaling is something that they miss after playing on Steam Deck. There are separate utilities for each, but not anything so simple and accessible as in Gamescope.
A good one is the shader pre caching with fossilize, microsoft is only now getting around it and it still pales in comparison to Valve's solution for Linux.
Surely a gaming handheld counts
Imagine if windows moved to the linux kernel and then used wine/proton to serve their own userspace.
It kinda looked like this is the future, about at the same time they introduced WSL, released dotNET for Linux and started contributing to the Linux Kernel - all the while making the bank with Azure mostly thanks to running Linux workloads.
But then they deCided it is better to show adds at OS level, rewrite OS UI as a web app, force harware DRM for their new OS version (TPM requirement) as well as automatically capturing content of you screen and feed it to AI.
The Linux kernel and Windows userspace are not very well matched on a fundamental level. I’m not sure we should be looking forward to that, other than for running games and other insular apps.
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> I don't have an example in mind at the moment
I do, MIDI 2.0. It's not because they're not doing it, just that they're doing it at a glacial pace compared to everyone else. They have reasons for this (a complete rewrite of the windows media services APIs and internals) but it's taken years and delays to do something that shipped on Linux over two years ago and on Apple more like 5 (although there were some protocol changes over that time).
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.
Please don't erase all the groundwork they've done over the years to make it possible for these later enhancements to happen. It wasn't like they were twiddling their thumbs this whole time!
That's not my intention at all. It's just frustrating how little of it translates to impact that's readily felt by end users, including those of us without technical inclination.
It's not just Valve taking the initiative. It's mostly because Windows has become increasingly hostile and just plain horrible over the years. They'll be writing textbooks on how badly Microsoft screwed up their operating system.
I'm a Mac user, but I recently played around with a beefy laptop at work to see how games ran on it, and I was shocked at how bad and user-hostile Windows 11 is. I had previously used Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7, but 11 is just so janky. It's feestoned with Co-pilot/AI jank, and seems to be filled with ads and spyware.
If I didn't know better, I'd assume Windows was a free, ad-supported product. If I ever pick up a dedicated PC for gaming, it's going to be a Steam Machine and/or Steam Deck. Microsoft is basically lighting Xbox and Windows on fire to chase AI clanker slop.
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That isn't it. Generally whatever the majority of users tend to use that where the majority of focus goes.
The vast majority of people that were using Linux on the desktop before 2015 were either hobbyists, developers or people that didn't want to run proprietary software for whatever reason.
These people generally didn't care about a lot of fancy tech mentioned. So this stuff didn't get fixed.
There’s some truth to that, but a lot of (maybe most) Linux desktop users are on laptops and yet there are many aspects of the Linux laptop experience that skew poor.
I think the bigger problem is that commercial use cases suck much of the air out of the room, leaving little for end user desktop use cases.
There's far more of that, starting with the lack of a stable ABI in gnu/linux distros. Eventually Valve or Google (with Android) are gonna swoop in with a user-friendly, targetable by devs OS that's actually a single platform
The enterprise distros do provide that, somewhat.
That's why, RHEL for example, has such a long support lifecycle. It's so you can develop software targeting RHEL specifically, and know you have a stable environment for 10+ years. RHEL sells a stable (as in unchanging) OS for x number of years to target.
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I don't have a whole lot of faith in Google, based on considerable experience with developing for Android. Put plainly, it's a mess, and even with improvements in recent years there's enough low-hanging fruit for improving its developer story that much of it has fallen off the tree and stands a foot thick on the ground.
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Ubuntu LTS is currently on track to be that. Both in the server and desktop space, in my personal experience it feels like a rising number of commercial apps are targeting that distro specifically.
It’s not my distribution of choice, but it’s currently doing exactly what you suggest.
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Valve has been pretty clear that Win32 is the platform.
Isn't that the steam linux runtime? Games linked against the runtime many years ago still run on modern distros.
What desktop Linux distro has “considerable funding”?
Red Hat, SuSE, and Ubuntu.
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
It takes a solid 45 seconds for me to enable zram (compressed RAM as swap) on a fresh Arch install. I know that doesn't solve the issue for 99% of people who don't even know what zram is / have no idea how to do it / are trying to do it for the first time, but it would be pretty easy for someone to enable that in a distro. I wouldn't be shocked if it is already enabled by default in Ubuntu or Fedora.
Zswap is arguably better. It confers most of the benefits of zram swap, plus being able to evict to non-RAM if cache becomes more important or if the situation is dire. The only times I use zram are when all I have to work with for storage is MMC, which is too slow and fragile to be written to unless absolutely necessary.
Zram has been enabled on Fedora by default since 2020:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/SwapOnZRAM
that just pushes away the problem ,it doesn't solve it. I still hit that limit when i ran a big compile while some other programs were using a lot of memory.
what behavior would you like to see when primary memory is under extreme pressure?
See mac or windows: grow swap automatically up to some sane limit, show a warning, give user an option to kill stuff; on headless systems, kill stuff. Do not page out critical system processes like sshd or the compositor.
A hard lock which requires a reboot or god forbid power cycling is the worst possible outcome, literally anything else which doesn’t start a fire is an improvement TBH.
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Same as Windows. Instead the system freezes.
I thought that was fixed after MGLRU.
I feel like all of the elements are there: zram, zswap, various packages that improve on default oom handling... maybe it's more about creating sane defaults that "just work" at this point?
I think it's more of a user space issue, that the UI doesn't degrade nicely. The kernel just defaults to a more server-oriented approach.
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.
I totally get why they did, having had to support Mac for an in-house engine. Apple is by far the most painful platform to support out of the big 3 if you're not using turnkey tools, and they don't make up for it with sales outside of iOS. The extra labor is hard to justify already, and then we get to technical deficiencies like MoltenVK, plus social deficiencies like terrible support. It's just a really hard sell all around.
Next thing I want them to work on is Linux suspend(-to-RAM) support!
Yeah, it's a great example of demand-driven open source work actually landing in places that matter
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.
Yes, and when Valve caught wind of his early efforts, they paid him to work on it full time.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2018/09/an-interview-with-the-...
And thanks to him I was able to play and finish Nier Automata on the Steam Deck!
> 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.
Long before Valve there was CrossOver which sold a polished version of Wine making a lot of Windows only enterprise software work on Linux.
I'm sure there have been more commercial contributors to Wine other than Valve and CodeWeavers.
Like giving the Han Solo award to the Rebel Fleet. ;-)
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.
> When developing for Linux becomes more and more attractive this might change.
If one (or maybe two) OSes win, then sure. The problem is there is no "develop for Linux" unless you are writing for the kernel.
Each distro is a standalone OS. It can have any variety of userland. You don't develop "for Linux" so much as you develop "for Ubuntu" or "for Fedora" or "for Android" etc.
There's always appimages or flatpaks that could fill that cross-distro gap, though I suspect a lot of development work would need to be done to get that to a point where either of those are streamlined enough to work in the phone ecosystem.
This is addressed (imperfectly) by Flatpak
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.
Honestly I can't see it remaining tenable to keep things like drivers in the kernel for too much longer… both due to the sheer speed at the industry moves and due to the security implications involved.
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.
Valve seemingly has no concerns with using the same tactics casinos perfected to hook people (and their demographics are young). They are not Meta level of societal harm, but they are happy to be a gateway for kids into gambling. Not that this is unusual in gaming unfortunately.
Like them or not - when it comes to the Linux kernel they are one of the biggest contributors for many years now.
Gaben does nothing: Wins
Gaben does something: Wins Harder
He's the person I want to meet the least from all the people in the world, he is that much of my hero.
> 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.
They have to abide by the Wine license, which is basically GPL, so unless they’re going to make their own from scratch, they can’t make the bread and butter of their compat layer proprietary
That's why the anti-GPL push is so harmful. Specially in the Rust ecosystem
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How? It's GPL.
Can it vanish behind proprietary licensing? Pretty sure most of Valve’s stuff is under GPL so they can’t exactly evaporate that away.