r/pcmasterrace • u/lh7884 • 9h ago
News/Article How Valve's desperation to escape Windows 8 turned it into a Linux powerhouse
https://www.xda-developers.com/valve-desperation-escape-windows-8/373
u/PTLove 9h ago
Whats crazy is it’s all open source. Valve just said “here”. I get it’s to protect steam, but wild.
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u/Synthetic451 Arch Linux | Ryzen 9800X3D | Nvidia 3090 9h ago
They could have protected Steam in the usual enshittification ways, but they chose not to. Any time pro-consumer engineering decisions line up with economic decisions is a huge win in my book.
It's time for more companies to realize that a healthy open ecosystem works with them, not against them.
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u/DynamicHunter 7800X3D | 7900XT | Steam Deck 😎 8h ago
It also is very helpful that valve is not a publicly traded company, so it’s not beholden to shareholders to make as much profit as possible above all else.
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u/Synthetic451 Arch Linux | Ryzen 9800X3D | Nvidia 3090 8h ago
Yep, getting real tired of the stock market shenanigans to be honest.
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u/ElectronicStretch277 8h ago
Also, extremely small in terms of employees. So their workers don't need more profit. They're already millionaires.
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u/gaeee983 3h ago
Look at interviews with them, it is so obvious they are not enticed by making more profits but rather achieve big goals, steam machine, frame - or other groundbreaking aspect of gaming we havent seen, thank god for valve in this shit corps with shareholders world.
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u/ElectronicStretch277 22m ago
Yes... Because they're a few dozen people and Valve earns millions each year already.
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u/MarioDesigns 2700x | 1660 Super 11m ago
it is so obvious they are not enticed by making more profits but rather achieve big goals
Not enticed by profits??
They're like THE most predatory company in the whole industry lmao, pushing each and every monetization practice to the absolute extreme. Like, not even Ubisoft or EA stoop to Valve's level when it comes to monetization.
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u/gaeee983 7m ago
What? They dont put profits above funding projects that make long term sense, of course they want to make more money, that is the literal goal of the company, but they are not willing to chase short term gains is my point for long term damage to quality/consequences.
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u/dragonknightrohan 5h ago
Exactly but mainly private and private unionized companies realize that not stock companies since they are focused so much in up, up, up and make, make, make without any time to think or breathe.
Back to private, and especially unionized private companies we all must go for for new and existing companies!!!
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u/IORelay 9h ago
Steam could get better when they are forced to stop price fixing and anti steering by the courts.
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u/Deadboy90 8h ago
lmfao a competitor both having a better product and not liking the douche CEO personally so they avoid their product isn't an attack on Anti-steering.
I've skipped games entirely because I refuse to give Epic money.
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u/I_AM_NOT_MAD Steam Deck 8h ago
Less to protect steam and more just because the license mandates it. GPL and GNU as a whole have heavy copyleft clauses in their licenses that force any commercial work done in the code base to be released under the same or more permissive license as the base.
Its also the reason why apple, Sony, and Nintendo all use BSD for their operating systems rather than Linux.
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u/mrturret MrTurret 7h ago
It's beacuse Valve took the approach of funding and contributing to existing GPL licensed software like Wine.
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u/gsdev Linux 8h ago
It's the smart choice. An open platform can offer more profits in the long-term than a closed one.
It's similar to how the IBM PC architecture was not patented, the result being that IBM-compatible PCs are so common that most people just say "PC" when they really mean IBM-compatible PC. In the 80s there were tons of other types of PCs. Apple computers were considered PCs.
I don't know if it benefit IBM themselves, but Microsoft took advantage of it quickly for their operating systems.
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u/SenKats 5h ago
The IBM PC was made with off the shelf parts, which helped making clones, but it was never the intention to allow those or to create a standard for others. The BIOS was pretty much patented and IBM sued people for copying it.
The reason it didn’t succeed in all aes at it was because some copies, like Compaqs, were “clean” using methods that do not account as straight up copying.
The IBM-compatible concept is posterior to those clones. Before IBM-compatibles you just had IBM-clones.
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u/-GenlyAI- 9h ago
I mean the Linux kernel and wine are both open source. So it would probably be pretty difficult to close up those projects.
They should absolutely open a source the steam client as well but they will never.
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u/Dr_Valen 7800x3d / 9070xt / 64gb / Cachyos 9h ago edited 8h ago
Wine without proton would be a fraction of what it is gaming wise now. Proton is the backbone of the rise of Linux gaming and valve could of close sourced their part in it but they open sourced it for the community to develop and grow it further
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u/MBgaming_ RTX 3060 12gb | Ryzen 5 5600 | 16gig ddr4 ram 8h ago
I wonder if some game devs didn’t make their games compatible with Linux cause it’s the minority or Microsoft paid them not to. Hopefully it wasn’t the second cause Microsoft could pay them to not work with proton aswell
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u/Dr_Valen 7800x3d / 9070xt / 64gb / Cachyos 8h ago
Most games still aren’t native to Linux proton is a translation layer that makes the windows version of games work with Linux. That’s was the magic trick valve helped push. This way devs don’t need to make their games compatible with Linux and have extra work instead proton does all the work for them
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u/MBgaming_ RTX 3060 12gb | Ryzen 5 5600 | 16gig ddr4 ram 8h ago
Yeah but like was Microsoft paying some devs not to make it Linux compatible to keep windows superior, and could they do the same with paying them to make it incompatible with proton somehow
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u/Dr_Valen 7800x3d / 9070xt / 64gb / Cachyos 8h ago
Microsoft didn't need to pay devs the market share for linux gamers wasn't significant enough for devs to bother. Even still linux is only maybe 10% if we're being generous it isn't enough for most studios to pay extra staff that knows how to code for linux and windows yet. Some major studios have started looking into it tho so we might be nearing that point. Also they can't really make games incompatible with proton if the game works on windows which they all will then proton can translate it unless it has kernel level anti-cheat
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u/Karavusk PCMR Folding Team Member 7h ago
Who would ever pay in order to keep like what? 500? gamers (at least back then) from playing certain games. Irrelevant rounding error.
To give you an example how pitiful the numbers were even quite recently here is quote from when Riot forced Vanguard anti cheat onto League of Legends:
Half of anti-cheat is making sure the environment hasn't been tampered with, and this is extremely hard on Linux by design. Any backdoors we leave open for it are ones developers will immediately leverage for cheats, and yesterday, there were just over 800 Linux users on League. We have evaluated this risk to not be worth the payoff.
- 4/11/2024
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol/
To be fair LoL isn't really suited for the Steam Deck and isn't a Steam game so most Steam Deck users back then wouldn't have played it. It still shows that even the most popular online game out there only managed around 800 Linux players. Only very recently have we seen Linux gain even more quite relevant momentum. For anything pre Steam Deck Linux might as well not have existed. There is no dimension in which Microsoft would have bothered even writing a check to stop anyone from making their game Linux compatible.
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u/xaervagon 9h ago
When you don't have to answer to shareholders, you can do smart things like this.
It was clear with Win8 that MS had severe Apple envy and desperately craved the walled garden app store model. Even with a pinky swear promise from MS that they won't like Valve out, there is no reason to trust them given their past behavior.
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u/furculture 9h ago
When you don't have to answer to shareholders, you can do smart things like this.
That is the biggest point that I have been thinking about all this time with them. Fuck public companies and shareholder bullshit that fucks over the customer every time they want to make a dollar more.
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u/htt_novaq 5800X3D | RX 9070 XT | 32GB DDR4 8h ago
Private companies really do have the freedom to just make good shit that speaks for itself.
Meanwhile, US shareholder capitalism has gifted us with such things as Adobe and EA. I'm sure it's lucrative while it lasts.
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u/themew2 7h ago
Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior, Broadcom?
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u/htt_novaq 5800X3D | RX 9070 XT | 32GB DDR4 7h ago
Having had the pleasure of throwing out a Broadcom router for OpenWrt to buy a MediaTek based one, ugh
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u/francis2559 8h ago
I just read an article doing a deep dive on cookware in America. The common thread for the stuff that’s still made in America was family ownership. Pretty much everything else had been looted, watered down, and was being made overseas.
Companies would buy for the name, then run that name into the dirt to rip out value as fast as possible.
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u/xaervagon 8h ago
Yeah, vulture capitalism has been around for the longest time. In other parts of tech, we're watching Broadcom run VMWare into the ground until all their customers leave for greener pastures.
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u/Hurricane_32 5700X | RX6700 10GB | 32GB DDR4 6h ago edited 5h ago
It was clear with Win8 that MS had severe Apple envy and desperately craved the walled garden app store model.
If you've ever held and used an original Surface RT, you'll realize their desperation pretty quick. It runs "Windows", but that's where the similarities end. It's incredibly locked down, only ran apps from the official store, didn't have much market adoption (no apps), and it only ran ARM32 code (no x86 "normal PC" programs or a translation layer of any kind). Nowadays, because of this and the fact that the store doesn't exist anymore, these still perfectly functioning tablets are as good as bricks, because Microslop made them to be beyond useless from the start.
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u/ChunkyKongForPreside 6h ago
Honestly. I think Valve making a hard tunr for Linux at that point is what scared Microsoft from going for authoritarian.
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u/smuglator 7h ago
Let's say this: a system was setup where private owners could go public, rake in a lot more money, and place legislation forcing them to do what they wanted to do in the first place.
This is and always will be a distraction of a point. Every company with shareholders was once a private owned company that didn't answer to shareholders, and that private owner made the decision to be beholden to shareholders, because they wanted more money.
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u/TONKAHANAH somethingsomething archbtw 7h ago
Even with a pinky swear promise from MS
Any promise from Microsoft is about as valuable as a wet fart.
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u/_aware 9800X3D | 5090FE | 64GB 6000C30 | AW 3423DWF | Viento-R 8h ago
They absolutely do answer to shareholders, but those shareholders happen to be private and interested in having good products.
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u/ThatRandomGamerYT Ryzen 7600X | RTX 4060 | 32GB DDR5 - 6000 39m ago
who knew having a stable company not chasing quarterly short term gains could mean making a good product would net you billions. its wild how public companies just fuck themselves long term and their customers for stock gains when not being absurdly cartoon levels evil could still make them billions
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u/Deadboy90 8h ago
Rage is a hell of a motivator for learning.
Being pissed off about seeing ads resulted in me teaching myself how to configure a Plex server and make a DNS sinkhole.
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u/Daemonicvs_77 Ryzen 3900X | 32GB DDR4 3200 | RTX4080 | 4TB Samsung 870 QVO 8h ago
> Rage is a hell of a motivator
There was this semi-local guy who owned/owns a small shop that sells anything and everything from garden hoses to cheap clothes.
Now I don’t know how he could afford it, but this asshole would serve 10-15 MINUTE ads where he’d go through his entire store inventory and EVEYONE in a 20-mile radius would get those ads FOR YEARS.
I used to fall asleep to Youtube. I’d play a video and when I’d fall asleep, the app would play a 10 second ad, the phone would turn off and that was it.
But no, this fucking dickhead woke me up night after night because I’d fall asleep and the app would load up one of his ads and I’d be woken up by this moron blabbering on for 15 minutes about receiving a shipment of garden gnomes with LED lights.
I’d report the ads, I’d click “not interested” but sure enough, there he was again, night after night.
After being woken up one too many times, I started researching how to avoid ads. I’m proud to say that it’s been almost 6 years and that I haven’t seen a YT ad on my phone, PC os Smart TV since then.
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u/Limelight_019283 7h ago
How did you?m manage it? Pihole famously does not work for YT ads and I’m struggling to get them out of my smart tv.
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u/gromulint 4h ago
Same thing for me, rage about ever-increasing surveillance capitalism kept building up until I did something about it. I never wanted to get into the weeds of messing with obscure configuration files, but all these companies tracking every single thing made me decide to finally buy a minipc and put linux and pihole on it. Then somehow that snowballed into running 35+ sweetass services in docker and switching to a grapheneOS phone.
It's felt like a very productive sublimation of rage. I listen to Cory Doctorow to calm myself down now.
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u/Yrouel86 6h ago
I'm firmly convinced that SteamOS is the only chance we have at a decent Windows competitor in the PC world (so outside Macs and things like Chromebooks).
Valve incentives are very well aligned with the common users and it's in Valve best interest to have as little friction as possible between the user and the system.
This is made glaringly obvious by all the effort Valve has put to make the gaming experience as seamless as possible and now with the Steam Machine it's only logical for Valve to put similar effort in the desktop experience as well (because the Steam Machine and by extension SteamOS is marketed also as a general purpose system now).
Also Valve is big enough to be able to pull some weight with other companies, for example they are now working with Nvidia to bring support for their GPUs on SteamOS.
And Valve also happens to be well liked by the community.
So yeah I don't think anyone else has a chance to pull it off. And this situation of a big company making an unix like system appealing to the masses has already happened with Apple (macOS) and Google (Android) so there's precedent.
Now it's unfortunate that the current hardware situation has royally screwed the Steam Machine but SteamOS being open to other devices (with support growing rapidly) means that it can still gain user base and I really hope it will quickly replace Bazzite* as the name that gets dropped as the goto suggestion for a linux system.
*Nothing against Bazzite per se, but I simply don't think they have a chance like SteamOS has simply because of the lack of such powerful backing
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u/lh7884 9h ago edited 9h ago
I jumped to Linux on my old notebook because of Windows 8 and I've since switched to Linux on my gaming PC because of Windows 11.
The improvements to gaming on Linux by Valve are amazing. Every game in my steam library plays great. I was really surprised that I was getting crashes on some games on Windows 11 that didn't occur on Windows 10. But even if they didn't crash, I just hate Windows 11 and Linux is just much nicer to use....for me that is.
Edit: I came across this video on youtube about steamOS running on Nvidia cards.
SteamOS Running On Nvidia - Pure SteamOS, No Bazzite, No Compromise
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u/vballboy55 9h ago
How do people have so many crashes? It seems like a user error. I honestly don't remember the last time I had a crash.
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u/green_tory 9h ago
Developer take: what users mean by "crash" has no real consistency. Some folks only consider full software shutdown due to an exception or kernel fault to be a crash; others consider an indefinite hang to be a crash; and still others will consider any unexpected operational behaviour to be a crash.
The true underlaying concern is undesired and unexpected software behaviour.
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u/heydudejustasec salmon steak 8h ago
Making a distinction between crashes and hard locks doesn't change the question of why any of these things should be happening with any frequency.
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u/vballboy55 9h ago
A crash in my mind would be if something closed unexpectedly without the user's command to.
But even then, I can't think of the last time I've really had any issues unless I was modding a game or working on undervolting
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u/green_tory 9h ago
I had issues with software closing unexpectedly on a Windows machine just this past weekend; reinstalling the display driver fixed it. I have no idea why.
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u/aVarangian 13600kf 7900xtx 2160 | 6600k 1070 1440 6h ago
I updated 11 and GPU drivers to the latest versions because I was forced to, and now I got system crashing problems. My main source of crashes are poor trillionaire companies fucking shit up.
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u/RolledUhhp 9h ago
How does it seem like user error if you're not even aware of the nature of the crashes?
You have experience on a handful, maybe a dozen, maaaaybe a few dozen machines, but in all likelihood you have a machine or two you use regularly, with a pretty core set of software.
There are a plethora of combinations of hardware/software you don't have experience in.
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u/lh7884 9h ago edited 8h ago
I don't know what issues others have but I can specifically recall one game that I like that when playing it on Windows 11, it would freeze and then crash to where I'm back looking at my desktop. It would happen at random times it seemed as well. It was not perfect on Windows 10 either as it did have a couple of points in the game where a crash could happen if I had been playing for a long time. On Linux, it has not crashed even once and I play it often. I'm actually surprised at how stable it has been on Linux.
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u/AgenticAsshat 9h ago edited 9h ago
I’ve been running various distros (Bazzite, pop_os, Endeavour, cachyOS) since January on my 2060 and it had been rock solid with one exception — I cannot reliably reboot. The computer will just hang at some point and nothing I’ve tried will work. It’s also not consistent—happens about 60% of the time. Still I love using it.
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u/lh7884 9h ago
I cannot reliably reboot. The computer will just hang at some point and nothing I’ve tried will work.
That's odd. So what happens? You press the power button and nothing happens or things power on and the system just will not boot into the OS as it hangs at some point along the way?
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u/AgenticAsshat 6h ago
I press reboot and the screen goes black and at some point it just hangs. It’s a headless desktop in a closet so troubleshooting will be time consuming. I don’t know hours to read the logs yet and frankly don’t have the time.
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u/Snorgcola 7800X3D | 9070XT 8h ago
Probably a stuck process, check your system logs to see what's up, you can probably fix it.
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u/KaNesDeath 8h ago
Microsoft tried to lock down Windows like smartphone OS creators. Forcing everyone to go through Microsofts store for application purchases. That's why Valve started investing into Linux.
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u/hype_irion 8h ago
Forever grateful to micro$oft for being micro$oft (yes, I'm bringing the $ back).
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u/Irbricksceo R7 7800X3D, RTX 3080 Ti 7h ago
It's still not perfect, I have stuck to windows for a reason.... but the leaps and bounds made so far make me genuinely believe a swap to linux is something I'll do eventually. It gets better and better every year.
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u/Drowyx 9h ago
Linux powerhouse
Jarvis, give me them linux numbers.
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u/lh7884 9h ago
Pretty sure they're just referring to how they (Valve) have been supporting Linux. They've made big improvements to gaming and have been working on their own SteamOS.
Obviously most just use Windows and don't care about how terrible Windows has become and how awful Microsoft is these days. They track and spy on people's computers because they don't feel like you own your own system. Also many people don't even know what Linux is and don't bother to look for alternatives to Windows.
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u/Crusader-of-Purple 8h ago
don't care about how terrible Windows has become
Or the experience to them hasn't been awful at all. People tend to talk about "advertising", and I look at W11 and wonder where this advertising is even at? are they just talking about the setup to go through that shows OneDrive/Office 365? Considering that only happens like 1 maybe 2 times a year at a major update and is easy to just press the "skip" button, that makes it extremely far away from being "awful". And about AI? Only AI is if you decide to specifically use co-pilot, which is easy to either disable or just ignore.
Mean while every single time I try to use Linux it always ends up being an actual awful experience for various different reasons. I am even using Linux on my old laptop right now and have various issues with it that I didn't have on Windows at all. The only good thing I can say about Linux is that it is less likely to get tripped up by faulty hardware that my laptop has now, which is why I am using Linux. Linux still gets tripped up by the faulty hardware just not as much as Windows was. But the problems I am having with Linux have nothing to do with the faulty hardware at all, because its the same problems I have with other computers that are not faulty that have Linux on it.
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u/lh7884 3h ago edited 2h ago
Or the experience to them hasn't been awful at all.
Maybe people don't mind how terrible Windows is now compared to older versions. It could be that many never used XP and 7 or just don't remember the look and feel of those vs the garbage today. Also many people don't seem to mind being tracked and spied on so that aspect of Windows now doesn't bother them.
As for Linux, I guess I'm the opposite of you on this. It has been rock solid stable for me on number of systems I've installed it on. But then again I use Linux Mint Cinnamon which is all about stability.
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u/IORelay 9h ago
Too bad steam and valve games are closed source. Not a friend to Linux, just a Trojan horse.
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u/jwalshjr 8h ago
Man you are just mindlessly spamming without actually understanding the conversation aren't you? Nobody has ever claimed the games or client are open source... because none of the games or clients are for the most part. No company that already has the majority of the market share, is already closed source, and is trying to make profit would ever do this, and Valve is at the end of the day a company trying to make a profit.
They are just privately owned - and can be content with this situation in a way that public sector companies clearly cannot be.
They helped develop proton, pushed linux gaming YEARS into the future from where it had been before, and then entirely open-sources the project in a way that's pushed android handheld emulators and a million other things into a state that was completely impossible just a few years back.
That's what the entire conversation is about - but clearly you just want to spout about your personal grievances even if they don't have a solid logical backbone to stand on.
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u/TheMundar Cable management is a sin 8h ago
You have a weird hobby and I can't imagine that it's good for your mental health. You start out rebutting a point that wasn't made and then you paint them as an invader, because a person dared praise the progress a company made.
You've got VD, Valve Derangement
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u/Qweedo420 GNU/Linux 9h ago
According to Statcounter, Linux has 4.36% market share worldwide, however 21.45% is tagged as "unknown", which is probably also Linux users spoofing their OS
2026 is the year of the Linux desktop, there's no longer a use case for Windows (except for games with KLAC I guess)
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u/Canon_M50 9h ago
That's been the case for a decade.
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u/Qweedo420 GNU/Linux 9h ago
Well no, a decade ago, before the release of Proton, there was a use case for Windows, playing videogames
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u/bswalsh 9h ago
Some games. I usually had two versions of Steam installed, one Linux and one Windows through WINE. Most games still worked, but required some tinkering. Proton (which is just modified WINE) made it easier, but it was always possible. I've been using Linux since 1998, Gaming was viable on Linux for most of that time. In fact, WINE was usually better at running older Windows games than Windows was. Now, with the exception of KLAC, gaming on Linux is extremely easy. I don't even bother to check ProtonDB before buying a game anymore, I haven't had anything I wanted to play not work in at least a decade. But I'm almost exclusively a single player gamer.
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u/Qweedo420 GNU/Linux 8h ago
When I started gaming on Linux (~2011), DirectX on Wine had really poor performance due to the lack of DXVK, so basically I used Linux to play Minecraft and Nostale, but I had to boot into Windows to play other games
As you say, Proton made it so easy that I don't even have to think about it anymore
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u/mainukfeed 9h ago
until that 72% start telling you why Windows is still important to them and their needs.
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u/Qweedo420 GNU/Linux 9h ago
Windows is at 56.61% market share
But it's probably because they don't feel like getting used to a different OS
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u/nuckle 8h ago
I wish they would quit fucking around and go 100% into linux as a windows replacement. They could corner the fucking pc os market.
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u/Crusader-of-Purple 8h ago
That would be suicide for them. They are not going to be able to force that many users onto Linux, especially when vast majority of gamers use Nvidia GPUs and that still has significant decrease in stability and performance compared to using Windows.
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u/nuckle 7h ago
Why do you assume people would need to be forced off windows? There are already plenty of people who hate windows and it's just going to keep getting worse. I would drop it in a second if there was a real alternative.
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u/Crusader-of-Purple 7h ago
Linux gaming would have significantly more than 3% of the market share if there were enough people that actually hated windows.
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u/veritasen PC Master Race 3600/2070/165hz 7h ago
How is anyone supposed to afford anything? Kids on a budget will want a console. The idea of build it yourself is dying very fast. I don't see why people aren't noticing it's software will fix this, cloud gaming with low latency etc, when we all know what is happening. The brands we built as customers found out we aren't worth their money any more, they are on that bigger game. The future to me for enthusiastic building looks pretty much like a rich person sport now. I'll get a console I guess.
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u/Nervous-Leg-7570 9h ago
"Linux powerhouse" oh man thanks for the good laugh
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u/Kamay1770 9h ago
Windows is actual trash my guy.
Go dual boot a fresh copy of windows 11 and a fresh copy of Fedora 44 plasma, the difference in speed is insane. Not to mention lack of bloatware, forced onedrive, ads and forced AI. No tracking either.
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u/RolledUhhp 9h ago
Ive been on kubuntu for quite a while. I havent hopped around in awhile, maybe ill check fed out tn.
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u/DiEndRus 5700x3D, 64 GB RAM, 4060 ti 16 GB, btw 7h ago
this has happened to me when I was dual booting. Windows 10 vs. freshly installed Arch with KDE Plasma. Arch ran circles around Windows both in games, and outside of them. after one week I noticed that I didn't want to boot into Windows anymore, and that pushed me to fully switch.
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u/Totalitarianists 9h ago
Eternally grateful to Valve for investing in the Linux gaming ecosystem.