Valve powers up Arch Linux – because who needs Windows when you have a Steam Deck? Valve is officially sponsoring the Linux distro that powers the gaming giant's Steam Deck console. According to an email on the Arch-dev-public mailing list, Valve Corporation is formally supporting the Arch Linux project: We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is …
Steam has done wonders for Linux compatibility regardless of distro. Even on Mint the vast majority of my 200+ games work better than Windows. They have come a long way in a short time, and all it took was a big company to finally get so fed up with Windows that they put their money in the alternative. And it doesn't need to be some locked down proprietary BSD variant like PlayStation. Letting users enjoy the Steam Deck as more than a console was the best decision Valve made for it.
"Forget the desktop: it's a dying market sector anyway. "
Hang on a bit.
Those games: do people write them on phones these days?
Where does most development happen?
Don't fall into the metric elephant trap for heavens sake. I deal with shit like that all day at $work. Isn't funny. People thinking that the largest % matters but not looking at the whole DAG.
(It is great that Steam Deck is doing well by the way - see icon)
Well, Liam seems to be separating desktops from laptops here, and plenty of development happens on laptops these days.
Also, you seem to be saying that % doesn't matter so much, but when talking market share as Liam is, it's exactly what matters. The percentage of people who still buy desktop machines is WAY down, and now consists almost entirely of gamers and content creators, both of which likely dwarf the number of developers. The average consumer does all of their computing tasks on their phone. Desktop machines may never totally die off, but they are becoming a MUCH smaller share of the market than they were 20 years ago. I think that meets my definition of "dying".
[Author here]
> Also, you seem to be saying that % doesn't matter so much, but when talking market share as Liam is, it's exactly what matters.
Thanks. Yes, that's right.
The thing is that it's the sales volume that influences the direction of R&D.
The result is visible in the new Apple Mac Pros: they are built from the same tech as the laptops. Which are in some ways more like iPads with a keyboard and trackpad, but minus the touchscreen.
So, you have a desktop computer with a highly-integrated SOC, with expansion slots that can't take GPUs. It doesn't need them, but it says something that you can't. And it is very selective about what storage devices you can bung into it, and you can't boot from them or from removable media. No booting off a USB key here to recover your data if your OS crashes, or if you need to reformat and reinstall.
Looks like a desktop, but in some important ways, it's not. It doesn't do things we expect desktop computers to do.
it's not meaningfully expandable or upgradable at all.
Which defeats the point of desktops, as other comments note. That was always true of desktop Macs to some degree, but where Apple goes first the industry tends to follow. GUIs, USB, closed boxes with no slots, RISC chips... all first seen on mass-market kit from Apple, even if they originated from other companies.
This is probably the way the PC industry is going.
In other words, 5Y or so, you may still have things that *look* like desktops, but in fact, they're sealed boxes, non-expandable... but you can use your own keyboard and mouse and screens. Which is still worth having, but it's only a small part of what's worth having.
Apple have used laptop parts in a desktop for a good while though, the Intel iMacs back to 2006 are basically laptop parts behind a screen in a pretty case. I say this as the owner of a 2007 one.
Intel came along with NUCs too which is taking it even further, but Apple knew what to throw out (bulk ordering only laptop parts to share costs between product lines) and what to keep (shiny case to be able to charge more).
I still think there's a place for expandable desktops, there's still a market for people who need power and a market for people who don't need to take their computer anywhere, and there's an industry built around that. They're not going disappear in 5 years if they've lasted through 20 years of Apple using laptop parts. It's not like Apple going USB only or dropping DVD drives which did change the industry in a few years.
"In other words, 5Y or so, you may still have things that *look* like desktops, but in fact, they're sealed boxes, non-expandable... but you can use your own keyboard and mouse and screens. Which is still worth having, but it's only a small part of what's worth having."
So the options for those of us who carefully spec their machines with particular CPUs, graphics cards etc are just going to dry up?
I think not.
There's a very real risk of it. You don't need a home PC to do your online banking or write an email anymore.
That means PCs in homes are increasingly either obsolete paperweights, or there probably as a dedicated enthusiast system. The remainder are laptops for laptoppy things.
Fortunately for us PC master racers MS and Sony are doing their damnedest to make the consoles more unappealing than ever.
Yeah but I do actual real work on my PC. Not just email and browsing yada yada. Graphics intensive 3D stuff and video editing.
As long as my PC supplier of choice exists I will still be speccing my computers with the hardware I want.
Thanks for the downvotes, whoever did that.
Numpties.
Certainly not me.
I've used "gaming" spec hardware for years for work/workstation purposes. 1/4 the price, and apart from ECC RAM compatibility (or the lack thereof) generally offer much better price/performance.
One of my work systems runs COMSOL Multiphysics, and for the specific models I run there the sheer quantity of RAM, followed by the bus speed of that RAM is the critical factor in reducing the time to solve.
But that's a niche use, I'm the one-in-3000 employees that actually does this... *almost* Everyone else lives on Excel/Word/Outlook.
It would be a difficult metric to measure I would think. Considering how many 'ship of theseus' thier desktops from one decatde to the next. I made the mistake of bying a dell off the shelf desktop once, never again, it was literally engineered landfill with misleading specs and a support scam attached. On the other hand I have 3 machines for coding and 3d design all in cases hailing from the late 90's and '00s. How can one possibly measure 'desktop' sales when I imagine the majority of desktop owners get them specifically for the ability to incrementally upgrade.
I have stuff that's that old but not stuff that I'm currently using. I agree though that my near decade old and probably over a decade old case and 1000W PSU are still going strong and I'd expect to keep going so for some time yet.
I mean, I've gone from an Intel dual x5650 board to an Asrockrock EP2C602 with dual E2670, later E2690s, to an AM4 motherboard with a Ryzen 3900XT to currently a Ryzen 5800X3D and that's just the CPU motherboard side, on the GPU I've gone from a pair of GTX260s to a pair of HD7970/R9 280xs to a Vega64 to now a 7900XT. This is why PCs are great and whilst maybe youngsters may be less inclined to get into building I'm sure that there will be a healthy market that will push back on locked down hardware for a long time to come.
I doubt many that like to build their own are in any way interested in Apple desktop (or of that style) hardware that is just antithetical in approach to the build your own segment.
Begun that journey myself with a custom-shop purchased desktop tower PC in 2021. It begun as a "whatever I can get that's available" spec sheet, and has started to get small upgrades here and there into something very capable. All the original parts got re-used and built into a cheapo second case as a tinkering rig once I felt confident enough to build something myself.
Welcome to the wonderful (?) world of DIY system builders and upgraders - but I have to admit that I agree with Liam and several posters that we are a dying breed, and it is certainly possible that we will be forced to give up in the not-too-distant future. <sad face>
Have one on me - you'll need it to cope with the frustrations that you will undoubtedly experience ->
I am still using my custom-built Core 2 Quad bench PC that I've used to help fix many, many clients' PC problems with. It has gone through many incremental upgrades, with only the case and PSU still from the original. I doubt there will be any more rebuilds - it does everything I'm likely to need in the foreseeable future.
Even my 'gaming rig' is old - 3rd gen i5 with 10-yo GPU - yes it can run Crysis (the first game I ever had to build a specific PC for back in 2008), but then so can any modern phone or PC - probably even the half-assed Win 11 NUC I've been provided with for WFH!
I'm now wondering if I can virtualise the NUC and stick the VM on one of my Proxmox servers or (Debian) dev laptop, and whether $employer/client would notice. Helpful suggestions welcome...
"Where does most development happen?"
In my case, circumstances have pushed me from my beloved, albeit elderly, desktop on to my laptop. It's a much newer Win 11 mid-range gaming laptop, and while the extra power is nice, trying to write code on a tiny 17 inch screen with one of those godawful chicklet keyboards is not my idea of fun. I've increased the font size in Vs code, Lazarus etc and it's still migraine territory. How anyone over 40 gets anything done on a laptop is a mystery to me. I can't wait to get back to my nice big desktop.
It's an interesting point. People do often paint Linux as a server success only, but if you include Chromebooks and Phones it's kicking ass. I just wish I had the level of control over my phone and Chromebook that I have over my Linux desktop computer. The former are merely consumer devices but the latter is a productivity device. I wish I could be productive on all of them.
I did that, several years ago, but unfortunately I could never user it as my main device. There are some android apps that I could not do without, that never worked on Sailfish OS. The store for the Android apps was attacked once by hackers (or something like that, I do not remember well, was too long ago and before the pandemic), so it never gave me confidence again, then Here Maps, worked ok and after an update never again, and never again could I get a GPS lock...
That is a shame, but if you use an smartphone, and want to use at least messaging and maps, seems that there is no escaping the known duopoly...
I'm currently running a Pixel 6 Pro with GrapheneOS. I've installed Organic Maps and the voice synthesizer RHVoice - both open source, free apps - and it's served me fairly well for navigating on the road. I probably could run Google Maps, but that sort of undermines the whole reason for getting away from regular Android.
Valve/Steam has been doing wonders for Linux (and macos) via its pretty thorough support for Windows games.
The SteamDeck is one facet of that but in general, games are not an overriding reason to stick to Windows anymore and Valve is a huge part of that. IIRC, their CEO initially - 10+ yrs ago? - had some proof-of-concept work done on emulating(?) the DirectX apis to support some games. Lo and behold, the frame rates were actually quite good and they doubled down ever since.
That all said, my own SteamDeck tends to be hyper-finicky about running games on it. Including ones that theoretically are listed as viable. Jagged Alliance 3 several times went into repeat crash loops on certain maps, The Troop never really loaded, etc... Kinda regret that purchase though it's very cool for those that work.
On my Linux laptop? Much better outcomes.
In any case, good on them to give back to the actual enablers, the distros themselves.
It wasn't Valve who kicked it off.
In 2018 Doitsujin made DXVK which converted DX10/11 calls into Vulkan calls. Later that year Valve began to sponsor the project and began developing Proton.
In 2019 Misyltoad made D9VK which converted DX9 calls into Vulkan, later that year it was merged into DXVK.
Nice. I probably confused that with something else. From your post, the actual breakthrough came much later, via making look it like DirectX is available, via Proton. That, at a guess, makes porting mostly a non-issue.
However, there were stirrings before...
Late 90s, Loki Games started porting some games to Linux. I saw some of them in stores in mall for a while. Ports of Windows-based clones of Civilization, that kind of stuff. Not bad games, no, but not quite AAAs. That petered out, either through lack of demand in bricks and mortar stores or because it was a costly undertaking to rewrite a port.
Later, 2010-ish?, I think it was Valve decided to try to benchmark some games under Linux, and IIRC, achieved fairly good benchmarks. I honestly don't recall if anything came out of it. It was more a proof of concept and I don't know if anything was commercialized at that stage.
Still, I also recall playing games like Shogun II Total War on macos - it was released there in 2014. And it came out on Linux/Steam OS in 2017. So the Steam-based action predates Proton.
"...my own SteamDeck tends to be hyper-finicky about running games on it."
I find this surprising. I have grown my Steam library recently to around 80 titles, and at least 90% run with no tinkering on my SteamDeck OLED. The remainder also all run fine, after consulting www.protondb.com and fiddling with launch settings and/or versions of proton. At least a couple of these games are listed as unsupported, but they work regardless. I am very happy with my purchase.
Yeah, me too. I think it might be a lemon unit somehow, because honestly, no one else seems to have as many problems as I do.
Thing is, Jagged Alliance 3 mostly worked, especially in the beginning. By the time I finished it and started looking at other games, the return window was long past.
To even get JA3 to complete, I had to a) switch to Proton Experimental b) turn down resolution c) go through each and every setting I could find and "dumb it down". i.e. "anti-aliasing? that sounds demanding. OFF dynamic shadows? OFF" Great game, but the graphics looked like JA1 by the time I was done.
Should try Baldur Gate 3. And maybe also be more systematic looking at protondb.com as per your suggestion. Still, not dissing SteamDeck in general, but my own experience seems a bit off.
And in any case, I buy a lot of these during sales and can still enjoy them on a (Linux) laptop, so its not all bad.
With Valve, I'm willing to give the benefit of doubt on this. They sure get sued a lot, and on the surface many of their practices do seem monopolistic, but as a customer I don't feel they are wronging me in any way, at least not yet. Games are quite cheap if you wait for sales. As a long time linux user, they have actually improved my life and got me back into PC gaming after a 20+ year hiatus.
Out of curiosity, which distro are you calling a "kiddie distro", SteamOS or Arch?
If valve didn't exist, MS game pass (or another competitor to valve) would have filled that void. Or worse.
They were ahead of the game with the digital distribution model, so much so I used to dislike them over physical media being enough to play games.
As it's where I started, there will always be space for a games machine that doubles as a proper computer. As opposed to the walled gardens popping up to be consumed and destroyed.
Once fixed two Windows servers and a Linux box using my SteamDeck in desktop mode, in a hotel room on the North Yorks coast using their TV on HDMI and a bluetooth keyboard! My SteamDeck is the best piece of kit I have ever owned.
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