back
854 comments
Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact.

The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.

Valve is one of the few companies regularly seen on HN where the headline is something like "[company] is secretly doing something really great" as opposed to "[company] is secretly doing something evil"
That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite: Linux is outperforming Windows[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q

I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company.

All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.

I always took the HL3 memes more as a good-faith joke. Like it's part of gaming culture more than a serious jab at them.

I personally can't wait for "SteamOS 2: Episode 2 part 1" :)

There's pretty strong rumours that they actually have been working on a new Half-Life. People are hoping it releases with their new hardware in 2026.
They are merely trying to commoditize their complement https://gwern.net/complement

Your games are still not owned by you, they are locked inside your Steam account (liable to be suspended at any time) and app (as I've learned when I couldn't play when their pretend-but-not-really-offline mode broke; I now block it at firewall level most of the time). That part will never become "community" oriented.

Valve is sort of like modern Bell Labs for software. It has almost-monopoly on PC game sales, which results in massive profits. Then it uses part of these profits for public good on projects that are at best tangentially related to their actual business.
>The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore.

It's absolutely fair to mock them for not releasing these games and keeping radio silence all these years. They managed to dethrone Duke Nukem Forever.

There were multiple times in which the internet was hyped for Episode 3 and where it would make sense to release even a basic game like they've did with Episodes 1&2 just to wrap things up. I'm sure plenty of people that make up various explanations to why that happened but the end result is that Valve has chosen to disappoint the fans who have been waiting for the conclusion to the story. It's not like doing that would prevent them from releasing an another new entry in the series that uses revolutionary new technology or whatever.

> Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact.

Some of it is counter-productive though. Proton made WINE commercially viable, and in doing so, disincentivized native Linux builds of games to the point that some studios that had been releasing games natively for Linux have stopped doing so, since the Windows version now plays well enough under Linux.

> and modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat simply do not work through a translation layer, something Valve hopes will change in the future.

Although this is true for most games it is worth noting that it isn't universally true. Usermode anti-cheat does sometimes work verbatim in Wine, and some anti-cheat software has Proton support, though not all developers elect to enable it.

I think Valve is not some kind of God who free the human from the hand of Microsoft, they are a private company, they are just protecting their business and protecting their business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits. The movement towards Linux benefits Valve the most since they have invested on Linux Gaming for 10 years now and that movement "conveniently" benefits the gamers too. That's a win-win situation, users can escape themself from a bloated Windows and Valve has the pioneering advantage.
Would love to see it on MacOS X -- Steam works great on my Mac Mini for the games it supports, would be great to see everything run on it.
kinda funny that Microsoft has tried and failed multiple times to make Windows on ARM work

and then valve is probably going to succeed, to Microsoft's detriment

Any leads on when the next generation of Steam Deck will be released? Hoping it could be sometime in 2025, but suspect it will be more like 2026.

Over the holidays I was playing GTA: San Andreas on a Nintendo Switch. It's fun but so underpowered for a game released in 2004 (Yes, 21 years ago! Damn..). I'm really craving something more.

As a sidenote, it's really cool Valve allows installing SteamOS on any hardware. There are some alternative comparable form-factor devices:

* Lenovo Legion Go S

* Asus ROG Ally

But I have yet to see any of these in real life, so not sure how good or bad they really are.

Source: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-handheld-gaming-devices

Can someone tell me how much more power efficient is ARM actually? Like under load when gaming, not in a phone that sleeps most of the time. I've heard both claims, that it's still a huge difference and that for new AMD Zen it's basically the same.
Hypothetically, if Valve made a strong push to make SteamOS compatible with all Windows programs, not just games, could they make a serious run at knocking down Windows?
I was also delighted to see Steam has an effort underway for Android on Linux, allegedly a fork of Waydroid, that they are working on. Tentatively delighted because it's unclear if this really will be open source, but hopefully! https://steamdb.info/app/3029110/info/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/12/valves-version-of-andr...

I don't need Android apps that often, but it would be neat for the options here to expand and improve. I want to say much as Proton has accelerated things, but man, I am pretty lost now tracking which projects Proton encompasses and the history of where Valve backed/helped these efforts.

I still really want to believe it's collaborative. That good work is going to flow upstream, to collaborated Valve + crowd spaces.

For an understanding of what Valve are doing, here is a 1 hour talk by Gabe Newell (CEO):

Gabe Newell: On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions, and the Future of Corporations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td_PGkfIdIQ

TL;DR:

* The most skilled workers are the most undervalued

* Make products to serve the customer

* Management is a skill, not a career path

* The only people they consider themselves to be unable to compete with are their customers, so enabling the customer to produce better content in their ecosystem is the most efficient way of producing things.

Given how arm license is know to be less than friendly.... Wouldn't it be preferable to explore a RISCV architecture.

As far as I know RISC provides similar power efficiency and sleep that is like ARM.

The one thing that worries me is that PC gaming is going fast to requiring controller support.

Which is reducing the complexity of control schemes to either nothing or mortal kombat like combos.

Forward, down, forward, high punch to build a new city in a 4X in a few years?

I downloaded an unoptimized game and tested it (Stray, a few years old at this point) and got some graphical glitches, but between 10-20 FPS on a three-year-old phone. That it’s even possible is impressive, and I imagine it will only get better as more games get optimized.
Oh so they did not "adopt" Fex, they actually financed the leading developer from the start.
Commoditize your complements (layers above and below).
I suppose this will is in order to be able to push lower powered hand helds to penetrate further into global markets. Not everyone can afford an X64 Nvidia usd5000 gaming workstation.
I like what Valve is doing for the Linux world, but I'd like to mention that box86 and box64 have been running x86 games onto arm (incl. android phones) for a long time too... And it does that on Risc-V and LoongArch too...

There is not so much support from companies to this project that I know of, but the people behind box64 manage to make it a solid and fast solution to running windows game on arm.

I find it kinda ironic that they phase out 32bit at the same time. I’d guess it would be easier to emulate 32but x86, although the difference perhaps goes away with a JIT.
What Valve hasn't announced yet, but which has leaked, is "Lepton", a fork of Waydroid they're working on to enable Android gaming for Steam—in particular, getting Oculus Quest games going on the Steam Frame.

The future actually looks pretty good for indie gaming development on the Android platform, Google's shenanigans notwithstanding.

2026 will be the year of the linux desktop
> and that’s when the Fex compatibility layer was started, because we knew there was close to a decade of work needed before it would be robust enough people could rely on it for their libraries.

In a recent Linus Tech Tips video, Linus Torvalds (original Linus) was asked, "if you could go back in time and start the Linux project from scratch, what would you do differently?" He had two answers, one was "nothing," and the other was "if I knew how much work this was going to take, I never would have started this project."

It makes me wonder, is there some kind of blissful ignorance required to kick off a project that will take you years to see through? How many times have I self limited myself, stopped myself from starting something, because I put on my lead hat and did some estimations and thought eh, not worth it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA

I’m interested in seeing Proton perform on Arm for Windows x86 games. That sounds like a real challenge.
Does anyone know what the limfac is? The machine code produced is of course different on different CPU arches, but isn't this handled at the compiler level? I.e. lower level than game devs worry about.

The exception I see is if SIMD intrinsics.

I cannot speak for the Steam console and I don't care about playing PC games on my phone: it's not the form factor for me.

But I'm really grateful for Valve and Steam.

Increasingly, more and more Windows-only games "just work" with Linux (or work with minor tweaks taken from ProtonDB).

I bought a Lenovo Legion a couple of weeks ago and I'm having a terrific experience with Linux+Steam so far. I don't claim to play the latest AAA games, but I don't feel the need to live at the edge anyway.

One game that has resisted running so far is Space Marine 2. Eventually I'll get it going. Some people report success.

Video tech is driven by pr0n and OS tech is driven by games.
> When you get into lower power, anything lower than Steam Deck, I think you’ll find that there’s an Arm chip that maybe is competitive with x86 offerings in that segment.

At which point does this pay off the emulation overhead? Fex has a lot of work to do to bridge two ISAs while going through the black box of compiler output of assembly, right?

Don’t you think that if usage goes significantly up, MS will just use its lawyers to shut down all of these cute initiatives ?
Thank god. Microsoft has shown they don't care about their users as anything other than eyeballs to shove bullshit to for _years_ and Gabe called them out on it back with Windows 8, and Valve has been working on this since.

Steam Deck is fantastic to use. Good riddance to Windows.

Valve has done wonders for Linux. I've often thought about this: https://kaveh.page/blog/linux-valve
valve is just as ambitious as microsoft or google, they just appear to be the good guy for now because theyre trying to gain some ground on evil corp, and linux is one of the only openings they (or anyone) has got.
Yooo this is awesome, maybe we will finally get some game support on Macs now
The best thing Valve could do is nuke Wayland/X11/Xwayland from orbit. Wayland is a mess that apps still don't support and doesn't work with NVIDIA GPUs. X11 is ancient and screen tears. Xwayland is the worst of both worlds.
Now we just need qualcomm to sort out their linux snapdragon support
This may be a naive question: why ARM and not RISC-V?
It should be RISC-V...
Unless I misunderstand something (not quite awake fully yet...), that's good right? Aka "play games on any platform" as goal. A bit with the inofficial goal of scummvm, to rescue old commercial games from vanishing for young, future generations.
fix anticheat!
This may be a naive question but why ARM and not RISC-V?
Steam API doesnt even have an arm version. You cant build a native arm app with it.