The Arch Linux team has announced on its public mailing list that it will be entering into a direct collaboration with Valve.
As primary Arch Linux developer Levente Polyak discloses in the announcement post, "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."
Polyak continues, "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 believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on the mailing list as work progresses."
These quotes go to show how bigger corporations like Valve can still be a helpful, desirable influence in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community. While the rules of FOSS dictate that Valve was under no obligation whatsoever to give back to the community in any way, it's had a great track record so far through Proton and is now directly funding the continued development of Arch Linux, which forms the foundation of its own SteamOS 3 operating system. It's true that volunteers in FOSS make that part of the tech world go round, but it's always nice when these projects can actually afford to pay people to get the work that needs to be done for the rest of our enjoyment.
I'll wait and see what comes of it. Valve have been singlehandedly responsible for evolving Linux gaming by leaps and bounds, to the point where the only real hurdle right now is anti-cheat compatibility.
Their direct collaboration with Arch is massive for that reason alone
They have a battleeye proton build that devs can choose to ship with if you use that, but for some reason most (including GTA V online) just... Decide not to use it.
This is exactly how we know that they are actively trying to exclude Linux users and it never has been "too much development effort with too little market share". They won't tick the check box in EAC to allow use in Linux. They actively aim to exclude the open-source community because they are big corporations and would rather a different big corporation hold some of the power they don't have yet instead of the "consumer".
"some reason" = anticheats are less effective on Linux, and publishers rather have fewer Linux players than more cheaters.
Eeh.. I'd respectfully disagree on the anti-cheat being the only real hurdle right now.
Modding is still a massive pita and janky compared to windows, as an example.
Don't get me wrong, Linux gaming has advanced entire geologic eras compared to where it was 10 years ago, 5 years ago, hell.. even last year. I dont even have to reference protondb anymore, I just expect things to work in general, and they usually do, outside of the minority of games with asshole anticheat (most of that can even be run on linux, they just refuse to enable the option)
r2modman works natively on Linux
As much as it frustrates me that this is the best option for various reasons, there is at least now a native nexusmods client.
Granted, if your game isn't supported by it and given that it's early days, I do still agree with you.
the new mod client from nexus will be great, but I'd wager it'd be another year before its in a non-test state.
Doesn't it currently only support like one or two games? I have a grandfathered premium account. It's a must for me for the few games I used to mod. Not to mention all the other mod utilities that outright don't work. Things the community has built. Not mad at them for not making another version of their apps.
Maybe one solution is for most games to have some kind of built in mod support? Bg3 basically did it. CP77 also kinda tried.
It only supports Stardew Valley and Cyberpunk at the moment iirc.
Cyberpunk is a good one though, cause it requires running external .exe files for some of the mods to install/run. Which I hope they get working, cause thats also kind of a problem games Skyrim/Fallout/Starfield have, in that the most essential mod is Script Extender, and trying to find a way to launch it on linux that will launch the game.
Still very early days, yes. R2modman supports more games also.
It's definitely helpful for games to support their own modders also, and I can understand why most don't put in the effort.
Fair
r2modman supports 4 games, 3 of which are relatively obscure.
https://thunderstore.io/c/lethal-company/p/ebkr/r2modman/v/3.1.45/
Edit, for convenience:
(Emphasis mine, one of them humorous. There's more, but formatting this on my phone is tedious and frustrating.)
They only had 4 on https://r2modman.com/
edit
I dont say that argumentatively, to be clear. Just pointing out where I got my info
Understood, thanks for the info. Probably worth raising with them on the discord, which I would do if I felt strongly about it.
Tbh, you'd think modding would be easier with Linux's file system, but no, it's pretty bad. I really do wonder why that is.
Linux is really good at sandboxing and containerizing things. Not to mention the display manager/server changes from system to system and is optional.
As someone who spent 2 hours fixing Reloaded II on steam deck for Persona 5 Royal, because Sega pushed an update that broke mods, I can agree with the statement "modding is still a massive pain in the ass" 200% my Reloaded II session on Windows was fixed in minutes.
Yeah, I've spent so much time smashing my head against the wall trying to resolve issues that would be very simple to solve on windows, largely cause windows is the native platform for a lot of this shit so its just inherently easier there.
The best example of that was setting up Stalker Anomaly. Good god was that a fucking nightmare. Cyberpunks not to fun either trying to get the mods set up.