this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Valve Is A Wonderful Upstream Contributor To Linux & The Open-Source Community (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/linux_gaming
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[–] emax_gomax 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Define users of their devices? As a steamdeck owner my experience for installing an alternative os was terrible because theirs specific hardware configurations that valve made for the device and never bothered to upstream it so they were applicable outside of their environment. I'm not criticising valve for closing their resources, I'm criticising them for exploiting open source software to get a usable os up quickly and then not contributing to the same ecosystem that let them do that... not even assuring anyone they would eventually do that. Valve is a for profit company like any other, if you wanna waste time defending their less savory actions than go ahead but don't pretend they aren't what they are.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Doesn't this article explicitly state that they are contributing to drivers and other projects that they use? It just sucks that you overlooked all of what they did and just focused on them not opening up their hardware configurations.

Also, what hardware configurations did they close? I couldn't find any problems when looking this up. It seems like you can just install another OS while having some hiccups. Which is understandable since most desktop OSes are geared toward a mouse and keyboard control.

[–] emax_gomax 1 points 1 year ago

I'm not saying they don't contribute anything, they dont, they fund others contributions which is just ss valuable, I'm saying their not the champions of Foss when the modification theyve made for their own hardware is pretty opaque by their own design. It's like praising nvidia for opening up their drivers when all they bloody is dis dump code to a public gihtub repo periodically with all actual changes squashed together. As for what they haven't open sourced:

  1. The pulse audio configuration that let's the builtin speaker system actually... you know, work. Someone else kindly looked into and contributed. it https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf/pull/233#issuecomment-1372671325
  2. The sddm changes to support the lockscreen code. This is a valve specific feature they forked and have as of yet refused to upstream.
  3. The trackpad drivers for the steamdeck/controller touch sensor. You literally have to run steam itself to get this basic hardware functionality working.

I praise valve for their support of Foss projects but that doesn't equivocate their lack of openness on the steamdeck.