Valve Steps Up for Linux Gaming Again: Huge News for Arch and Wayland!

[0:00] Valve has proven many times over the years that they are a friend of Linux. They’ve brought Steam to Linux for Linux gaming. They’ve made Proton to bring Windows games to Linux. And the Steam Deck runs Linux. This week, they also confirmed that they are friends yet again.

[0:17] So let’s talk about that. There was an announcement this week that Valve will be entering into a direct collaboration with Arch Linux. So Leventi Poliak, I almost guaranteed I said that wrong, of Arch Linux says that 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. Now, for those who are unfamiliar, a build service infrastructure refers to a system to build and distribute binary packages in an automatic and reproducible way. This is also sometimes referred to as continuous integration.

[1:07] And a secure signing enclave refers to digitally signing executables and scripts to confirm the software author and the guarantee that the code has not been altered or corrupted since it was signed. This is also known as simply code signing. Leventi goes on to say, 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.

[1:40] Now, this is very cool news and shows just how great Valve is for their commitment to Linux. Obviously, this is going to benefit Valve as well, of course, because their SteamOS distro for the Steam Deck is based on Arch Linux.

[1:57] If that wasn’t enough, Valve devs are also looking to improve Wayland. Wayland versus X.org is still a topic that is heavily debated, and I can’t count the amount of times I’ve heard someone say, “why is Wayland taking so long?” Or “are we ever going to get to Wayland?”

[2:13] It turns out that this sentiment has some merit behind it. Mike Blumenkrantz, hopefully I said that right, is an open source graphics software engineer for Valve. He’s known in the Linux community for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code and various Mesa driver optimizations. And now he has decided to take up the task of accelerating development for the Wayland protocols, which if it needs to have that, that’s fantastic. So I’m glad to see someone is wanting to do that. And also at the same time, fellow Valve Linux engineer Joshua Ashton has proposed the Frog Protocols to serve as an alternative to Wayland Protocols to be able to iterate new Wayland protocols quicker. Now, what Mike is proposing is something I think should be absolutely added, and that is a new experimental protocol development area. While a protocol is still within the experimental branch, there could be a breaking change that’s allowed, and the purpose is to allow for more iterative development before being ready for the staging or stable branches. If this experimental proposal gains adoption, it could help in accelerating new protocol development and get new protocols into the repository faster. It’s also rather surprising to me that this doesn’t already exist.

[3:34] Why would you only have staging and stable? stable how does it even get into staging I mean as a non-developer I always thought that you know it would be standard to have some kind of dev branch before staging because staging means that it’s getting ready for stable so you know I just assumed it was there anyway for those who are thinking this might be a pipewire dream, get it . . . pipedream, pipewire . . . well Mike is also now serving as a member of the Wayland Protocol’s governance in the MESA stack, along with Daniel Stone, so there’s a lot of potential here. You can follow what is happening on Mike’s blog as he wrote up a post outlining the Wayland Protocol development headaches as they stand currently and his hopes for helping to address the situation as a whole. And I gotta say, his blog is a fun read. Mike’s sense of humor is clearly evident in his writing, and even his domain has some fun to it, so if you want to learn more about this news, you can go to supergoodcode.com.

[4:36] This is just yet another example of Mr. Newell being “Good Guy Gabe”. Valve is also trying to get Rockstar to be good guys. They’re not so far, but they’re trying. And Rockstar decided to remove Linux support from GTA Online because they added an anti-cheat called BattlEye. But BattlEye works on Linux. So what’s going on here? Well, Rockstar is actually lying about it. Here, check it out.