What is Linux & ;? Never heard of that distro before
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This shouldn’t come as any surprise to any longtime Phoronix readers and dedicated open-source/Linux enthusiasts, but Valve with their work on the Steam Deck and SteamOS have been lifting the open-source ecosystem as a whole.
A talk this week at the Linux Foundation Europe’s Open-Source Summit highlighted some of the great and ongoing contributions by Valve and their partners.
Alberto Garcia of the open-source consulting firm Igalia, which continues to collaborate with Valve on some of these Linux ecosystem improvements, talked at length around how SteamOS is contributing to the Linux ecosystem.
SteamOS is built atop Arch Linux with a GNU user-space and systemd, the desktop mode features KDE Plasma to which Valve has funded some improvements there, Valve’s Steam Play / Proton that leverages Wine has been immensely valuable to Linux gamers and enthusiasts along with related open-source projects like DXVK / VKD3D-Proton, and then there’s also they work they are doing around AMD color management / HDR.
Not just to the AMD graphics drivers for benefiting the Steam Deck’s hardware but also to Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan and then other common infrastructure.
There has also been other efforts Valve has been involved in such on expanding case insensitive file-system support on Linux, various other kernel features, their Gamescope Wayland compositor, immutable software updates, and Flatpak.
The original article contains 366 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 41%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
They also distribute the largest closed source digital restrictions management system…
Doesn’t that depend on game devs?
I mean, I can copy Baldur’s Gate on a PC where there’s no Steam at all and play it just fine, because the game itself doesn’t have any restrictions. If other games have DRMs I don’t think it’s Steam fault.
If you want to be totally free from DRMs you need to check GOG, if a game is there, it doesn’t have DRM, so neither the Steam version will.
I mean, I can copy Baldur’s Gate on a PC where there’s no Steam at all and play it just fine, because the game itself doesn’t have any restrictions
I don’t think so, no. You can do that with the gog version. With the steam version it’ll try to launch / connect to the local installed steam at startup, and fails if it cannot do so. You’d need to install a steam emulator like goldberg for it to work.
This is the case with most games (there are a few exceptions) on steam, even those that don’t enforce “strong” DRM. They want steam running. This is, by itself, a completely unacceptable form of DRM.
You can do that with the gog version.
You can do that with Steam too, I know because I’m doing it. I have dual boot, I use Windows very rarely (I play on Linux) so Steam is not installed on it at all, I copied BG3 on it to try out mods because Mod Manager doesn’t work on wine for me.
I can assure you the game works perfectly fine without Steam.
With the steam version it’ll try to launch / connect to the local installed steam at startup
As you sure you’re using the right exe? bg3_dx11.exe and not some launcher?
Sorry, I should’ve clarified: I didn’t try it with BG3 (I use the gog version) - hence my “I don’t think so”; I simply assumed it wouldn’t work because that’s the case with like 99% of steam games.
This means Larian specifically implemented their calls to the steam API in order not to exit if it fails to connect; that’s indeed pretty good and in fact I know of only one other such exception to the rule: rimworld.
Ah ok.
I simply assumed it wouldn’t work because that’s the case with like 99% of steam games
That’s because the vast majority of games implement DRM unfortunately, BG3 does not, Witcher doesn’t either, any game that does not have any DRM can be played fine outside of Steam, tho there are not many.
DRMs are not Steam doing, it’s game devs.
