We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. 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.

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 are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.

These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.

  • Raglesnarf@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    alright, time to wipe my Mint test/fun build and try out Arch. I don’t do much with Linux but it’s gonna be fun getting back into it. Who doesn’t love the smell of a fresh OS install

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      That’ll be… quite the Leap. I haven’t done an Arch install, but the last time I did, it required a fair amount of reading since the installer doesn’t walk you through everything. It’s not hard per se, but it does take some time for the first install.

      If you’re not super familiar with Linux, I recommend holding off on Arch. This isn’t coming from any form of elitism (I don’t use Arch anymore) or lack of experience (I used Arch for > 5 years), just from reading between the lines of what you said, which indicates that you’re probably not super familiar with Linux.

      If you really want to do it, go for it! I think Arch is an absolutely fine distro, and I think there are a lot of good reasons to use it. I just don’t want someone who may be new to Linux to get frustrated and end up not having fun. So don’t let me discourage you, but also know what you’re jumping into: probably a couple hours of getting the base system installed, and maybe another hour or two of installing packages to get to a usable system.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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    1 month ago

    Valve is a Titan doing incredible work for the open source community and making money while doing so.

    Successful open source software business model at work. Way to go.

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      I’d like to see a Sankey graph of where Valve’s money goes before I praise them that much for helping out a Linux distribution a bit.

      Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn’t make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.

      Gabe Newell is a billionaire, Steam is a defacto monopoly that objectively charges more than they have to, and literally everyone who works at Valve is in the 1%. Let’s not fall over ourselves dick-riding them.

      • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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        1 month ago

        I’d like to see a Sankey graph of where Valve’s money goes before I praise them that much for helping out a Linux distribution a bit.

        I’d say it’s a lot more than “a bit”. It’s an enormous amount of help that pretty much everyone in the Linux (professional) community can, has, and will attest to.

        I don’t agree that they’re a monopoly, because they’ve done absolutely nothing to prevent competition. Other stores do it to themselves.

        I do agree though that their fees are exorbitant and their contributions to Linux are a teeny tiny fraction of their wealth, but I appreciate it regardless.

        • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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          1 month ago

          I don’t agree that they’re a monopoly, because they’ve done absolutely nothing to prevent competition. Other stores do it to themselves.

          Yes they have. The steam friends network and the fact that you can’t transfer your purchases, friends data, or community data to other platforms is an inherent form of lock in. Just because you’re used to it because Facebook also does it, doesn’t mean it’s not.

          • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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            1 month ago

            What do you expect them to do? Not actively helping your competition is not remotely the same thing as being anticompetitive.

                • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  While I disagree with the other commenter’s approach and attitude, he/she/they are partially correct with the comment they left next to this one.

                  There is no legal obligation for a company to fund or assist its competition, even if it holds a significant marketshare. The companies that do help their competition, like Microsoft with Apple in 1997 or Google with Mozilla today, begrugingly choose to do it so their lawyers can make the argument that they are not a monopoly because they still have competition.

  • Earth Walker@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Using OSS in your product and giving the OSS devs resources to improve their software, instead of trying to take over their project? Did Valve not get the memo that big tech companies are supposed to be evil?? Oh right, they have a monopoly on video game distribution and all of their products rely on DRM.