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.
Steam support two weeks ago be like:
They should support Flatpak.
They support Unity???
Unity desktop: Ubuntu’s DE
Yes I know, and no they use GNOME with a few extensions, they have abandoned Unity since quite a while, I would wonder if there still was a supported LTS with Unity.
There is a Unity variant that’s still maintained
Completely fair. They have specific distro they support, and their staff is trained for. Also this seems like you’ve got some OS level issues independent from steam…
If Windows or MacOs had a variety of distributions, Valve would similarly limit support to a practicable number.
I’ve had weird issues with missing codecs in Windows N variants. It definitely happens
Yeah and arch is a distro where you do things yourself.
Reading the announcement, this won’t be changed. Steam on Arch is still not supported.
Not officially supported but it works just as well and might be more well documented than Ubuntu, regarding support and issues
Gaming in Arch Linux through Steam has been incredibly smooth for me.
I run Steam on Arch as a Flatpak (because it tends to be pretty messy with dependencies so it’s nice to have it all contained in one place) and it’s always worked perfectly well for me too.
Same. I have had a couple of hiccups but nothing more than I did gaming on Windows. Overall my transition to Linux, especially for gaming, has gone exceptionally smooth.
Maybe that bug report was the motivation for the collaboration! Or maybe the level 1 support aren’t aware of unannounced business decisions.
Working in open-source, frequent issues do end up being future feature requests.
The Steamdeck was motivation for the collaboration - since it is based on Arch Linux. But as a desktop client they only support ubuntu officially which makes level 1 tech support easier as supporting every distro can be very complex.