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.
This is a great step for humanity imo
Does it even make sense to keep playing with a Manjaro VM or just go straight Arch?
I’ve been very happy with my Manjaro install on AMD GPU, everything worked out of the box on fist try install without any weird step. I would say you could jump straight to Arch/Arch-based, but first research about your GPU compatibility.
(I’m aware of how Manjaro is perceived and its downsides, please avoid comments suggesting me to switch).
Go endeavourOS if your first time. Manjaro has a bad track record, as shown at https://manjarno.pages.dev
Manjaro worked without issues for me for about 2 years, unlike EOS which broke within less than half a year and their forum is the most unhelpful and toxic clown show I’ve ever seen as they just insulted me to the point where the admins closed the thread and said I should make a new one if I still need help - hiding it in the process so it won’t get indexed and shine a bad light on them. So I find the Manjaro hate very unwarranted and it seems to get way more hate than it deserves. Most of it is just a bunch of “what if” scenarios that never happened.
Could you link to the thread? I had a good experience with the forums. It sounds like they locked it to prevent people from sending more bullying comments and suspended everyone.
Most of it is just a bunch of “what if” scenarios that never happened.
The link lists a bunch of things that did happen, along with the thing on partial upgrades, which is guidance on the Arch wiki.
https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/grub-boot-error-after-update/42928/31
They were at least still able to write in other places. And given that experience I of course did not follow up with another thread, just to experience the same thing.The link lists a bunch of things that did happen, along with the thing on partial upgrades, which is guidance on the Arch wiki.
It lists a bunch of inconsequential things when it comes to the distro. The worst were the pamac DDOSing incidents. The SSL certificates of their websites I really don’t give a damn about but people then keep saying “yeah but if they are sloppy there then…”, without being able to provide examples where the distro was ever affected by it. They also keep arguing about the packaging on the AUR potentially being newer than the ones in Manjaro and thus potentially causing breakage, which is a weak argument - especially with how sloppily a lot of AUR packages are maintained. And if you’re super paranoid, just update the AUR when Manjaro updates.
Overall, hating on it feels like it became more of a meme with little substance, fueled by the general entitlement and elitism within the Linux community regarding their favorite distros.
And given that experience I of course did not follow up with another thread, just to experience the same thing.
If they had commented in the new thread, suspension would be definite. IMO, locking it would be a good choice, since if that user commented on the new thread, they’s very likely to be stalking you and have a concrete reason to get punished. I’m sure the only disruptive user got a formal warning.
As for being unable to report, that’s because of default policies by Discourse, the forum software used by EOS: You can only flag posts after reading 30 posts across 5 topics for 10 minutes. The Manjaro forums use the same forums and configuration. (Not as in exactly the same, just the same on this front.)
It lists a bunch of inconsequential things when it comes to the distro.
You seem to have skipped over the part about shipping the M1 kernel 3 days after its first demo with bugs. They then PR’d a commit they obviously did not understand to archlinuxarm, a much smaller project unaffilated with ARM, causing breakage. This was in October 2022.
The SSL certificates of their websites I really don’t give a damn about but people then keep saying “yeah but if they are sloppy there then…”, without being able to provide examples where the distro was ever affected by it.
The SSL certificate expiring means you are not able to connect to Manjaro servers to update anything. No Manjaro packages at all can be upgraded or installed while the SSL certificate’s expired. That’s pretty big.
And if you’re super paranoid, just update the AUR when Manjaro updates.
But when Manjaro gives you updates from two weeks prior, AUR gives you new updates from today.
Holding updates does not make the system more secure
Holding all updates for two weeks is just a dumb design choice:
- If the concern is breakages, you’ll still get the breakages, just two weeks later.
- Arch Linux already holds updates to core packages, to packages with wide impact, and that are expected to risk breakage.
- Aforementioned deal with partial upgrades. The 2-week long period pretty much guarantees that AUR packages in need of bumping their library versions will have updated before you receive the library update yourself.
They do have a different testing system now—with a good justification of being quite a different system from Arch—where all updates are pushed to a test branch and errors are caught, supposedly. I say supposedly because that did not stop the AUR being DDOS’d for the 2nd time under the same exact system in 2021.
This is all on top on the fact that Manjaro has officially said that they are not Arch, albeit based on Arch. Though at the end of the day, anyone is of course free to use whatever they wants. Manjaro has done some wonderful work for everyone. It’s just I need to wait until at least 2028 to trust it.
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
Archinstall is super easy. Just copy a few commands from the wiki to join a wifi network and then it will take everything from there.
Until you reach the part where you want to partition and encrypt your drives.
Endeavour just gets rid of the install headache
Garbage distro with a garbage community.
dannnnn
Care to elaborate?
https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/1250293/Arch-Linux-and-Valve-Collaboration/comment/7534737#entry-comment-7534737
So the admins do their job and you had an issue
That doesn’t seem like a big deal
Punishing the person seeking help while doing jack shit to the people insulting & trolling while hiding the whole thing so others can’t see is certainly not how I want to see the moderation job to be done. But if you want to circlejerk with toxic trolls, then go right ahead.
The posts you had a problem with were deleted, what more can they do? Leaving them up just encourages that behaviour
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.
Or he could try a arch distro like manjaro.
You mean endeavourOS. Manjaro has a bad record. There’s also a gaming-focused one called Garuda.
I like Garuda, but as someone who started with it it’s a maybe for a first distro. It’s beginner friendly except when it isn’t.
Exactly. Don’t use Manjaro, I argue that it’s less stable than Arch due to how updates are managed.
Actually huge news. Linux as a whole benefits and needs more of this imo.
I hope it ends up similar to OpenSUSE’s OBS, or even better, that they can reuse a lot of the work OBS has done. I use it and think it’s fantastic.
hell yeah
Man it sure is a good day to be both a Valve and Arch fanboy.
I use Steam btw
It’s really good news that there’s another company behind Wayland now.
RH frankly directs it against people using “marginal” setups and applications, thus less influenced by it, and not for some ambitious goal.
Valve tend to be well-meaning guys. Anyway, in this case it’s in their business interest to be well-meaning.
Valve is not well meaning. No large for-profit company is ever well-meaning. It’s merely the case that Valve’s best interest happens to align with those of the consumer, and they have decided that their business model is going to be to win over consumers’ loyalty through goodwill rather than milking them for every penny they can get. And they are very successful at this, seeing that there has still not arisen any serious competitor to Steam. That’s entirely because consumers are loyal to the platform. Valve provides a good service, consumers reward them with loyalty. It’s not friendship, but it’s symbiotic, which is as close as you can get to friendship in the harsh world of business.
Yada yada I think Valve is well meaning and I’m still to trust anything Microsoft does is well meaning. OpenAi is just the latest manifestation of how you could do things well but intentionally choose the evil path.
Great news! Crazy to think that Valve is hijacking/liberating the Windows gaming library. You would think that Microsoft would be doing more to prevent this.
don’t jinx it
They kind of tried with UWP apps in the Microsoft Store, but they didn’t catch on.
Valve has enough lawyer money to keep Microsoft at bay.
Some extra fun details from the staff discussions around this: Valve is not interested in control of the distro, but are mainly interested in funding work on projects that are chosen by Arch staff, and are already things that Arch staff wants to implement. The projects chosen are indeed things that Valve also want to be part of the distro’s infrastructure, but the process has been totally in the hands of Arch staff.
I gotta say, it’s been really cool to see Valve go through the process of considering OSS as not just a useful tool or worthwhile target, but as a robust collaborator.
First, they build and maintain their client on Linux, and build their games to run natively on Linux, learning that things aren’t actually as difficult as it’s commonly made out to be, and the things that are more difficult than they need to be can be fixed by working with and contributing to the existing community.
Then they consider building their own hardware, but try the half-way approach of building SteamOS on top of Debian, and depending on existing hardware vendors to build machines with SteamOS in mind, learning that there’s a lot of unnecessary complexity around both of those approaches to that goal.
Then they learn how to develop and build 1st party hardware with the SteamLink and Steam Controller.
Then they put the lessons from the Steam Machine project into practice by dumping loads of time and effort into Proton, knowing that they won’t have the market unless they can get Windows games to run on Linux in a reliable and seamless way.
Then they put all that knowledge and effort together to do the impossible: unite PC gamers of both Windows and Linux flavors under the banner of the SteamDeck, a fully gaming-focused, high-quality, and owner-friendly piece of kit that kicks so much ass that it single-handedly pulls a whole category of PC hardware out of obsurity and into the mainstream.
And what do they do with that success? Literally pay it forward by funding work on the free software that forms the plinth that their success stands upon.
Good on Valve.
I love that you can even edit the boot logos. Always a treat to see another one every time.
as, you can randomize them? huh, ill have to look into it
If you place multiple files in the boot video folder you can select them in the system options
Thanks; nice write up.
Dude this is seriously cool as fuck. Valves contributions are priceless to the future of Arch and the rest of the Linux ecosystem.
Would someone elucidate as to what this means for a normie PC gamer and begrudging windows user?
I would say this is great news all around. With SteamOS pushing the Linux market share higher than it’s ever been, and a partnership with Arch to boost direct development, this could mean other companies taking a hard look at Linux and either developing native software or ensuring proton compatibility out of the gate.
I’m imagining “Runs on Arch” markers on software like the old “Works on Windows '95” stickers I used to see everywhere.
This puts competitive pressure on Microsoft. Valve’s goal is to turn Steam OS into a legitimate competitor to Windows for gamers, and Microsoft should fear Valve’s success.
Right now, Microsoft has no legitimate competitors in the PC gaming space. They are free to do anything they want to their OS and consumers have no choice but to tolerate it. If Microsoft say “watch these adverts”, consumers open their eyes. If Microsoft says “pay up”, they reach for their wallets. If Microsoft says “suck”, they kneel.
If a competitor arises to Windows, then Microsoft will have to actually start worrying about losing customers to Steam OS. More importantly, every customer who switches to Steam OS is one who isn’t paying for Game Pass and one who isn’t buying games from the Microsoft Store and paying Microsoft their 30%.
Pretty much just that Arch Linux will be more secure, stable and reliable.
And for Valve, producing SteamOS images could be easier, meaning they can focus their dev efforts on something else.
And it supports competition against a locked down Windows-only gaming ecosystem that restricts Valve/Steams potential market. This is a great move for anyone interested in gaming or Linux.
Probably nothing. This is more steamdeck related stuff since the SteamOS is based on ArchLinux. And even then, it does not mean much for SteamDeck users. They wont notice much at all really. This might help with development a bit on valves end. The big news is really for ArchLinux users and maintainers which will see more effort in the development of that distro.
There is some wild speculation that maybe this makes arm for Arch Linux more official in the future. Which is based of the other recent news that Valve are creating an ARM emulation layer for running games on ARM devices. Which means maybe they are working on an ARM device and maybe need to start working on getting ARM support for Arch. Though again this is all wild speculation.
Along with the recent Frog Wayland stuff, I’m happy to see Valve is gonna help linux desktop again lol.
From reddit:
Anybody remembers Linus saying “I hope Valve comes and fixes the packaging issue on Linux”? (yeah, on that ancient DebConf)
I hope Valve comes and fixes the very slowness of anything Wayland.
I just heard of Frog today, and I don’t really like it. It just seems like bypassing review. I like the competing proposal of experimental wayland protocols (merged into repository as “experimental” and iterative if 2 weeks pass without anyone opposing) much better.
After 15 years of wayland development hell, I’m honestly open to anything. Problem is I can definitely see an experimental branch being just as scrutinized. One of the core issues highlighted was that features and requests were rejected because of hypotheticals and the maintainers trying to avoid fragmentation like early Xorg.
Basic features from X11 are still missing. Everyone ended up somewhat fragmenting anyway via compositors because weston wasn’t really useful for developers beyond a demo. Wayfire started out as a Compiz redux and now its being considered by several DEs like XFCE to be the default compositor which they should standardize around.
Regardless, I really hope they nail it down in the next year because the halfway migration to wayland is seriously harming Linux desktop, especially when lots of frontend UI has been done perfectly decades ago on X11, and wayland still not properly supporting new features like HDR.
Spent a few hours today installing vanilla arch for the first time because of this. Loving it so far.
This comment is missing the mandatory “btw.” :(
Valve: “Yeah, we funded Arch (btw)”
