Has it really been that long? Apparently so. Valve originally announced their rebranding of Steam Play with Proton back on August 21st, 2018. Seems like a good time for a quick reflection being halfway to a decade old now with the tech that gave rise to the Steam Deck.
Huge kudos to them, they saw that they were on top of the PC market and wanted to expand, and they found the market of linux users who wanted to game on their machines too. Wine wasn’t up to par for gaming and they took it and ran with it. Beyond that they open sourced proton too, something most companies wouldn’t have done. Even if they quit now the help they gave to the linux community is immeasurable
Proton is based on wine, which is copyleft so valve didn’t exactly have a choice in keeping it open source. I also don’t necessarily think that their goal was to reach the rather small existing user base of Linux users, but rather they wanted to make sure they aren’t at the will of a bigger company (Microsoft) whose product is/was required to run most of what valve makes money with.
This is probably more accurate, their entire model depended on Windows, and if they wanted to make their own devices they would all be forced to either start new or get Linux up and running. Motives aside they did good for the community
Oh yeah their efforts are definitely a huge net benefit for the Linux community, I just don’t like seeing big companies portrayed in a better light than they deserve. When it comes down to it, what valve really cares about is still their bottom line.
Linux users (me included) are only a few percents of all PC users. I don’t think they did it for us as a market, more to have an alternative to windows if they start closing down more (started with Windows 8 I believe). First try they fumbled a bit with the Steam Machines (Stream OS and proton weren’t there yet and the prices were not really competitive) and now nailed it with the Steam Deck. I do love that they seem to care about openness to some degree!
Yeah, it’s probably more about them not being locked in MS’s ecosystem more than anything, but whatever the intention may be, everyone is benefiting from the results.
Maybe not Microsoft, but I could learn to live with that I suppose