How about we start Monday off with an interesting little titbit? According to a former Valve staffer, Steam for Linux was started up by ex-Microsoft employees.
The information comes from Richard Geldreich, part of the Linux team who left Valve back in 2014. On Twitter, Geldreich interestingly said this:
What isn't commonly known is that the original Steam Linux effort was started and led by a number of ex-Microsoft employees who, for various reasons, believed that Windows was going in the wrong direction.
Definitely something I didn't know. It sort of makes sense though, with many in the gaming and tech industry showing concern on where Microsoft was taking Windows. Valve's Gabe Newell (who also worked at Microsoft) famously said Windows 8 was "a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space" and that getting their games and Steam onto Linux was "a hedging strategy". From the big touch orientated interface that tried dropping the traditional desktop, to the hinted plans at pushing people towards the Windows Store there was a lot of ire aimed at Windows 8.
Getting Steam on Linux, and the original Valve blog posts like the "Faster Zombies!" lit a fire under Microsoft, clearly feeling a little threatened (or perhaps just motivated to do something) as Geldreich actually wrote on his blog back in 2017 that Microsoft ended up paying Valve a visit.
Without Valve's initial push into Linux, and their continued support with various projects and contracts with developers to work on improving all manner of things like the Linux Kernel, Mesa drivers and more, Linux gaming would have gone nowhere. It's still a tiny niche now of course, but it's come a very long way in terms of usability and performance.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: hammahUnrelated to the conversation at hand, but I stumbled over the word “titbit” in the first sentence. Personally I hadn’t seen it written like this before, but only as “tidbit” i.e. with a “d” instead of a “t”. Believe it or not this was the reason for creating an account with GOL.What you did here reminds me of myself. Are you in IT? :)
In any case if anyone is interested, apparently both forms exist, but according to Merriam-Webster, the notation with a “t” is less common:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/titbit
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tidbit
Thus ends my first contribution to this fabulous site...:D
I'm going to use the titbit version in front of my wife all the time now.
Quoting: BielFPsUsually I would agree with you, but games usually require fresh updates (specially with graphic drivers),and while I think Debian is a great distro (since I use at work) they have the habit of not update anything that's not a security issue (even minor bugs/glitches) until a major release, and this is bad for our case as we may have some minor performance issue in some specific game with some specific card and drive version, that need a specific fix in the newest drivers release, etc.
Sure they can backport those packages if necessary, but I think mixing old packages with new packages can be more problematic than just downgrade a faulty package if needed.
For Nvidia, I can assure its not a problem, I even use experimental every now and then. The driver is so seperated from the rest of the system you can just drop in the other version. Kernels usually get backported, and I think that's also the case for Mesa?
If you want something more rolling, you could still use Debian testing. With all the quality assurance needed for something like SteamOS though, I'd probably stick with something stable with very selected updates.
Last edited by Eike on 7 January 2020 at 3:34 pm UTC
Quoting: EikeFor Nvidia, I can assure its not a problem, I even use experimental every now and then. The driver so is seperated from the rest of the system you can just drop in the other version. Kernels usually get backported, and I think that's also the case for Mesa?
And if you want something more rolling, you could still use Debian testing. With all the quality assurance needed for something like SteamOS though, I'd probably stick with something stable with very selected updates.
Nvidia is a whole new subject in this case, the good part of their drivers is that works well for their products, the bad is that it's usually a problem for everything else (and a Gaming OS is more than just graphics components).
Their products are good but only if you work with their drivers and their patterns, which means that you're arbitrary stuck with their decisions, or else good luck in your own (Nouveau and Wayland people know well what I mean).
Support a SO which the system depends on a third company that you don't have official support/partnership is really a bad ideia, and in Nvidia's case, the only company I think can be arbitrary to then as they are for anyone else is Microsoft (for obvious reasons)
Philadelphus Jan 8, 2020
Quoting: hammahUnrelated to the conversation at hand, but I stumbled over the word “titbit” in the first sentence. Personally I hadn’t seen it written like this before, but only as “tidbit” i.e. with a “d” instead of a “t”. Believe it or not this was the reason for creating an account with GOL.From what I remember reading, the original version was actually titbit, nothing salacious about it, that's just how it came down from older English. But then someone created the tidbit form because they thought it was salacious, and now we have two forms. :)
In any case if anyone is interested, apparently both forms exist, but according to Merriam-Webster, the notation with a “t” is less common:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/titbit
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tidbit
Thus ends my first contribution to this fabulous site...:D
Uhh, on topic, that's actually rather interesting to hear that Steam for Linux got started by ex-Microsoft employees, and that even they can think that Windows is going the wrong direction.
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