Steam Deck and SteamOS are great for Linux as a whole - Open Source Summit Europe 2023

At the recent Open Source Summit Europe 2023, Alberto Garcia a software engineer at Igalia did a talk covering Valve, Steam Deck, SteamOS and how it all helps Linux as a whole.

For people who understand Linux and open source, a lot of this would be pretty obvious but it's always nice to have a refresher from people who work with Valve - talking about how good it is to have all the Valve funding, and how having SteamOS Linux shipping on widely available consumer devices like the Steam Deck is great for Linux in general.

Giving a nice overview reminding people that SteamOS is actually a pretty standard Linux distribution based on Arch Linux, with some customizations and a full KDE Plasma desktop mode. It also goes over: Wine and Valve's funding of Proton working with CodeWeavers, Valve's funding work for Linux kernel improvements like the new futex API, work to solve filename case sensitivity in ext4 to extend it to support case insensitive like Windows (so games can work properly through Wine / Proton), various work on graphics drivers like AMD RADV, the ACO shader compiler, Vulkan Video extensions, advanced colour and HDR, better handling of GPU resets, Gamescope, supporting Flatpak by default on SteamOS and much more.

The main overall point is that Valve contributes a lot, it's all open source and Valve's philosophy is "upstream everything" which improves Linux for everyone everywhere.

The full talk can be seen below with the Steam Deck / SteamOS bit starting at 4:12:07 and ending 4:47:00.

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The event page is here.