Valve is officially sponsoring the Linux distro that powers the gaming giant's Steam Deck console.
According to an email on the Arch-dev-public mailing list, Valve Corporation is formally supporting the Arch Linux project:
A post from Arch developer Morten Linderud on Mastodon insists that the choice of projects belongs to Arch devs, not Valve:
In case you're wondering exactly what a "secure signing enclave" is and why Arch needs one, there was a talk on just that at this year's All Systems Go conference.
Arch Linux is a community-led distro, and a member project of the non-profit Software in the Public Interest (along with Debian, Gentoo, and many others). Corporate sponsorship is often mostly helpful, though. Why Valve? Well, alongside games and the Steam platform, Valve sells Linux hardware. Its Steam Deck handheld console plays Windows games, but it runs Linux, and its SteamOS distro is based on Arch.
Forget the desktop: it's a dying market sector anyway. The Year of Linux On The Games Console is more significant, and that began back in 2021. The Year Of Linux On The Games Console came nearly a decade after the Year Decade Of Linux On The Laptop, which began when Chromebooks became best-sellers in 2013. The COVID pandemic helped Chromebooks outsell Macs by 2020.
If you take even a passing interest, you probably already know what Free Software and Open Source folks are like. They are far too concerned with disagreeing about what sort of Unix-like system qualifies as open source, and is it really Free, and does it use the right license, to pay any attention to the fact that they won the battle years ago. The Year Of Linux On The Server was way before that, but it arguably began when AWS launched in 2002. Only if there are no license fees is it feasible to take control of spinning up new VMs away from humans and put it under program control. If you had to pay for all the software, a rogue line of code could cost you billions. This only works if it's all free.
- Windows 11 and Linux gain ground among Steam gamers
- Manjaro 24 is Arch Linux for the rest of us
- Valve celebrates New Year by blowing off Steam support for Windows 7 and 8
- Linux will soon offer switchable x86-32 binary support
It's not going to displace the PlayStation or Nintendo Switch any time soon, but Steam Deck sales seem to be doing all right. Valve has shifted millions of units, and there are now over 14,000 games that are "Deck Verified."
It's true, the Linux numbers in the latest Steam hardware and software survey are very slightly down. They show Windows gaining by over 1.5 percent and Linux marginally down at under 2 percent – still well ahead of macOS, we note. The bump in Windows numbers is paralleled by a similar increase in Simplified Chinese usage, so maybe some new game is doing exceptionally well in China at the moment [likely Black Myth: Wukong, a Chinese game based on Chinese mythology – ed].
As we noted last year, what's most interesting to us is the Linux distro breakdown. As we reported in our Debian at 30 story, in most surveys Ubuntu is about a third of usage, and Debian another sixth, meaning about half overall. But on Steam, apparently, there are about twice as many Arch users as the next most popular distro, which, predictably, is Ubuntu.
Maybe the meme-mongers who coined "BTW I use Arch" knew a big shift was happening long before the rest of us. ®