Valve certainly isn’t perfect, and I used to buy more games on GOG. But then I noticed those games, which initially had Linux support, were no longer getting updated or working properly on distros. Their Linux support just kind of fizzled out.
On the flipside, even in it’s early days, Steam/Proton made Linux gaming such a far nicer experience. If Proton were proprietary, I would stay away from Steam still. But what Valve is doing for Linux and free and open-source software is a net good right now, and that is worth supporting.
There are things that suck about Steam, like the drm. Just the other day I had a game running and also tried to run a second game through GameNative only to find Steam only allows me to run one game at a time, dumb. And there will probably be a day when Valve pulls some kind of enshittified bait and switch like Google is doing with Android right now.
And when that day comes it will be necessary to fork and forget them. But until then I’ll enjoy the ride.
That’s slightly better, but the salient question is, how would these things function in system that overall is more rights respecting and built on free software principles? It’s still an anti-feature, it’s still drm, and it’s still a component of a part of Steam that is proprietary.
While Steam is doing a lot of good, it can’t be forgotten that the majority of their systems are still not free software, and still fall far short of a more ideal platform.
What’d be really nice to see is maybe something like Bazaar but with a gaming focus. A much more open storefront that can still allow game devs to be compensated for their work.
Valve certainly isn’t perfect, and I used to buy more games on GOG. But then I noticed those games, which initially had Linux support, were no longer getting updated or working properly on distros. Their Linux support just kind of fizzled out.
On the flipside, even in it’s early days, Steam/Proton made Linux gaming such a far nicer experience. If Proton were proprietary, I would stay away from Steam still. But what Valve is doing for Linux and free and open-source software is a net good right now, and that is worth supporting.
There are things that suck about Steam, like the drm. Just the other day I had a game running and also tried to run a second game through GameNative only to find Steam only allows me to run one game at a time, dumb. And there will probably be a day when Valve pulls some kind of enshittified bait and switch like Google is doing with Android right now.
And when that day comes it will be necessary to fork and forget them. But until then I’ll enjoy the ride.
Technically they only block the second game launch if both are online. If you switch steam to offline mode, you can launch as many games as you want.
That’s slightly better, but the salient question is, how would these things function in system that overall is more rights respecting and built on free software principles? It’s still an anti-feature, it’s still drm, and it’s still a component of a part of Steam that is proprietary.
While Steam is doing a lot of good, it can’t be forgotten that the majority of their systems are still not free software, and still fall far short of a more ideal platform.
What’d be really nice to see is maybe something like Bazaar but with a gaming focus. A much more open storefront that can still allow game devs to be compensated for their work.