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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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I think you have a lot of valid arguments for why Valve isn't a pure champion for all things good. But, that also wasn't the question.
I've used proton more often than not with games purchased through GoG. Their contributions to wine and the layer on top is excellent. Sam Latinga is a Valve employee and creator of libSDL, which is also another significant and foundational contribution to FOSS.
A company can do a lot of good without having to be exclusively good. And as for Linux gaming, it wouldn't be where it is without Valve.
Agreed, they aren't a perfect company but a Trojan horse metaphor just doesn't fit here, closest I could think of is that steam is closed source, but proton isn't, and they also fund a TON of open source programs, including wine
I think the comment is meant to claim that while they contribute to these open source projects, the end goal is the ability to control those new arms of the emerging market to an extent. Kind of like what's happened with steam where it's been around for so long , has such a large community and quantity of content, that any similar platform that comes along is going to be at a serious disadvantage. Even large scale companies don't even know how to compete with steam properly so far.
If the same thing happens to the Linux community within the next 10 years or so due to valves contributions. That could be not necessarily bad, but a serious change to the Linux culture. Open source culture could take a hit. Gabe won't live forever, and he has a unique understanding of " you don't fuck with the open source community, you work with them ". Once he's gone, whoever takes over could take advantage of their foothold in the open source community, or at least try to. That would probably be bad.
Wine and SDL were around before Valve was involved. It is unclear if and how good they can prevail if Valve decides that they aren't interested anymore. Structures that are lost might be hard to regenerate.
Half on the way to a glorified console for most of its users? The Linux gaming scene is now a reduced mirror of the gaming scene for Windows and the consoles; imo it was to be more interesting before. There was a higher and more vocal interest in smaller and more experimental productions. Nowadays it is the same as everywhere else.
Companies do profit, not good. The Linux Gaming scene was once quite sensitive to privacy, self control, and independence. Lemmy is a dedicated left site. But some of the folks here are cheerleading to a monopolist corp like there is no tomorrow. I'm from Germany - if I hear people worrying about what will happen when the benevolent dictator dies (see above in this thread) I get the creeps.