Valve Is A Wonderful Upstream Contributor To Linux & The Open-Source Community

This shouldn't come as any surprise to any longtime Phoronix readers and dedicated open-source/Linux enthusiasts, but Valve with their work on the Steam Deck and SteamOS have been lifting the open-source ecosystem as a whole. A talk this week at the Linux Foundation Europe's Open-Source Summit highlighted some of the great and ongoing contributions by Valve and their partners.

Alberto Garcia of the open-source consulting firm Igalia, which continues to collaborate with Valve on some of these Linux ecosystem improvements, talked at length around how SteamOS is contributing to the Linux ecosystem.

SteamOS is built atop Arch Linux with a GNU user-space and systemd, the desktop mode features KDE Plasma to which Valve has funded some improvements there, Valve's Steam Play / Proton that leverages Wine has been immensely valuable to Linux gamers and enthusiasts along with related open-source projects like DXVK / VKD3D-Proton, and then there's also they work they are doing around AMD color management / HDR. Igalia engineers have been involved with Valve on the AMD color management work as well as other areas like enabling new Linux kernel features for enabling better Steam Play support.

The elephant in the room meanwhile is the countless improvements Valve engineers have made to the the Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan drivers as well as to the kernel graphics driver components. Not just to the AMD graphics drivers for benefiting the Steam Deck's hardware but also to Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan and then other common infrastructure. But in this area of the Linux graphics driver support, Valve's contributions and those of their partners have been incredibly beneficial to the Linux desktop ecosystem even outside gaming.

There has also been other efforts Valve has been involved in such on expanding case insensitive file-system support on Linux, various other kernel features, their Gamescope Wayland compositor, immutable software updates, and Flatpak. Igalia says it's part of Valve's policy to "upstream everything" they are working on.

So for those questioning Valve's contributions to the Linux and open-source ecosystems or for helping to convince any friends/colleagues about Valve's open-source software work, check out Alberto Garcia's OSS EU 2023 presentation for the more comprehensive look at all of the great Valve / SteamOS upstream contributions.