Hi folks! The Fedora Project Leader kicked off this discussion on the council-discuss mailing list. Since I imagine folks here have a lot of unique viewpoints about gaming on Linux, I encourage you to check out the thread and share your perspective if you are inclined:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Fedora and Steam Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2019 13:43:49 -0400 From: Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Reply-To: Discussions with the Fedora Council and community council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To: Discussions with the Fedora Council and community council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org
So, a lot of people have been asking me about this! Steam, of course, is a a popular platform for gaming, and it runs on Linux. Valve, the company behind it, puts a lot of resources into gaming on Linux (including working on open source video drivers). Until now, they'd explicitly endorsed and supported a specific non-Fedora Linux distro. However, there's been some changes which you can read about in this forum post: https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1640915206447625383/, which says in part:
The Linux landscape has changed dramatically since we released the initial version of Steam for Linux, and as such, we are re-thinking how we want to approach distribution support going forward. There are several distributions on the market today that offer a great gaming desktop experience such as Arch Linux, Manjaro, Pop!_OS, Fedora, and many others. We'll be working closer with many more distribution maintainers in the future. [...]
Several people have suggested to me that it'd be awesome for a Fedora offering to be _the_ supported Steam distribution. Or at least, a formally recommended one. I can definitely see the appeal -- although we haven't targetted gamers formally except through the Games spin (which showcases open source gaming), gaming is generally pretty important to the student/academic audience we'd like to reach.
But, of course, Steam is a proprietary platform, and gaming comes with the large elephant-in-the-room that is Nvidia. Despite awesomeness from the AMD open source driver recently, and Intel integrated video good enough for a lot of basic gaming, Nvidia still has a near monopoly.
I don't have any specific requests or direction from the informal conversations we've had with Valve so far, but I imagine that in order to really make a Fedora edition or spin their official recommendation, they'd want some kind of consideration given to problems that might come up with their proprietary system (or with the Nvidia driver). We've traditionally had bright line here, where while we may provide advice and point to workarounds when there's a problem with popular proprietary software (like Steam games, even -- see this from F26 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F26_bugs), we don't block or slip the release for them.
I know this a contentious topic with a lot of different opinions, but let's not let that stop us from talking about it. What _are_ our options here, and what are we willing to do?
For example, maybe we would not slip the general release, but would allow a Fedora-branded spin to delay release until some bug is worked out. Or, we could decide that we want to stick to our all-open-source criterion but interested teams could work with Valve to be aware of our release schedule and make sure they're able to test and get things working _before_ we hit release freeze. If it comes to it, maybe we'd allow Fedora editions or spins that want to and which have Steam installed from a third-party repository to warn of potential problems before upgrading. These are just some thoughts, not specific plans.... I can imagine a range of possibilities.
In any case, let's talk about the pros and cons here and what we can gain for Fedora and for our open source and free software cause, and what we're able to do within our values to accomplish that.
Should be awesome , I'd like participate on that , at least on testing it.
Best regards,
On Tue, 2019-07-02 at 17:37 -0500, Justin W. Flory wrote:
Hi folks! The Fedora Project Leader kicked off this discussion on the council-discuss mailing list. Since I imagine folks here have a lot of unique viewpoints about gaming on Linux, I encourage you to check out the thread and share your perspective if you are inclined:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Fedora and Steam Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2019 13:43:49 -0400 From: Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Reply-To: Discussions with the Fedora Council and community council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To: Discussions with the Fedora Council and community council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org
So, a lot of people have been asking me about this! Steam, of course, is a a popular platform for gaming, and it runs on Linux. Valve, the company behind it, puts a lot of resources into gaming on Linux (including working on open source video drivers). Until now, they'd explicitly endorsed and supported a specific non-Fedora Linux distro. However, there's been some changes which you can read about in this forum post: https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1640915206447625383/, which says in part:
The Linux landscape has changed dramatically since we released the initial version of Steam for Linux, and as such, we are re- thinking how we want to approach distribution support going forward. There are several distributions on the market today that offer a great gaming desktop experience such as Arch Linux, Manjaro, Pop!_OS, Fedora, and many others. We'll be working closer with many more distribution maintainers in the future. [...]
Several people have suggested to me that it'd be awesome for a Fedora offering to be _the_ supported Steam distribution. Or at least, a formally recommended one. I can definitely see the appeal -- although we haven't targetted gamers formally except through the Games spin (which showcases open source gaming), gaming is generally pretty important to the student/academic audience we'd like to reach.
But, of course, Steam is a proprietary platform, and gaming comes with the large elephant-in-the-room that is Nvidia. Despite awesomeness from the AMD open source driver recently, and Intel integrated video good enough for a lot of basic gaming, Nvidia still has a near monopoly.
I don't have any specific requests or direction from the informal conversations we've had with Valve so far, but I imagine that in order to really make a Fedora edition or spin their official recommendation, they'd want some kind of consideration given to problems that might come up with their proprietary system (or with the Nvidia driver). We've traditionally had bright line here, where while we may provide advice and point to workarounds when there's a problem with popular proprietary software (like Steam games, even -- see this from F26 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F26_bugs), we don't block or slip the release for them.
I know this a contentious topic with a lot of different opinions, but let's not let that stop us from talking about it. What _are_ our options here, and what are we willing to do?
For example, maybe we would not slip the general release, but would allow a Fedora-branded spin to delay release until some bug is worked out. Or, we could decide that we want to stick to our all-open-source criterion but interested teams could work with Valve to be aware of our release schedule and make sure they're able to test and get things working _before_ we hit release freeze. If it comes to it, maybe we'd allow Fedora editions or spins that want to and which have Steam installed from a third-party repository to warn of potential problems before upgrading. These are just some thoughts, not specific plans.... I can imagine a range of possibilities.
In any case, let's talk about the pros and cons here and what we can gain for Fedora and for our open source and free software cause, and what we're able to do within our values to accomplish that.
Fedora Games SIG mailing list -- games@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to games-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/games@lists.fedoraproject.org
On Tuesday, July 16, 2019 3:51:08 PM MST Sérgio Basto wrote:
Should be awesome , I'd like participate on that , at least on testing it.
Best regards,
Yeah, so long as it's not done in our repos. No proprietary software in Fedora. :)
-
John Harris -
Justin W. Flory -
Sérgio Basto