The Arch Linux team has announced on its public mailing list that it will be entering into a direct collaboration with Valve.
As primary Arch Linux developer Levente Polyak discloses in the announcement post, “Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.”
Polyak continues, “This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors […] We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on the mailing list as work progresses.”
These quotes go to show how bigger corporations like Valve can still be a helpful, desirable influence in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community. While the rules of FOSS dictate that Valve was under no obligation whatsoever to give back to the community in any way, it’s had a great track record so far through Proton and is now directly funding the continued development of Arch Linux, which forms the foundation of its own SteamOS 3 operating system. It’s true that volunteers in FOSS make that part of the tech world go round, but it’s always nice when these projects can actually afford to pay people to get the work that needs to be done for the rest of our enjoyment.
I wonder how much Arch-derivative distros like Manjaro or EndeavourOS will benefit from this, aside from Proton improvements.
Endeavour will benefit from it directly. There’s nothing proprietary in the distribution, except for a repository with their theming, a keyring/mirrorlist, and a few alpm hooks for nvidia and dracut installs.
With Manjaro it’s a little different, but who knows. They have other issues to worry about
I was JUST about to try out Manjaro. Are these ‘other issues’ a new thing or are you saying that because Manjaro is more of a departure from arch than endeavor is?
Agreed, do endeavour, plain arch (maybe with something like arch install), or hard pivot and try nixos. Manjaro has never really been a good option.
Oh no, not a new thing. Manjaro has a very long history of consistently fucking things up. I would not, in good consciousness, recommend Manjaro to anyone
