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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • They leveraged open source to compete on the console front without actually investing dev time.

    This is just false.

    Valve has funded a lot of extra work though to get things like DXVK and VKD3D-Proton for the translation from Direct3D to Vulkan into a state where performance can be really great! Valve also funds work on Linux graphics drivers, Linux kernel work and the list goes on.

    reference

    The included improvements to Wine have been designed and funded by Valve, in a joint development effort with CodeWeavers. Here are some examples of what we’ve been working on together since 2016:

    • vkd3d, the Direct3D 12 implementation based on Vulkan
    • The OpenVR and Steamworks native API bridges
    • Many wined3d performance and functionality fixes for Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11
    • Overhauled fullscreen and gamepad support
    • The “esync” patchset, for multi-threaded performance improvements

    Modifications to Wine are submitted upstream if they’re compatible with the goals and requirements of the larger Wine project; as a result, Wine users have been benefiting from parts of this work for over a year now. The rest is available as part of our source code repository for Proton and its modules.

    In addition to that, we’ve been supporting the development of DXVK, the Direct3D 11 implementation based on Vulkan; the nature of this support includes:

    • Employing the DXVK developer in our open-source graphics group since February 2018
    • Providing direct support from our open-source graphics group to fix Mesa driver issues affecting DXVK, and provide prototype implementations of brand new Vulkan features to improve DXVK functionality
    • Working with our partners over at Khronos, NVIDIA, Intel and AMD to coordinate Vulkan feature and driver support

    from Valve’s original Proton announcement

    You should try doing some research before making such claims. Valve has been directly cooperating with, contributing to, and financially supporting several open source projects related to gaming since at least 2016.


  • I’m guessing you don’t remember what the market was like for indie games before Steam. Valve’s platform has done a lot of work to expose small game developers, and made it economically viable to work on and publish games independently. Before this it was very difficult for small titles without the advertising budget of a AAA publisher to get any attention at all, let alone actual sales. There’s nothing else like Steam for small studios trying to find buyers for their games, and Valve does deserve credit for that because it’s improved the video game market overall to have more people making more games and able to earn a living doing it.

    The other major effort that Valve has made is Linux compatibility. Even before their work on Proton, Valve released native Linux versions of their games (they were one of very few publishers to do so at the time). I’ve been gaming on Linux since 2006, and Wine was great but rarely easy or complete. Proton has made things so straightforward that people have forgotten just how difficult it was before.

    Credit where it’s due. No other major publisher has contributed to the gaming community the way Valve has, except maybe id Software when they just handed the entire Quake 3 Arena source code to the open source community in 2005 which spawned countless new open source game projects.

    Downvote me you bootlickers.

    No, you’ll enjoy the attention too much.





  • The problem is that phone hardware is incredibly non-standard. Every model requires custom tweaks and regular bug fixes, which is why there aren’t many phones with good Linux support or with enduring LineageOS support or any other specialty OS. Every manufacturer does their own thing and edits Android to fit their hardware, but they generally don’t release the custom drivers or any documentation. The same phone model from a different year or different region might have a different chipset in it. Keeping up with it is basically impossible, by the time an aftermarket developer gets their custom OS build running properly the phone is obsolete.

    On the other hand, if a project can pick the hardware platform for themselves then everything is more manageable.






  • Sort of… but saying that the government can issue as much new currency as they want is disingenuous and this is addressed later in the video, but it literally says that the tax money is “destroyed”… this is not really correct.

    The value of a government currency like the dollar comes ultimately from confidence in the US economy. If the economy produces value, then the dollar represents a piece of that value. If the economy is unproductive (less value is produced) then tax revenue is lower, and less new money can be issued.

    So to close the circle, your taxes do pay for something… the government’s capacity to issue new money, which it then uses to pay for government services &etc. Saying that “your taxes pay for nothing” is kind of a pointless argument over semantics, because without the tax collection the government would not be able to pay for anything.



  • Of course English is spoken in other countries, and other countries have high numbers of internet users, but it does not follow that English is a commonly used language for internet users in other countries. Most Chinese are probably speaking Chinese, most Indians are probably speaking Hindi.

    The IPv6 graph you linked shows that adoption is still less than 50%, and I’m not clear on their methodology… does “users that access Google” mean users with Google accounts? or individual users that use google.com? or does it include all of their cloud services? do web servers linking content from Google Ads count? does this data represent mostly end users, or also infrastructure connections?