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.
As much as it frustrates me that this is the best option for various reasons, there is at least now a native nexusmods client.
Granted, if your game isn’t supported by it and given that it’s early days, I do still agree with you.
the new mod client from nexus will be great, but I’d wager it’d be another year before its in a non-test state.
Doesn’t it currently only support like one or two games? I have a grandfathered premium account. It’s a must for me for the few games I used to mod. Not to mention all the other mod utilities that outright don’t work. Things the community has built. Not mad at them for not making another version of their apps.
Maybe one solution is for most games to have some kind of built in mod support? Bg3 basically did it. CP77 also kinda tried.
It only supports Stardew Valley and Cyberpunk at the moment iirc.
Cyberpunk is a good one though, cause it requires running external .exe files for some of the mods to install/run. Which I hope they get working, cause thats also kind of a problem games Skyrim/Fallout/Starfield have, in that the most essential mod is Script Extender, and trying to find a way to launch it on linux that will launch the game.
Still very early days, yes. R2modman supports more games also.
It’s definitely helpful for games to support their own modders also, and I can understand why most don’t put in the effort.
Fair
r2modman supports 4 games, 3 of which are relatively obscure.
https://thunderstore.io/c/lethal-company/p/ebkr/r2modman/v/3.1.45/
Edit, for convenience:
(Emphasis mine, one of them humorous. There’s more, but formatting this on my phone is tedious and frustrating.)
They only had 4 on https://r2modman.com/
edit
I dont say that argumentatively, to be clear. Just pointing out where I got my info
Understood, thanks for the info. Probably worth raising with them on the discord, which I would do if I felt strongly about it.