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.
On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 2:18 PM Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
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.
OK, want to make sure I understand here before I opine. Which is not how it usually goes. :)
The opportunity is to convince Valve to say, officially, "if you want to get the best Steam experience, you should go install Fedora first." Is that right?
Because if that is the actual opportunity, and we think it's a realistic goal, then I think we should pursue it with whatever resources we might reasonably commit, and make any compromises that we might reasonably make. Including close coordination of release activities.
Having a spiffy Ansible role to get Steam properly configured, including configuration of third party installs, could also be quite nice. ;)
--g
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-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/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 8:42 PM Greg DeKoenigsberg greg.dekoenigsberg@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 2:18 PM Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
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.
OK, want to make sure I understand here before I opine. Which is not how it usually goes. :)
The opportunity is to convince Valve to say, officially, "if you want to get the best Steam experience, you should go install Fedora first." Is that right?
Because if that is the actual opportunity, and we think it's a realistic goal, then I think we should pursue it with whatever resources we might reasonably commit, and make any compromises that we might reasonably make. Including close coordination of release activities.
Having a spiffy Ansible role to get Steam properly configured, including configuration of third party installs, could also be quite nice. ;)
I propose we consider pushing our end-state further. I'd LOVE to see Valve produce a Fedora Remix that has their code pre-installed (this presumes they have code we can't distribute - I don't know if this is the case). This way we have them, ideally saying three things:
1. The best desktop Linux experience for Steam is on Fedora (i.e. go getfedora.org now!) 2. Here is an ansible role/script/method to add Steam to your existing Fedora install 3. Want a short cut, here is our remix that brings Fedora together with Steam. This is how we test and QA our builds. This gets you Steam and everything that is part of regular Fedora.
The committing resources is the hard part.for the community. I think this means asking Fedora QA to help Valve land appropriate gating (?) tests in rawhide in a "train them" model, not a "do it for them and maintain it" model. This would let Valve get rawhide feedback and possibly help us gate on bugs. Hopefully release engineering and our friends in the RIT remix can help them figure out how to get a remix rolling in the same way. Lastly, our friends at ansible should be able to onboard their role in to Galaxy and this would make a great quick doc. This puts a lot of the work on Valve to become contributors to Fedora (a win for everyone) and encourages us to both live our mission (the best platform for your user's solution ...) and to keep our onboarding program going strong. These specific goals with QA and Release Engineering also help improve our docs to make it easier for the next "Valve."
regards,
bex
--g
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-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/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-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/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
Not to be the +1 person, but +1 to Greg and Bex. And while an announcement is unrealistic, if there's anything we can do related at Open Source Game Day before Open Source Summit in August, please let me know!
On Tue, Jul 02, 2019 at 13:43:49 -0400, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
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 see us becoming _the_ supported Steam distribution unless we are willing to block updates to things to not break Steam (which might include proprietary video drivers).
I don't think that is a good trade off. Certainly working with them to improve things for everybody is a laudable goal.
Personally, I don't use Steam at all. When I want specific proprietary games bad enough, I get them from Gog to avoid drm. I'm starting to move to power 9 to avoid proprietary firmware, but it will be a while before I retire my existing laptops that I currently play games on. None of my current favorite computer games (free and proprietary) are very demanding graphically.
So for me trading off delaying new features in Fedora for a better Steam experience, provides no direct benefits. There may be indirect benefits, but I wouldn't want to give up much for them up front.
On Mon, Jul 8, 2019 at 9:47 PM Bruno Wolff III bruno@wolff.to wrote:
On Tue, Jul 02, 2019 at 13:43:49 -0400, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
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 see us becoming _the_ supported Steam distribution unless we are willing to block updates to things to not break Steam (which might include proprietary video drivers).
I don't think that is a good trade off. Certainly working with them to improve things for everybody is a laudable goal.
I would like to believe there is a middle ground here. I don't know that Fedora should block on things required by Steam, but I also think we should work on enabling people, like Valve, to use Fedora as a platform. To that end, I think we need to double-down on our work to accomplish two goals:
1) Enable CI, gating and non-gating that will allow, for example, Fedora workstation to gate certain changes, and a Valve remix to be notified that a change is breaking them before it is time for them to ship.
2) Enable differential ship dates for our outputs. This would allow spins, labs, and by extension remixes the ability to ship when they are ready, not just when our editions are ready. Remixes can do this today, but we need to make it easier for them to integrate with our buildsystems where appropriate and to get messages to trigger theirs where appropriate.
regards,
bex
Personally, I don't use Steam at all. When I want specific proprietary games bad enough, I get them from Gog to avoid drm. I'm starting to move to power 9 to avoid proprietary firmware, but it will be a while before I retire my existing laptops that I currently play games on. None of my current favorite computer games (free and proprietary) are very demanding graphically.
So for me trading off delaying new features in Fedora for a better Steam experience, provides no direct benefits. There may be indirect benefits, but I wouldn't want to give up much for them up front. _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-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/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
Adding my 2c for what it is worth!
As someone who owns and plays PC games for the past 15 years or so, Steam is a day to day experience. It is literally the only reason I have a Windows license on my machine and while Steam for Linux has indeed made great jumps, it's not enough to tempt anyone who games somewhat seriously from abandoning their tried and trusted means of using it. From performing a straw poll of colleagues over lunch who also play games, their main OS is Linux for everything bar gaming. For sure the student / academic population are a great target market but your professional software developers who also like to play games to unwind maintain a dual OS for this kind of scenario. I think it would be great to explore and if the experience was fine tuned for Fedora it would certainly tempt me + others to move their gaming experience exclusively there.
Leigh
On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 1:47 PM Brian (bex) Exelbierd bexelbie@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Jul 8, 2019 at 9:47 PM Bruno Wolff III bruno@wolff.to wrote:
On Tue, Jul 02, 2019 at 13:43:49 -0400, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
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 see us becoming _the_ supported Steam distribution unless we are willing to block updates to things to not break Steam (which might
include
proprietary video drivers).
I don't think that is a good trade off. Certainly working with them to improve things for everybody is a laudable goal.
I would like to believe there is a middle ground here. I don't know that Fedora should block on things required by Steam, but I also think we should work on enabling people, like Valve, to use Fedora as a platform. To that end, I think we need to double-down on our work to accomplish two goals:
- Enable CI, gating and non-gating that will allow, for example,
Fedora workstation to gate certain changes, and a Valve remix to be notified that a change is breaking them before it is time for them to ship.
- Enable differential ship dates for our outputs. This would allow
spins, labs, and by extension remixes the ability to ship when they are ready, not just when our editions are ready. Remixes can do this today, but we need to make it easier for them to integrate with our buildsystems where appropriate and to get messages to trigger theirs where appropriate.
regards,
bex
Personally, I don't use Steam at all. When I want specific proprietary
games
bad enough, I get them from Gog to avoid drm. I'm starting to move to
power 9
to avoid proprietary firmware, but it will be a while before I retire my existing laptops that I currently play games on. None of my current
favorite
computer games (free and proprietary) are very demanding graphically.
So for me trading off delaying new features in Fedora for a better Steam experience, provides no direct benefits. There may be indirect benefits, but I wouldn't want to give up much for them up front. _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to
council-discuss-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/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
-- Brian "bex" Exelbierd (he/him/his) Fedora Community Action & Impact Coordinator @bexelbie | http://www.winglemeyer.org bexelbie@redhat.com | bex@pobox.com _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-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/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
On 7/11/19 8:14 AM, Leigh Griffin wrote:
For sure the student / academic population are a great target market but your professional software developers who also like to play games to unwind maintain a dual OS for this kind of scenario. I think it would be great to explore and if the experience was fine tuned for Fedora it would certainly tempt me + others to move their gaming experience exclusively there.
To expand here, university students who identify as gamers are also not necessarily technology-driven people. They may know how to install latest NVIDIA drivers on Windows 10 but may also assume "Linux" means "Ubuntu". :) Of the wider pool of student gamers, it is a more narrow and specific audience of students who game and are also familiar with Linux on a day-to-day basis.
Personally I see the gamer demographic as tough for Fedora to reach. It also requires non-trivial investments in marketing and outreach¹, along with the technical challenges mentioned previously.
I liked Bex's suggestion of providing a platform for Valve, enabled by CI / gating / non-gating and self-determined release dates. Self-determined release dates would also impact a Fedora Remix at the Rochester Institute of Technology, TigerOS². The Fedora release schedule is difficult for the Remix team to keep up with, even though Fedora provides the best tool-set for them to build their Remix. I think they are currently working on a F28 => F30 jump.
Either way, I encourage considering who the audience for this is and how much Fedora must change to accommodate that audience. In the last few years, Fedora has become better at finding our audiences and focusing efforts to enable those audiences to do useful stuff with Fedora.
¹ There are also other big companies who make operating systems that invest a **significant** amount of marketing and outreach towards gamers. It is difficult to compete with a marketing budget that could parallel the annual budget of the Fedora Project alone. Not that it is impossible… but it is hard and non-trivial. :) ² https://ritlug.com/tigeros
On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 7:41 PM Justin W. Flory jflory7@gmail.com wrote:
Personally I see the gamer demographic as tough for Fedora to reach. It also requires non-trivial investments in marketing and outreach¹, along with the technical challenges mentioned previously.
Seems like the potential opportunity is to become a default option for another organization that is already doing some of that outreach. The Power of the Default is strong. :)
If Valve agrees that Fedora can become the default Linux option for Steam users with a well-scoped amount of work, then it might be worth pursuing.
If Valve is unwilling to commit to that kind of relationship, then it's probably not worth pursuing.
--g
On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 9:23 AM Brian (bex) Exelbierd bexelbie@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Jul 8, 2019 at 9:47 PM Bruno Wolff III bruno@wolff.to wrote:
On Tue, Jul 02, 2019 at 13:43:49 -0400, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
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 see us becoming _the_ supported Steam distribution unless we are willing to block updates to things to not break Steam (which might include proprietary video drivers).
I don't think that is a good trade off. Certainly working with them to improve things for everybody is a laudable goal.
I would like to believe there is a middle ground here. I don't know that Fedora should block on things required by Steam, but I also think we should work on enabling people, like Valve, to use Fedora as a platform. To that end, I think we need to double-down on our work to accomplish two goals:
- Enable CI, gating and non-gating that will allow, for example,
Fedora workstation to gate certain changes, and a Valve remix to be notified that a change is breaking them before it is time for them to ship.
If we can get Fedora CI figured out, this would be great.
- Enable differential ship dates for our outputs. This would allow
spins, labs, and by extension remixes the ability to ship when they are ready, not just when our editions are ready. Remixes can do this today, but we need to make it easier for them to integrate with our buildsystems where appropriate and to get messages to trigger theirs where appropriate.
This is a bit harder to do right now, because the interconnect mechanism in Koji doesn't do a lot right now. And I'm pretty sure MBS isn't helping with that...
But if we could aim to beef up our tooling to support this, then that is a huge potential opportunity, not just with Valve, but anyone who is downstream of us using Koji to build their deliverables.
I've got some specific ideas of what I'd like to see for this, but this is probably not the right list to talk about them.
But I would also like to add a third pillar to this:
The way to build Fedora (and derivatives) needs to be fully documented and easily reproducible, infrastructure and tooling wise. Right now, it's not very easy to set up a Koji system and configure it to build packages and media. There's a somewhat incomplete doc in the Koji docs about basic server setup (which didn't work when I tried it) and some blog posts on the internet about setting up Koji (which went a bit better...). Also we're in the middle of some of the biggest changes to how stuff is built in Fedora, and I'm pretty sure everyone else is having a hard time keeping up with the changes. If we want people to be able to build on top of Fedora leveraging our tools, we need to make these tools more accessible, usable, and deployable.
As an example of "easy to access, use, and deploy", the openSUSE guys have an "OBS in a box" appliance image that you can use to set up your own copy of their build system, which will interconnect with the openSUSE Build Service by default and let you access those resources for your own purposes (including triggering builds when upstream changes occur!). I want something like that for Fedora's stuff, and I'd be happy to help make it. I just don't know how to yet...
-- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
On Thu, 11 Jul 2019 at 11:08, Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 9:23 AM Brian (bex) Exelbierd bexelbie@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Jul 8, 2019 at 9:47 PM Bruno Wolff III bruno@wolff.to wrote:
On Tue, Jul 02, 2019 at 13:43:49 -0400, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
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 see us becoming _the_ supported Steam distribution unless we
are
willing to block updates to things to not break Steam (which might
include
proprietary video drivers).
I don't think that is a good trade off. Certainly working with them to improve things for everybody is a laudable goal.
I would like to believe there is a middle ground here. I don't know that Fedora should block on things required by Steam, but I also think we should work on enabling people, like Valve, to use Fedora as a platform. To that end, I think we need to double-down on our work to accomplish two goals:
- Enable CI, gating and non-gating that will allow, for example,
Fedora workstation to gate certain changes, and a Valve remix to be notified that a change is breaking them before it is time for them to ship.
If we can get Fedora CI figured out, this would be great.
- Enable differential ship dates for our outputs. This would allow
spins, labs, and by extension remixes the ability to ship when they are ready, not just when our editions are ready. Remixes can do this today, but we need to make it easier for them to integrate with our buildsystems where appropriate and to get messages to trigger theirs where appropriate.
This is a bit harder to do right now, because the interconnect mechanism in Koji doesn't do a lot right now. And I'm pretty sure MBS isn't helping with that...
But if we could aim to beef up our tooling to support this, then that is a huge potential opportunity, not just with Valve, but anyone who is downstream of us using Koji to build their deliverables.
I've got some specific ideas of what I'd like to see for this, but this is probably not the right list to talk about them.
But I would also like to add a third pillar to this:
The way to build Fedora (and derivatives) needs to be fully documented and easily reproducible, infrastructure and tooling wise. Right now, it's not very easy to set up a Koji system and configure it to build packages and media. There's a somewhat incomplete doc in the Koji docs about basic server setup (which didn't work when I tried it) and some blog posts on the internet about setting up Koji (which went a bit better...). Also we're in the middle of some of the biggest changes to how stuff is built in Fedora, and I'm pretty sure everyone else is having a hard time keeping up with the changes. If we want people to be able to build on top of Fedora leveraging our tools, we need to make these tools more accessible, usable, and deployable.
As an example of "easy to access, use, and deploy", the openSUSE guys have an "OBS in a box" appliance image that you can use to set up your own copy of their build system, which will interconnect with the openSUSE Build Service by default and let you access those resources for your own purposes (including triggering builds when upstream changes occur!). I want something like that for Fedora's stuff, and I'd be happy to help make it. I just don't know how to yet...
I believe there are multiple efforts to do this. The one that is being used by some groups is https://github.com/puiterwijk/mbbox I believe that mizdebsk and some others also have their own similar efforts.
-- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-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/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
I think that it would be very interesting to know specifically what Valve would like to see in Fedora to make it an ideal platform (ideally their default) for their target audience.
I also think we should make every reasonable effort to accommodate them, without compromising our stance on free software.
Tom
On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 1:44 PM Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
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.
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-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/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
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