I’ve had good luck with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but I usually recommend Linux Mint because it’s so much more common so it’s probably easier to get help. So that’s my recommendation, check out Linux Mint.
They’d probably contract Bethesda to develop it and make another soulless open world grindfest on an engine that’s about as overdue for retirement as Mitch McConnell
I agree. I’m surprised people are convinced that everyone would just leave a service they’ve been using for years once it starts to suck.
First of all, all your purchased games will only work on Steam, so you’re probably not going to just abandon it and give up access to all your previous purchases. And then you’re going to think to yourself, “Well, since I have to keep using Steam anyway, and since all my friends are here, I guess I’ll just keep buying games here anyway.”
Second of all, people, historically, just continue to use large services even when they go to shit / evidence that they’ve gone to shit comes to light. Hell, even when substantially better services show up, people don’t just suddenly switch.
reddit is still wildly popular. lemmy’s user numbers have been dropping over the last 2 months. it’s way more active than it was before june but if anything the lemmy/reddit masto/twitter dynamic is emblematic of how things would go
Lol. I left Reddit for Lemmy, and I continue to use Lemmy. I am very much the exception and not the norm, though.
I will be very, very surprised if Lemmy ends up growing more popular than Reddit at any time in the near future. As others have pointed out, Lemmy’s popularity has been decreasing and Reddit’s popularity has not substantially decreased. There’s still way more people and content on Reddit than there is on Lemmy, and I don’t think there’s any evidence there was any real mass exodus. Some people left, but it was basically a rounding error in the grand scheme of things. I would expect the same even if Microsoft, Tencent, Activision, or pretty much anyone else were to buy Steam. People may get irritated, and some people may even leave and never come back, but most people generally want to just continue using the services they’re used to.
Universal Blue has some really good ideas. I really think immutable and atomic updating linux distros are the future. Most applications have flatpaks available.
Bazzite has alot of gamer forward features, has Nvidia specific builds, and even supports a SteamDeck replacement version of their OCI images.
Even though people may not like Fedora, I think universal Blue solves a lot of the Fedora style problems people experience.
There are also BlendOS and VanillaOS but I haven’t tried them with NVIDIA GPUs.
I like to think Gabe knows all too well the importance of remaining a private business. Publicly traded businesses are the root cause of a lot of problems in the world.
I work for one who said the same thing then 2 years ago sold for $12 billion dollars to a public company. The employees didn’t get very much of that either.
A public traded company has way more transparency, I have no idea why you believe privately held companies would be in any way better.
The problem is often when the original founder of a private company leaves, the company loses its roots and by that its reason to exist. And those two often go together.
Only more transparency in the fiduciary sense, which only really helps shareholders. All companies are still required to follow any regulatory disclosures, which generally benefits the public and users.
Valve has only gotten to where they are being on the pulse of the gaming community, and being agile to adapt to those needs. Publicly traded companies only care about profits and shareholders by contract. That’s kind of their job once they go public. Very few buck that trend.
Large “activist” shareholders (usually fund managers, I believe) often step-in and make demands when the stock isn’t performing as they would like. Gabe could be CEO, but shareholders could threaten to dump stock to get the company to act in a certain way. I believe that was behind all the tech layoffs. My conspiracy-biased mind believes these shareholders sometimes push for things that aren’t exactly in the company’s best interest, but are in the investor’s best interest. E.g. if the fund management company is also heavily in commercial real-estate, they may try to get other companies they are invested in to institute return-to-office mandates. My guess is these big players do all kinds of shady shit (use their influence to control media narratives, politicians, etc).
Just because a company is public, doesn’t mean control suddenly is with some Capital company.
Microsoft as an example was absolutely controlled by the founders for decades, before they left the company and handed control over. There is NOTHING different about that, compared to a private company, that can also be traded.
My point was that Valve could only be what it is without being a publicly traded company. Yes, it also requires Gabe or the business owner to direct the company properly, but there are a range of things that publicly traded companies are legally prohibited from doing.
Just because a company is public, doesn’t mean control suddenly is with some Capital company.
Control still primarily lies with the CEO, but the CEO of a publicly traded company is legally obligated to pursue profits above all else.
No control lies with the owners, a public company can easily have a single or a small group of owners that control the company. Your entire premise is simply false.
Yes you’re right, the control lies with the owner. The owner is quite often also the CEO with a private company, but the distinction is worth clarifying.
Strictly speaking, the same is true of publicly traded companies. However with publicly traded companies there is also law that obligates the CEO to act on behalf of the shareholders. The shareholders are the owner, just like with private companies. However a private CEO would just be in breach of their employment contract, a public CEO would be in breach of the law.
Ultimately the reality of publicly traded companies means that “the CEO works for the owner” in all practical purposes is “the CEO pursues profit above all else”. While it would technically be possible for all the shareholders to vote that the company do something else, in reality that almost never happens - there are too many ways for shareholders to buy into the company and say “no I want money”. Thus, privately owned businesses have the opportunity, under direction from the owner/CEO of behaving differently to publicly traded companies. That doesn’t mean they will, because many private business owners want to make money just the same as public shareholders, but the possibility is much higher.
Your entire premise is simply false.
No it isn’t, and the things I’m explaining to you are widely understood.
That the shareholders push for things in their interest over that of the company doesn’t exactly strike me as conspiratorial thinking. Nearly everyone in an organization will push for what’s best for them.
Maintaining a healthy organization is in nearly everyone’s best interest, but if you have a small group of decision makers who are not invested in the health of the organization, they’ll be willing to make decisions at the expense of the organization.
When Gabe Newell at some point leaves Valve, the company will change, no matter if it stays private or goes public.
Depends how that happens. Since frankly I think people think “the way Gabe Newell leaves ownership of Valve is by him eventually dying”. Since he has never shown any indication to sell. He has offered shares to employees as part of compensation packages, but as I understand even then he has controlling share.
So ofcourse the most simplest way is “Gabe dies and has done no special arrangement”… shares go to inheritance to his family. So his wife and children. Which might mean nothing changes or everything changes. Maybe he has given private last wishes, maybe not. However they get to decide. They might decide to keep the company as is. Since given they are inheritors of Gabes fortune, not like they would be immediately hurting for cash.
Second option is… Gabe does actual official arrangements. This isn’t unheard of in case of big private family or personal companies or holdings. For example he might put his shares in a foundation or trust with legally binding last wishes unlike non legally binding personal last wishes. Then what happens is whatever the trust charter is. Given example of say some European industrialist foundadtions like Bosch, instructions are left to run the company as commercial business by board of managers to best benefit of the company finances. However the one option the holders don’t have is “sell the company”, since the shares are hold up in the foundation/trust with instructions “never sell”. Company is to be run profitable enterprise as his and best ability of managers and then… the trust gets the profits and uses them for it’s purposes. It might be a private family trust, where upon the money is then shared to Gabes descendants, but don’t really have say in “we want to cash out, just lump sell our shares”. It could also be as in case of Bosch, that it is charitable foundation. After which all of the business profits of the Bosch conglomerate end up financing various charities, foundations, clinics and so on run by the Bosch stifftung.
It will change no doubt, since well Gabe isn’t there anymore with his personal personality and well each person has their own personality and influence. However it might not change as much as people think, if say his heirs decide to keep running the company based on same base ethos and principles as Gabe did.
That or everything might change. Two days after he dies, his estate sells Valve to Electronic Arts.
Gaben already refused to sell to EA and made it abundantly clear that we would rather let valve die than go public.
Microsoft also just recently said they’d buy Nintendo if they could.
All this means is that Microsoft is filthy rich and still doesn’t know how to make an original quality game studio. They seem to overly rely on buying out studios and IPs that are successful to rake in more money.
spoilerAll of which reeks of an oligigopoly and reminds me of even worse companies like Oracle and AT&T
The funny thing about selling valve, what would it even give for Gabe? He’s already filthy rich. What more could one want with more money?
Saying no to selling only makes sense in his position, in my opinion. At least I personally would think so. Because then you still keep what is effectively your creation, and can use it to shape the world.
At some point you really do just have enough money.
Well, the idea is you can do something else with the money instead of it being tied up with that company. You could start another venture if you want to. I’m pretty sure Valve is what he wants to be doing though, so starting a different company isn’t really something he’d want to do.
Even if he doesn’t want to run it, doesn’t mean it has to be sold to another company. It can just keep on being a private company with a new handpicked leader. There’s no upside to selling for Gabe. After he passes however… all bets are off.
depends who he passes ownership to. it could be a bunch of inheriters who have no interest in owning/running it and it will be forced to sell off to split shares out. or maybe he gifts it to a single person he sees as a successor. who knows, i dont know shit about his family so have no idea
I would trust Gabe’s judgement 100%. Dude runs one of the most pro-consumer companies in history. In doing so, he has built a fiercely loyal fan base by simply being good to his customers; not trying to squeeze them for every single cent.
Gabe is a rarity; part of a bygone era of business owners and software engineers who truly care about their projects and want to build things that they themselves want to use and play. He’s a smart man and Valve has been his baby since he left Microsoft. He’ll make sure it’s in good hands when and if retirement comes calling.
third option is he sets up some kind of foundation or trust arrangement and testaments his shares to that trust, which is then run by board of trustees as per trust charter. Usually meaning “well board of trustees is entrusted to see to the continued profitable management of the company by selecting suitable new management as comes necessary” combined with possible whatever extra instructions there is as to how to and underwhat principles the company is to be run.
Be it either private trust to benefit the descendants/described beneficiaries or a charitable trust with funds to be used for charitable causes.
Family trusts aren’t that unheard of to exactly avoid the splintering of the ownership and thus risk take over bit by bit.
At some point you really do just have enough money.
Well there is people to whom no amount of money is enough money. Not that it is at that point about, what you can do with that money. Rather by then the amount of money is a leader board and score board all to it’s own. The desire to be Forbes number 1 and then to be forbes number 1 with ever increasing lead to the number 2.
However all indications are, Gabe Newell isn’t one of those people. He would have had plenty of opportunities to cash out and then do some other business dealings to get ever bigger score card number. Don’t really know exactly what else it would tell of him or his character, but the one thing we can pretty confidently tell is “it seems he isn’t about just singularly amassing ever growing pile of wealth as large as possible”. He would have had plenty opportunity to enrich himself way more aggressively and he didn’t.
I can’t reccomend arch or arch based enough, it is not that hard, you will become somewhat adept in the terminal in the process. Arch wiki is very extensive and the community is huge, package management is a breeze.
I recommend Garuda. It’s an arch based distro with a focus on gaming. Arch is great for gaming and developing as it’s bleeding edge. Base arch is very minimal and needs a lot of packages to be installed and configured before you can game. Garuda has all of that installed and configured when you install the distro.
The only complain I hear people have about Garuda is that they find it too bloated. But I find it easier to uninstall whatever you consider to be bloat, rather than install and configure all the gaming stuff you need. As a bonus, Garuda automatically sets up btrfs snapshots when you install it. So if you break something while uninstalling what you don’t want, you can just go to a previous snapshot.
Yeah 100% this. Why would you not buy Valve? The store is a cash cow and the userbase is huge. They have a lot of good faith with the community too. These must be rage bait articles.
They’d buy Sony and Nintendo if those were up to sell. For the right price (I dunno, in the hundreds of dollars according to my bank account), I’d buy them too.
This nothing email has been making headlines for a week and it’s so frustrating. It’s literally just a guy from outside the gaming division saying “what if” and Phil saying “sure, that’d be neat”
Games that just come out could be an issue regardless of distro. Sometimes Wine/Proton needs to fix a few things… no distro is going to help, in that regard. I suppose a more regularly updated distro COULD help with getting updates faster… but it’s usually nothing you cannot already solve with Pop. ProtonUp-QT is a great tool to help get you the latest Proton versions, including the Eggroll fork. It’s available as a Flatpak, so it’ll work on most modern distros (including Pop).
If you must switch to a more regularly updated distro, you have a couple of options. Nobara (based on Fedora) will give you a nice middle ground between your current setup and Arch. Speaking of which, Arch is a great distribution, with fantastic documentation. That being said, it IS NOT new user friendly. It WILL break, and you WILL need to look stuff up. You’re on the literal bleeding edge, of Linux. The Arch forums can also be quite toxic, in comparison to what’s available on both Pop/Ubuntu and Nobara/Fedora. If neither is appealing to you, consider OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s very up to date, but I often find it more stable than Arch.
When one company in an industry has nearly endless cash, as Microsoft and Apple do, it is natural that everyone else would be seen as acquisition targets
The difference is Valve is completely privately owned, Microsoft cannot force a sale.
With a publicly traded business, the business must be run in the interests of the shareholders, ie it must pursue profits above all else. Thus a buyer can effectively present “an offer you can’t refuse”, at least the business can’t refuse on behalf of shareholders (maybe the shareholders could vote and refuse). With a private business the owner generally has free reign to run the business as they see fit, they could run it into the ground if they so desired.
So it doesn’t matter how much cash Microsoft or whoever have, so long as Gabe doesn’t want to sell.
Nobara Linux. It’s a fedora derivative that’s focused for gaming, with regular updates. It even comes with all the important things like Steam and Feral Gamemode installed. Make sure to download the Nvidia version if you have an Nvidia GPU.
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