We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. 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.
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 are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.
These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.
They do still have some basic protection. Steam’s default, loose, DRM requires you to launch Steam when you open a game’s executable.
No, definitely not. When games don’t integrate SteamWorks features such as friends lists (or were written by people who accounted for the features to just not be available instead of outright failing), they don’t need Steam.
When the games use GPLed engines, Steam integration may not be legally possible anyway.
Off the top of my head I can immediately name Krita, the painting app by KDE whose Steam release has no Steam integration and runs just fine without.
Yesnt. I certainly played games on school pcs (Like HL2, Hotline Miami 2. Other students played Binding of Isaac and other smaller or rogue-like) and only with executables I got from Steam.
That may have been earlier than Steam’s DRM. Nowadays you need to copy a steam emulator (a few DLLs) into the executables folder as well before sharing.