Ask Slashdot: Should Valve Start Their Own Steam Linux Distro?

Duggeek writes "There's been a lot of discussion lately about Valve, Steam and the uncertain future of the Windows platform for gaming. While the effect of these events is unmistakably huge, it raises an interesting question: Would Valve consider putting out its own Linux distro? One advantage of such a dedicated distro would be tighter control over kernel drivers, storage, init processes and managing display(s), but would it be worth all the upstream bickering? Would it be better to start anew, or ride on a mature foundation like Fedora or Debian? Might that be a better option than addressing the myriad differences of today's increasingly fracturing distro-scape?"

Comments

Re:why on earth would they want to do that?

[TheRaven64]

The drivers for gaming-related devices have got to be pretty awful on FreeBSD if nobody seems to use it at all for games, only servers

nVidia ships blob drivers for FreeBSD.

Yet they don't make the (blob) drivers for BSD either

Yes they do, at least for x86 and x86-64.

The way drivers work in Linux and BSD, aren't accommodating to "binary blobs" since they can be broken with even minor updates

FreeBSD guarantees a stable KBI across minor revisions, and we require strong justifications for breaking it between minor revisions (which means that often kernel modules will work between major revisions, we just don't guarantee it). After 10.0, we're looking at providing longer-term support for a subset of KPIs.