Valve and Arch Linux Begin New Collaboration

In a welcome, yet slightly unexpected turn of events, Arch Linux developer Levente Polyak announced via the Arch Linux mailing list a brand new collaboration with Valve. In a message sent on the 28th of September, Polyak stated that Valve will help create “a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave.”

Now while I admit I’m not exactly sure what these things are, one thing is for certain, Valve isn’t messing around with their commitment to open-source and Linux. It was always one thing to ship their Steam Decks and Steam Deck OLEDs with SteamOS, Valves flavor of Arch Linux. But, to take that manpower and research, and give it back not only to the team that created the foundation of your project, but the open-source community as a whole, shows that this isn’t just Valve trying to save money on Windows licenses or to get praise from a community that may not normally care for their practice. Valve deep down believes in being free to run your software as you see fit, and, as we’ve already seen with their iFixit collaboration, your hardware as well. We’ll have to wait and see if Valve continues this trend with other open-source projects, or if they’ll grow into helping other parts of Arch, but for now, this is an optimistic look into the future of wider Linux adaptation.