> This is a very difficult combination to achieve, and yet that’s exactly what we’ve done for Valve with Mesa3D Turnip, a FOSS Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs.
Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing.
Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
> Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
Cynical: Valve doesn't sell hardware or operating systems, they sell games. These devices are merely another storefront.
Optimistic: Valve has also figured out how to turn good will into a commodity. Blowing cash on Steam sales is a bit of a cultural centerpiece of the PC gaming community.
Gabe has proven that you can make stupid amounts of money by [mostly] doing right by the consumer. I'm not sure if there's more to the secret source, her sauce, because we've yet to see another CEO pull their head out of their arse far enough to see how lucrative this approach can be: consumerism is fickle, fanaticism is loyal.
This is what I say a lot. Valve isn't even remotely close to having clean hands here. They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc.
It's just that the bar is so INSANELY low - it's probably somewhere deep in the earth's core at this point - that valve looks like a fucking angel by being only VAGUELY greedy on occasion.
I have a super high opinion of Valve. Sure, they have loot crates. But sensible people don't buy them. I guess you could blame them for having it in the first place. That's fair I guess. But I've never for a second considered buying any of that junk.
I just buy single player offline games with no IAP, and Steam is amazing. It's a million miles ahead of the competitors, and it's really surprising that EA/Ubi etc.. try to compete but don't get the reason they're losing. They screw customers and then act surprised that customers hate them.
The problem with loot crates, and the reason why they're being slowly regulated against in several places, is that "sensible people don't buy them" has never stopped people to lose their life to gambling.
I hope everyone who is so outspoken about loot crates are also fighting for TCG packs to be banned/regulated because they are literally the same level of "gambling".
I think we can ban companies selling packages without disclosing exactly what is in those packages. I think we can regulate companies in that way without finding ourselves hopelessly slipping down some silly slope.
I can totally see EU making unwanted "dark" products returnable for full refund. I understand that already applies to anything that tries to force contracts terms on you after the purchase: you can choose not to agree and get a full refund.
I think it's difficult to just call things "self control" when there have been entire college majors / studies / casinos dedicated to tricking us into making the choices they want.
Look at the Apple price ladder on ipads.
Look at any tactic by a casino - go to Reno and see many retires at the beginning of the month drop their whole social security check in the casino.
Look at why they label things $9.99 instead of $10.00
Look at why they put all the overpriced candy at the cash register in a super market.
Look at how they create junk food to be "perfect" and addictive
source: https://archive.globalpolicy.org/world-hunger/trade-and-food...
I have a lot of friends that stopped playing gacha games because they would come home drunk - the game would incentivize you to login - and then blow more money than they truly wanted to.
At some level it's unfair to say we should just "have self control" when you have entire academic institutions and entire industries figuring out how to get you to "crack" and make a bad decision that favors their pocket book.
So yeah - I agree - we need more self control - but it's being purposefully assaulted every second of our day by EVERYTHING.
Yeah, existing in the modern world you're surrounded by mind-hackers. Everywhere you go there are hacking attempts against your mind, trying to get you to buy stuff you shouldn't or want stuff you don't. It's really absurd.
Well then regulation should help. And people should stop doing outright stupid things - you have no reason to be in casino, in same way you have no reason lighting that cigarette or doing another round of binge drinking (or those gacha games, had to google WTF that is, same mind cancer as the rest, no thank you). You, nor me are not stronger than those addictions. Billions of miserable poor fuckers before us are proof enough, learn from their mistakes.
Attack from both sides, heck all sides - from the top with regulation. From the bottom by being mentally more resilient, there are endless ways to get there - ie do rock climbing (yes, not joking, it will change you for the better for good if you stick long enough). Or other sports and activities that challenge you, your fears, your laziness, push yourself physically. Do it 10 times and something clicks in the mind and it goes almost on its own afterwards.
Another angle - shame those working in such business. Goes for fuck ton of FAANGS and many others. I know its blurry and whatever else of an excuse will fly around, don't care. Have a clearly moral work or accept shame, or change for the better.
Its a terrible situation but by far the biggest mistake is throwing hands in the air and giving up immediately just because some greedy sociopathic billionaire wants a bigger yacht or rocket to compensate even more for their fucked up childhood, and thus pushes a lot of psychology phds against you. You don't have to even start to play that game, not even for a second. We are stronger, much stronger than that and real good life (TM) is not about anything digital in any way.
Depending on how your brain got wired, self-control condemns you to a life of misery while not being exposed allows you to live a normal life. Of course you cannot ask for societal experience to be tailored just for you but there seem to be a consensus on protecting the most vulnerable people from the most destructive habits. Where to draw the line is for everyone to find agreement upon and if that's not good enough for you, you need to find a safe haven.
Self-control is like a tourniquet on a severed leg, it can buy you time but you need an hospital at some point
Most people have perfectly well avoided blowing all their money on baseball card packs or whatever other random "box of randomized items" without enduring a life of misery...
If self control were reliable we wouldn't need seatbelts, antilock brakes, bumpers, and other safety mechanisms. We would all just drive safely all the time.
But that would be silly. Self control is not as simple and reliable as we want it to be.
I agree that humans are fallible, but the analogy is still off despite being catchy, yet flawed. Seatbelts are passive mechanical systems; self-control is a complex, context-dependent cognitive function. Conflating the two oversimplifies how human behavior actually works.
There's definitely a double standard in the gaming community where people don't treat TCG packs as ethically fraught in the same way, despite being the same thing.
And loot boxes in Valve games never bothered me, because if you want a particular skin you can just buy it off the market. I can't remember being angry at Valve for having loot boxes.
All other games require you to keep opening loot boxes to get what you want.
Well not with their battle passes in Dota. They employed a lot of FOMO tactics where you had to spend hundreds to guarantee a set that you'll otherwise never be able to get again.
The author is completely ignoring that you didn't have to BUY these hats. For example, you could (and still can) craft the Milkman hat with 1 refined metal + 1 special delivery weapon.
Don't forget the part where they're encouraging kids to gamble with real money on Counter-Strike skins. They rely on an API that Valve freely provides and makes no effort to curtail.
But they like Linux and give refunds so they get a free pass.
Whatever the reason for their policy, it provides a nice sense of safety to Linux gamers. They can buy the game without worrying about compatibility; if the game doesn't run then its two clicks for an automated refund.
Sure, but I imagine they saw the dominoes falling and realized that the optics of going down kicking and screaming in endless battles against basic consumer rights would be exceptionally bad. If they hadn't fully conceded then the EU would have been up their ass too before long.
AFAIK Steam has this too. The Subscriber Agreement clearly states that you're not guaranteed continued, free access to Steam. If they decided they wanted to charge you to access games you already bought, they could.
I truly believe that Valve has two fundamental things working in their favor:
Firstly: Despite inventing or at least popularizing a lot of new microtransaction concepts, they've just never been the greediest company in the business when it comes to microtransactions. Mobile gacha games have cleaned up their business quite a lot lately, with most of them being significantly less predatory than they used to be, but even back when TF2 introduced lootboxes and hats, the important thing was that the game was not pay to win; you could get all of the items in relatively short order just by playing, and the only benefit to paying was cosmetics.
Contrast this to the earlier reign of Korean MMOs: pretty much all of them had egregious microtransactions. MapleStory, PangYa, Gunbound, etc, and even some current platforms like Roblox. Valve also came into this whole thing before lootboxes became the root of all evil, and while TF2's lootbox mechanism looks bad in retrospect, there was simply no stigma against a system like that, and it never felt like a big deal during the game's heyday. Just my opinion, but I strongly believe it to be true.
Secondly: The most egregious things going on are not things Valve is directly involved in, they are merely complicit, in that they don't do much to curtail it. It's not even necessarily cynical to say that Valve is turning a blind eye, they benefit so significantly from the egregious behavior that it is hard to believe they are not influenced by this fact. But: It is consistent with Valve's behavior in other ways: Valve has taken a very hands-off stance in many places, and if it weren't for external factors it seems likely they would be even more hands-off than they are now. I think they genuinely take the position that it's not their job to enforce moral standards, and if you really do take this position seriously it is going to wind up looking extremely bad when you benefit from it. It's not so dissimilar from the position that Cloudflare tries to take with its services: it's hard to pick apart what may be people with power trying to uphold ideals even when it is optically poor versus greedy companies intentionally turning a blind eye because it might enrich them. (And yes, I do understand that these sites violate Valve's own ToS, but so does a lot of things on Steam Workshop and elsewhere. In many cases, they really do seem consistently lax as long as there isn't significant external pressure.)
Despite these two things, there is a nagging feeling that every company gives me that I should never take anything but a cynical view on them, because almost all companies are basically lawnmowers now. But I really do not feel like I only give Valve the benefit of the doubt just because they support Linux; I actually feel like Valve has done a substantial amount to prove that they are not just another lawnmower. After all, while they definitely are substantially enriched by tolerating misuse of their APIs, they've probably also gotten themselves into tons of trouble by continuing to have a very hands-off attitude. In fact, it seems like owing to the relatively high standards people have for Valve, they get criticized and punished more for conduct than other companies. I mean seriously, Valve has gotten absolutely reamed for their attempt at adding an arbitration clause into their ToS, with consequences that lingered long after they removed and cancelled the arbitration clause. And I do hate that they even tried it -- but what's crazy to me is that it was already basically standard in big tech licensing agreements. Virtually everyone has an insane "you can't sue us" rule in their ToS. It numbs my mind to try to understand why Valve was one of the first and only companies to face punishment for this. It wouldn't numb my mind at all if it was happening to all of them, but plenty of these arbitration clauses persist today!
So when I consider all of this, I think Valve is an alright company. They're not saints, but even if the bar wasn't so terribly low, they'd probably still be above average overall. That can be true simultaneously with them still having bad practices that we don't all like.
Yes everybody is trying to find rational reasons but to me like in recent politics a lot has to do with irrational tribalism.
I stumbled on an article of Gabe talking about his new yacht[0] and it made me realize he is not different than other billionaire (and maybe worst than average because he doesn’t even give to charity). But he looks like he is "one of us" and he likes Linux, so it’s okay.
Would gamers keep the rose colored glasses if Valve was exactly the same but the CEO was a business suit style type?
It isn't tribalism, at least not from my side. There's a tangible, noticeable, immediate difference between buying a piece of hardware from Valve and buying a piece of hardware from Google or Apple. I really resented Valve after the Steam box debacle that left me with a $1,200 paperweight, but since then, they've done enormous amounts of work to regain my trust through tangible increases in the quality of the gaming experience, including not having to use Windows to game anymore, and providing me with open hardware that I can install whatever I want on, including using their hardware as my own personal PC when e.g. traveling.
Its weird to me that people choose what companies to buy from on the basis of whether or not the CEO owns a yacht or how rich he is. That is not the operative criteria when I choose what products to buy, but rather how well that product suits my needs and how much I trust the relationship with the company that produced it.
Valve is just miles ahead of every other manufacturer in this regard.
Hard disagree. The difference between "good" and "bad" billionaires is in how the operate the entities they control. No matter how much money Bill Gates gives to charity, he should mainly be judged based how Microsoft acted while he were in control. Similarly, Gabe Newell is a much "better" billionaire than Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos.
What does it matter if Gabe has a yacht? He has multiple of them.
Gabe also have an undersea research company called Inkfish, which is a non-profit company designed to "conduct deep-sea research and explore, map, and study the least-explored parts of the ocean".
In 2020 he donated $300,000 to the Starship Children's Hospital.
In 2020 Gabe Newell arranging free concert for New Zealand.
In 2014 Gabe founded a Racing Team which helps support Grassroots motorsports, the Heart of Racing Team also supports the Seattle Children's Hospital.
Game is also the co-founder of a company called foundry10, which is an education research organization focused on youth philanthropy.
Gabe is not the evil person you are trying to make him out to be. He has visited numerous schools, colleges and universities and done free talks out of goodwill. He has put millions into research and development of Linux software for the bettering of Linux community as a whole. He doesn't "Just like Linux", through his investments and care for the Linux community, Valve has made Linux a viable gaming platform, which it would be likely a decade behind without his investments.
It's amazing that an always-on DRM company can become the "good guy" by staying the same level of asshole they've always been, while every other company became much worse assholes.
Steam itself is DRM, especially when games depend on it to even run, which many of Valve's games do. They don't have additional DRM on top of that but why would they when they already control Steam.
Because in practice that "always-on DRM" is actually just purely an advantage for the customer with zero downsides. It only sounds like you're making a good point when you frame "provides the best shopping and library experience in gaming" in the least charitable way possible. The Valve hate-boner is so weird.
There are disadvantages. e.g. if you don't want to update a program (maybe the new version breaks your modded setup), too bad. Or if you need Windows still for compatibility, it no longer supports Windows 7, so you have to go hunting for old versions of the client and fiddle with it to prevent updates (if that still even works), at which point you'd might as well just mod it to remove the DRM instead.
Basically, it creates a failure point for setups that should otherwise last and be stable several more decades.
Not that I see. The publisher can add old versions as a "beta" that you can select if they want (e.g. Kerbal Space Program and Factorio do this), but otherwise you can only run the latest. Your choices for updating are "when launching", "when Steam decides", and "immediately". There is no "when I decide" or "never". e.g. Bethesda has apparently broken Fallout 4 multiple times over the last 1.5 years with no ability to revert after it had been stable for 5 years.
> always-on DRM is actually just purely an advantage for the consumer
Look me in the eyes and read this quote to me again. Then think about how yourself from 20 years ago would feel about reading this quote from someone else. You've gone so far down the rabbit hole but you don't realize you're in one.
Their DRM seems to be okay, but they do have some weird bugs.
My biggest gripe with Valve right now is that I bought a copy of No Man's Sky on GOG, and then I also had a copy on Steam. And so I let my son play my Steam copy through Steam Library sharing so we can play co-op while I play my GOG copy. Unfortunately, because I launched my GOG game through Steam, Steam's DRM won't let him play at the same time as me because they think we're playing the same copy.
It seems to be that they simply look at the title of the game and or the executable name to figure out what game it is, but they don't check to see what storefront it was bought from. I'm not sure about this though, I have to do more investigation.
In case you launch the GOG game because of Proton, then I suggest using Heroic launcher to start it instead. You can use Proton there too, automatically downloads and everything, same as Steam. And there will be no clashes with Steam.
You don't need to launch your GOG game via Steam, you can just remove its shortcut from Steam and launch it separately. Then your son can launch and play the Steam game in parallel, so both of you can play coop.
DRM is optional on Steam, many games don't have it (or roll their own). In many cases of Steam DRM, activation is only one-time, after that, granted the hardware doesn't change significantly, the player can be offline indefinitely.
I'm no fan or DRM, but the current implementation is far from "always-on".
On a personal level I just don't give a shit about the loot crates or cosmetic stuff because I don't buy them, they hold no interest for me, and they typically don't impact gameplay.
I acknowledge that there's a legitimate ethical concern there the same way there is for, say, Magic the Gathering or other card games. But much like MtG, I can't bring myself to be all that upset about it.
You don't become a billionaire by having your hands clean. But what set them appart to other companies is that they go out of their way not to be hostile to their users.
Loot boxes done well are not user hostile, players pay because they like them, and sure, it uses all the tricks from the gambling industry to get as most money as they can, but player don't feel scammed or considering it an obstacle to their goals. It is just an additional feature they may or may not use. Compare to say, locking part of the game behind a paid DLC, players don't like that, they feel forced. Same end goal, that is to make their money your money, but the latter is considered hostile.
And ads, Steam is full of ads, from recommendations to the store page showing up right as you launch steam. But they won't put a popup between you and your game. They show you the ads you want to see... And you buy games you wouldn't have bought otherwise.
And Steam has DRM, that's weak DRM, but effective at what it does, and importantly, if you bought the games legally, you won't even notice, contrary to some other company intrusive practices.
The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat. Employees have 100% control over their time. By not centralizing decision making, you create the conditions for good ideas to form and connect with the problems they are going to be best suited for.
The dynamics at work here are very well understood (see Ackoff / Sycara / Gharajedaghi, and yes I had to look the spelling up). Hierarchies and centralization cause fragility and maladaptive behavior, autonomous cellular networks are robust and highly adaptive.
For another look at similar principles in action, look up gore-tex and their corporate fragmenting. It's not flat like Valve but it's still kind of genius.
I wish there were more discussion about this stuff in general - society could benefit from having better systems literacy.
> The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat.
I'm too lazy to dig up references, but there have been semi-exposés over the years by ex-employees stating that Valve's flatness was anything but. Namely, in the absence of formal hierarchy an informal one will inevitably arise, and can be equally constraining and pathological, without the benefit of having known avenues for redress. To be sure, formal procedures can also be window-dressing: it's a balancing act, and not an easy one. I'm just skeptical of ascribing too much benefit to lack of structure.
My understanding is that the emergence of informal hierarchy can actualy be the feature; The problem being addressed being the rigdity of formal hierarchies in a changing environment. As long as informal hierarchies emerge and die according to circumstances, that can be a win.
The point being that the informality arises organically. People are capital-b Bad at risk assessment and planning; we are much, much better at responding to current stimuli.
Also, flat is a structure (albeit a simple one). To use an abstraction, think of a house. When you move in, the house is flat (organizationally speaking). There are floors, and that's it. This means you can place things anywhere they make sense to. Sure, it's inconvenient to have to add a dresser here or a shelf there when one doesn't already exist, but you can adapt the space to your current problems. Over time, you add things and change stuff to be less flat, which means that if you've been living there a long time there is more friction to implement things that you may not have known you were going to need at first. Your fridge is insufficient, but instead of getting one that works for what you need you now need to move all the things between the fridge and the door, move out the old fridge, and only then can you move the new one in.
With a 'flat' org - you start each project with this fresh slate. Each project can adapt it's policies and org chart to match what's important for that project. This way, you don't end up using an organization that is primarily suited for content distribution to make a game (a win that i think is obvious in Valve already) or using an org built around an advertising platform for a browser (a deficiency blatantly obvious in Google).
The real secret sauce is that Valve is private and doesn't have external investors. As soon as you're owners are primarily interested in short term capital extraction everything else is inevitable.
I think you are correct here. If you want to look at the decline of the US ... this is perhaps a good place to start. Short term capital extraction little long term strategic planning. Maybe Cisco is a good example.. lets move all of our switch hardware production to China and still charge the consumer 3500$ per switch. Equals short term gain, makes lots of millinaires... and then just a few years later.. now Huawei makes excellent switches that are mostly on par with Cisco at a better price point.
In reality, Valve is doing all this work on GNU+Linux because they've been afraid of Microsoft ever since Windows 8 and the introduction of the Windows Store. For now, Microsoft is remaining open and isn't restricting installations to its own store; we even see that with the full-screen gaming version of Windows for handhelds, they display games from other stores, including Steam. But Microsoft also has a history of abusing its dominant position and monopoly to push its own products (Internet Explorer, Edge, OneDrive, etc.). Gaben made the only possible decision to protect Valve from that: having their own OS.
Does it really matter if they take these consumer friendly actions because they know it will get them good press and dedicated consumers? The end result is the same.
Like you touched on, for whatever reason, most large enough companies haven't seemed to figure out this obvious truth. I tend to believe it's because it's harder than it looks, once a company reaches a certain size. Now sure, they are by no means perfect, but I'd like to at least give them credit for being far better than any of the competition, no matter the rational behind it.
No one is hiding anything. No one is pretending to be something they're not. Life is not a Saturday morning cartoon. There are no good guys vs bad guys. There are just businesses trying to earn more profits.
Valve is a business. When Microsoft introduced a Store they threatened Steam's market share. In theory Microsoft could one day update Windows so that it's hard to buy games through non Microsoft stores. Valve responded by investing in open source OS stuff. Their goal is to commoditize Windows, so that Microsoft doesn't wrest control of video game sales away from them. Commoditize your complement is a strategy as old as the software industry itself.
We've known all this for years, it's been discussed publicly and no one is hiding it. It always annoys me when people think we're in Lord of the Rings and one company is Sauron or another is Gandalf. It's all just business. To everyone who makes decisions, it all boils down to numbers on a spreadsheet. They want their number to go up.
What you SHOULD care about is competition. Valve would never have invested in all these OSS technologies if Microsoft hadn't tried to compete with them. They wouldn't be consumer friendly and they wouldn't make investments if they thought they could sit on their ass. They would just coast and enshittify (like Microsoft has in the OS space with its Windows monopoly).
We don't need good guy companies, we need strong pro-competition laws and strong enforcers of those laws. You can vote accordingly at the ballot box, and you can also vote accordingly with your wallet, buy stuff from the little guys.
It is also doesn't even have to be about more profits. In Valve's case, I do think they like profit or they would lower their commission. But what Valve most needs to do is maintain market share. If they lose market share, they become as relevant to the market as GOG. Steam's market share is the only thing that allows them to dictate pricing in their favor, and that is the only thing stopping Microsoft from owning PC gaming.
My point is that is a shallow and not especially productive discourse. Companies respond to market incentives. If they have to compete for their market share they'll do stuff consumers want. If they don't because they have no competition, they'll focus on maximizing their profit margins at the expense of their customers, suppliers and everyone else.
These responses to incentives are in the DNA of every corporation and any solution which ignores that will fail. Competition for the consumer's dollar is the key and what you need to promote. These are basic economic principles that go all the way back to Adam Smith, a lot of problems would be solved if more people were aware of their significance and considered restoring competition to markets where it has been eliminated a main function of our government.
You can install your own store or games on the devices if you want to without Steam. You could also take their work and build a custom distro or even a device without any trace of Steam whatsover.
and that's why Gabe's wealth is "only" 10 billion not 100 billion. The problem is many CEOs will look at what Gabe has and think "I want more than him".
Valve is private right? One of the reasons they are not pure evil is because they have the luxury of not needing to chase the magic dragon of inf growth. They can focus on product. Bet your ass if they were public u would see the slimiest shit coming out to eek every possible percent so bonuses are made.
I wish more companies were private for profit but not inf growth.
I dont really know what has happened, but many forces have had to improve Linux kernel incrementally.
15 years ago, linux was terrible at suspend-to-ram, wifi drivers a nightmare. Power efficiency was lagging far behind on most architectures. Everyone from intel, to amd, router vendors, server datacenters and android manufacturers have gradually improved these parts over years and years and now, there seems to be enough vested interest that linux compatibility is not a third afterthought, but having good linux support early means you can launch on a android phone, in the datacenter, or build for a custom SoC.
Many CEOs are either paid by mythical "shareholder value" or beholden to it in the shape of a board, if they tried to go the valve route they would likely get replaced too soon for the benefits to materialize
To modulate your cynical take somewhat, it's remarkable to me that all the devices are completely open. You can install anything you want on them, which makes them more than a storefront. It makes them a device that works for the user, which, to your final point, does create loyalty in people like me.
Other CEOs are not owner-CEOs. They may be founder-CEOs, but at the end of the day those aren't really more powerful than a CEO hired off the street by owners. For publicly traded companies, even a majority stake only makes them powerful on paper, because the 49% selling would shatter their paper net worth.
The other difference (and I think a more important one) is that they take a longer term view of the business, rather than next year's bonus and options vesting. A hired CEO will probably not still be there in a few years time.
> or publicly traded companies, even a majority stake only makes them powerful on paper, because the 49% selling would shatter their paper net worth.
That threat is limited because the other shareholders do not want to reduce the value of their investment either. Look at what a firm of Musk has on Tesla with something like a 15% stake.
It’s incredible how bad driver support is the ARM space. I was looking into some of the various Ambernic handhelds and their Linux firmware. Despite their SoCs being advertised as having Vulkan 1.1 support every firmware for the device ships with it disabled.
So many chipmakers and development board manufacturers see software/driver support as some kind of necessary evil--a chore that they grudgingly do because they have to, and they will do the absolute minimum amount of work, with barely enough quality to sell their hardware.
It bewilders me. Software's gotta be easier than hardware right? Not that either is easy but as a software engineer, the engineering that goes into modern hardware mystifies me.
With hardware, you have about one billion validation tests and QA processes, because when you're done, you're done and it had better work. Fixing an "issue" is very very expensive, and you want to get rid of them. However, this also makes the process more of, to stereotype, an "engineer's engineering" practice. It's very rules based, and if everything follows the rules and passes the tests, it's done. It doesn't matter how "hacky" or "badly architected" or "nasty" the input product is, when it works, it works. And, when it's done, it's done.
On the other hand, software is highly human-oriented and subjective, and it's a continuous process. With Linux working the way it does, with an intentionally hostile kernel interface, driver software is even more so. With Linux drivers you basically chose to either get them upstreamed (a massive undertaking in personality management, but Valve's choice here), deal with maintaining them in perpetuity at enormous cost as every release will break them (not common), or give up and release a point in time snapshot and ride into the sunset (which is what most people do). I don't really think this is easier than hardware, it's just a different thing.
From the outside looking in. It really seems like both fields are working around each other in weird ways, somewhat enforced by backwards compatibility and historical path dependence.
The transition from more homogeneous architectures to the very heterogeneous and distributed architectures of today has never really been all that well accounted for, just lots of abstractions that have been papered over and work for the most part. Power management being the most common place these mismatches seem to surface.
I do wonder if it will ever be economical to "fix" some of these lower level issues or if we are stuck on this path dependent trajectory like the recurrent laryngeal nerve in our bodies.
I think what they were referencing with that is that the kernel hardware interface is unstable, it changes literally every version, which is why you went to upstream it so you don't have to keep it up yourself after that.
I've done both. There are difficulties with both but overall I would say software is significantly more difficult than hardware.
Most hardware is actually relatively simple (though hardware engineers do their best to turn it into an incomprehensible mess). Software can get pretty much arbitrarily complex.
In a way I suspect it's because hardware engineers are mostly old fogies stuck in the 80s using 80s technologies like Verilog. They haven't evolved the tools that software developers have that enable them to write extremely complicated programs.
Wow, super hard disagree, comment here sounds like the typical arrogance hardware engineers face from people in software who've never really done the job or have some superficial experiences.
I won't blindly state "software is easier" but software is definitely easier to modify, iterate and fix, which is why sofware tools and resulting applications can evolve so fast.
I have done both HW & SW, routinely do so, and switch between deep hardware jobs and deep software so I'm qualified to speak.
If you're blinking a light or doing something with Bluetooth you can buy microcontrollers that have this capability and yes that hardware is simple.
But have you ever DESIGNED a microcontroller, let alone a modern processor or complex system ?
Getting something "simple" like a microcontroller to reliably start-up involves complex power sequencing, making sure an oscillator works, a phase-locked-loop that behaves correctly and that's just "to make a clock signal run at a frequency" we're not talking about implementing PCIe Gen5 or RDMA over 100Gbps Ethernet.
Hardware engineers definitely welcome better tools but the cost of using an unproven tool or tool that might have "a few" corner cases resulting in your $5-million SoC not working is a hard risk to tolerate, so sadly(and to our pain) we end up using proven but arcane infrastructure.
Software in contrast can evolve faster because you can "fix it in software". New tools can be readily tested, iterated on and deployed.
Yes... But in fairness I was just talking about the digital RTL, not the messy analogue stuff (PLLs, power/reset, etc.) I've never done that.
> but software is definitely easier to modify, iterate and fix,
Definitely true.
> which is why sofware tools and resulting applications can evolve so fast.
Not sure I agree here though. It seems to me that EDA tools evolve super slowly because a) hardware engineers are timid old fogies who never want to learn anything new, and b) the big three have a monopoly on tooling.
In my experience, hardware companies all believe that software is trivial nonsense they don't need to spend any effort on. Consequently, the software that drives their hardware really sucks.
People repeat this line a lot but I don’t think it’s true. Companies like Intel, AMD, Arm, Broadcom, etc. afaik all pay their software folks of equivalent YoE or level roughly the same as their hardware folks. To the extent there’s any difference, it’s much less than 25%.
OTOH, there’s a small slice of (mainly) software companies like Google and Meta, along with Unicorn private companies, that skew the average software engineer salary high. Then there’s a long tail of “old school” hardware companies like TI, Motorola, Atmel, Microchip, and tons of smaller less well known companies that all pay much lower than Google. But they pay their software people poorly as well.
So if you just look at “average software engineer salary” vs “average hardware engineer salary” it appears that SW people are making 50% more than HW people, but it’s not at the same companies.
> Companies like Intel, AMD, Arm, Broadcom, etc. afaik all pay their software folks of equivalent YoE or level roughly the same as their hardware folks.
This is a fairly new phenomenon and it's mostly a consequence of the AI hype wave driving investment in hardware. Wages have mostly caught up at the big boy hardware companies but you'll still generally see a disparity outside that big group.
Come to think of it, for them it is basically customer support.
Most will want to outsource it as cheap as possible and/or push it to the community. They won't care if it takes an eternity for the customer to get their issues solved as long as new customers keep buying.
And a few companies will see an opportunity to bring better customer care as an advantage and/or integrate it in their philosophy.
I would recommend the Anbernic RG353M running ROCKNIX, or for a more powerful device, Retroid's Pocket 5 running ROCKNIX. Most other options have awful software support and are just e-waste, unfortunately.
They're stuck in the building model of making semi-custom SoCs for enormous corporations and releasing/developing drivers for them in extreme NDA environments.
It's fine (or arguably not) for locked down corporate devices.
Not so fine for building computers people want to use and own themselves.
I don't know, Turnip's a cute name and I wouldn't think twice before buying a product which is branded that way (as long as the actual product is cool of course!).
I think this is the wrong way around. There might be an economic incentive to keeping something closed source, for example having licensed other closed source code. And remaining in control without oversight also might be an incentive. But the incentive to making something open source is that someone might improve your work, making your product better. It is somewhat arrogant to assume that nobody else out there could possibly improve this code or add value. Just like it is arrogant to assume that your competitors don't already know your 'secrets' and haven't reverse engineered anything they found interesting.
Speaking from the perspective of somebody who used to do this for a living.
> But the incentive to making something open source is that someone might improve your work
Device drivers, particularly on mobile, aren't evergreen sorts of software. New hardware is released several times a year, and maintenance after shipping is limited to critical issues. By the time it hits the market, the people who developed that driver have moved on to newer products.
> It is somewhat arrogant to assume that nobody else out there could possibly improve this code or add value
Whatever they did would have completely missed the release schedule. It may provide value to people who want to keep using a 10 year old phone, but how does that benefit a company that only makes income when they sell new models?
> Just like it is arrogant to assume that your competitors don't already know your 'secrets' and haven't reverse engineered anything they found interesting.
This made me laugh. You would be surprised by how minimal reverse engineering goes on in this space. It boils down to the same reason as before: by the time you have made any progress, the product you are reverse engineering is semi obsolete. The vast majority of the time it makes more sense to invest those resources into developing your own stuff.
That's my $.02 from having worked for four major GPU vendors out there. Upper management knows what they are doing, even if outsiders don't get it. The incentives simply aren't there for most GPU vendors most of the time.
Qualcomm's Vulkan drivers are hot garbage, so I'm not surprised Turnip was seen as more desirable. I work with mobile GPUs for <AAA Engine>, have direct contacts with Qualcomm, and the drivers still find ways to disappoint even with my low expectations.
> I work with mobile GPUs for <AAA Engine>, have direct contacts with Qualcomm, and the drivers still find ways to disappoint even with my low expectations.
Often when people run into problems with a GPU they blame "the drivers". How confident are you that the problems you ran into originated from the drivers, and not from other sources, such as the hardware itself? Just because an issue goes away with a driver update it doesn't mean that the problem originated in the driver -- most of the time what happens is that they found a hardware bug and implemented yet another software workaround.
I am not throwing the HW folks under the bus, either. The hardware is immensely complex and it's not that they can release a new revision every month.
One of the main responsibilities of GPU drivers is working around the bugs that are found after hardware is released. That, and getting all the blame.
I suppose from the outside I cant meaningfully distinguish from hardware or software bugs except in a few cases. Doesn't change the outcome for us either, it's not like we can rely on driver updates to be shipped on Android. Many extensions are broken like extended dynamic state to the point of being unusable. We've hit plenty of issues in the driver shader compiler too, even in Vulkan 1.0 features like relaxed precision.
We've hit a ton of bugs on the adreno 830, with even basic stuff like barriers being broken.
The problem isn't exclusive to Qualcomm fwiw, we've run into plenty of bugs in ARM's driver. Apple's too
Hardware can have issues, but firmware and drivers usually work around those issues. When firmware and drivers crash, you get "masterpieces" like the one above.
If the driver advertises support for something that's broken in hardware and not sufficiently worked around in the driver then that is still a driver bug. Keeping up the illusion that the hardware actually works as advertised is the whole point of drivers.
Worked there for 9 years, can confirm. I wish that our drivers had been open sources, because we poured our souls into them and took pride in the result.
It's actually very easy for skilled people to deliver good products when they aren't just tasked with sucking off shareholders. Public trade of companies makes them worse every time.
Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing.
Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.