It’s 2026. An experimental version of Steam’s runtime container – a very normal thing for your very functional software to have – is now 64-bit. This is worthy of praise somehow for a multibillion-dollar corporation whose only real job is to do bare minimum maintenance of its storefront and rake in 30% of profits from its monopoly.
Glad to know where the bar is.
a very normal thing for your very functional software to have
What an incredibly weird complaint. I can’t even fathom how one could arrive at this opinion.
That it’s weird for Valve’s client to be running inside a container?
My other software isn’t containerized that I know of. I don’t run Firefox in Docker.
Why the fuck is it weird for a client to run inside a runtime environment with well-defined library versions, when that client has to ship that runtime environment anyways to ensure the games can actually run on a broad range of systems?
Oh, sure, it’s so much better if the client relies on system libraries instead. Yes please, I like incompatibilities and issues with debugging. So much better than loading a different set of libraries. Stupid Valve!
Alright, let’s just ignore the containerization because of the problem Valve creates by making you open Steam when you play games you paid for. It’s just 64-bit for the runtime, not even the client itself. It’s 2026. I’m not going to act like this is noteworthy or an accomplishment.
You can run steam games without opening steam as long as they don’t use the steamworks DRM or require an additional login (Ubisoft, Bethesda). Both of these issues are created by the developers / publishers, not steam.
Do you even know what any of the words you’re using mean? It doesn’t matter whether the Steam client is running in the runtime, you still want the same containerization to run your games, because that’s how they make sure the games run everywhere.
You’re just angrily flinging shit around without understanding what any of this is about. Don’t you have anything better to do?
Funnily enough, people running in Ubuntu do get Firefox in a container by default IIRC as it’s delivered as a snap
You recall correctly. It’s another one of Canonical’s attempts to shoehorn their trash.
I run most of my software in containers. Firefox is in a flatpak. My terminal shells are all containers using distrobox. My homelab services are all containers. My few VMs (i run a few vituralized rke2 clusters, sometimes a test version of my baremetal harvester cluster, and test versions of my desktops)? Also running in containers. My desktop OSs are also containers (ublue, SteamOS, and SUSE Elemental).
The future is now old man! :p
But honestly linux namespaces and overlay filesystems are the bees knees. Create reusable layers of filesystems, use just the ones needed for a given app/service. Expose just what a service or app needs to for a given function. You end up with an extemly portable, and consistent system that has cleaner seperations of concerns. For basically free. From an app dev perspective you remove a whole matrix of supported configurations to worry about (distro/version/packages installed/etc).
At that point, why not just go for Qubes OS?
Qubes is really cool but it uses VM instead of containers, and for its use case you basically have too. Containers isolation at almost no cost come from actually share the underlying kernel and hardware. That isnt isolated enough for data domain seperation thay qubes is built around.
That is one reason i have multiple clusters actually, and the confidential container effort is actually light weight VMs with tools to intergrate them with the network of the host correctly (and multikey memory encryption to fully enforce the boundary). I havent goten around to deploying an app like that yet myself though
Containers all the way down.
My services are all running in containers, but I’ve some work to do to catch up to your skill level. That said, the above comment is music to my ears with where I am at in the learning process just now, it just resonates. Have a good weekend!
There’s gonna be people who don’t know why containers break iso27002 and think they’re the bees knees just lashing out for this affront to their favourite toy, dude. Hunker down.
Holy fuck you nerds will find ANYTHING to screech about. You must just be miserable irl.
👆Why are you booing him? He’s right!
I mean, good for Valve for finally making progress on 64-bit, but it really is kinda absurd that it’s taken this long.
Name another gaming company that has been as good and influential.
Are you butthurt that I called it a monopoly because it is one? Its status as a “benevolent monopoly” doesn’t make it not a monopoly; its competitors’ incompetence doesn’t make it not a monopoly; competition existing doesn’t make it not a monopoly; that it’s not an illegal monopoly doesn’t make it not a monopoly.
Its incredibly stable and enormous market share, which is deeply entrenched because you don’t own the games you buy there and can’t bring them elsewhere, makes it a monopoly. The unhealthy amount of power Valve wields over the PC gaming market is exemplified when people panic over what’ll happen when Gabe Newell dies and fear that Valve might e.g. go public. Not because that’s extremely likely, but because that would be catastrophic to the PC gaming scene.
The point of pointing out that Valve is a monopoly is that they have functionally no real competition to worry about; they have all the leeway in the world to improve their client, so I’m not going to clap like a seal when the container for the software gets 64-bit support in the year of our lord 2026.
That’s not really Valve’s fault: Tell the other companies to suck less! All the other services are fucking terrible by comparison, GOG is the only one that comes close.
Good at getting people hooked on gambling?
