Valve wants FOSS AMD drivers on Windows, Framework laptop 13 Pro looks good for Linux, GoG on Linux

[whooshing sound] So let's start with some fun stuff.

It looks like Valve is now sponsoring Collabora to bring the open source RADV driver for AMD to Windows.

Now, this is the Vulkan driver for Linux.

The goal is to port that to Microsoft's operating system to offer a partly open-source solution, even for Windows users, who generally depend on the full proprietary AMD drivers for Windows, which include the kernel driver, the OpenGL driver, the Vulkan driver, the DirectX driver, and all of that stuff.

So the goal wouldn't be to replace the kernel driver, but at least the Vulkan part with what we already have on Linux.

Mesa has had Windows drivers for a long while.

You can install Mesa drivers on Windows.

They support OpenGL and Vulkan and OpenCL.

But the AMD RADV driver for Vulkan has not been available for Windows through that channel for a while because it just did not work.

Valve wants to fix that, it seems, so apparently Collabora successfully ran Counter-Strike 2 with it.

It is far from being ready.

It is not a conformant Vulkan implementation yet, and the main issue is that you need an interface with the existing kernel driver on Windows, and that interface doesn't currently exist.

Because AMD distributes their software as an entire package, they never probably saw the need to build an interface that other drivers could interface with.

And so Collabora needs that kind of documented interface and a library that acts as middleware between, uh, the Vulkan driver, the RADV driver, and the kernel driver that AMD makes.

So every time the kernel driver changes, you don't have to rewrite the entire Mesa drivers as well.

You can just change the middleware.

Now, why would anyone want that sort of driver on Windows, you might ask? Well, it's mostly because that would be a shared code base across Linux and Windows for all Vulkan-related things, which would make progress faster on both systems.

It would make debugging easier.

It would improve game support as well because all efforts made on one operating system would also help the other.

And it would also be a way for the community to contribute to these drivers, even for Windows, plus all the usual benefits for the end user of using open-source software.

Now, imagine a world where RADV is the default Vulkan driver on Windows and where developers actually implement game fixes themselves on the driver or AMD implements those game fixes on the Mesa code base, which also then helps Linux games.

Imagine a world where games actually defaults to the Vulkan renderer, so you would have an easier Linux port without using DXVK, Proton, and all of that stuff.

That could be pretty cool.

This is a long way away.

This might never even happen at all, but I think this is pretty neat.