Valve developers are making some hard choices

Aug 17, 2015 08:12 GMT  ·  By

Valve is making some hard choice for SteamOS, and it looks like they are having some issues with the support for various components. In this case, it's about the support for suspend, which is not all that good, forcing them to drop it from the operating system.

Suspend is a function that does just that. It suspends the operating system, and users can easily resume working afterwards. It's normally not an issue, and all major distributions out there have this function implemented. Suspending the OS on the desktop computers might not be all that important, but think about laptops. The default action when you close a laptop is to go into suspend mode, so you need that function to work.

As it turns out, Valve is not finding the support for this function very reliable, especially since it's not a single library or package managed by a single group of developers. This function is provided by various developers, like Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and we're not counting the developers of free drivers. It's a mess of things, and it's in a bad enough condition for Valve to drop it.

No suspend for SteamOS just yet

The decision to remove the suspend support for SteamOS is an older one, but the community just found out about. A Reddit user posted a link to a GitHub discussion about this issue. There is no relevant information about the reasons why this happened, just that it did and that they have no intention of bringing it back.

"Given the state of hardware and software support throughout the graphics stack on Linux we didn't think we could make this reliable," wrote one of the Valve developers on GitHub. The problem occurs when the system wakes up, and the controllers don't. From the looks if it, users need to disconnect the controllers, wait a while, and then reconnect them. It might not seem like a big issue, but it's at least annoying.