Further evidence that Valve is here for the long-run, they've hired yet another developer to help improve open source graphics drivers on Linux.

Daniel Schürmann is the latest, confirmed by Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter. So they have now hired Samuel "hakzsam" Pitoiset, Timothy Arceri (who previously crowdfunded his work to improve Linux drivers), Andres Rodriguez and more in addition to this latest.

It's going to be interesting to see if Valve continue to bring in more Linux folk, and the fact that Valve is still hiring people to help Linux gaming through driver work, VR work and so on is quite telling on how they plan to continue pushing Linux gaming for some time. They might not be shouting from the rooftops about it, but the work they're doing is vitally important.

Something else that Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais shared recently, is that approximately 13% of Mesa contributions in 2017 were from Valve developers:

Fun fact: Valve contributions seem to make up about 13% of Mesa commits in 2017. (commit count isn't relevant to contribution significance, so this fact is not only fun, but also useless).

It's going to be interesting to see what kind of splash Valve make, when VR support is solid on Linux and what their plans are after then. Some form of Steam Machine with SteamOS and a VR headset bundle, along with some upgrades to SteamOS could be quite interesting.