Feature Request: Steam release

[harpetersen]

A number of open source projects are making themselves available via Steam. (For example, Krita, Blender, Godot, OBS studio, Pixelorama, Pixieditor, ShareX, and a number of open source games). This serves several purposes...

1. It increases visibility for the open source project significantly.
2. I gives a revenue stream for the open source project to put more time & money into development.
3. It builds more community for the open source project's development
4. It creates an auto-updator and with steam comes with a built-in collaboration tool (steam chat), bringing a suite of features.
5. Makes it easier to test items within the context of the Steamworks Framework.
6. It would encourage community development of a suite of packages geared towards game development, which are some of the more complex development scenarios.
7. Would open up the possibility to quickly share various non-package IDE hacks via the Steam Workshop (stuff like macro presets, keybindings, and flex-toolbar layouts)
8. Gain the ability to flip between Pulsar-native-on-linux vs Pulsar-in-proton-on-linux, allowing for quick checking of "is it Pulsar or the environment?" in bugfixing on linux.

Further, there's currently no open source general-use IDE on Steam, meaning it's an uncovered niche that would do a lot to help pulsar stand out.

[confused-Techie]

That's actually a really interesting idea.
Might have to look into steams policies and how difficult that'd be to manage.
Although I'll say I'd never venture into Steam for an IDE, but if other projects are doing similar, I suppose it could be a new direction they are heading in.

I'll bring it up into our team chat to get some thoughts.

[panamDEVEL]

Is Pulsar even a real thing anymore? I love to code with it as I did with atom back in the days but the last year I've the strong feeling that Pulsar is slowly getting unmaintained/abandoned as well. The community is very small and there are many outdated packages or unanswered questions from years ago.

[adupont-veza]

Outdated packages are a fact of life; a lot of packages were written ~10 years ago when Atom had way more users than Pulsar does now.

We don't have as many active contributors as we would like, but development proceeds, and Pulsar is definitely a real thing. We expect to release a major upgrade in the next few days. We've also got plans to improve the out-of-box experience for new users.