Arch Linux recently announced that it would be a part of a collaboration with Steam for two major projects. The projects in question are a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave.

According to the Arch news release, "This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux."

The secure signing enclave allows the Arch team to sign packages with a single signing key, instead of the current process of one person key per packager. Essentially, this collaboration will make it considerably easier for Arch Linux developers to do their jobs.
Arch Linux project leader, Levente Polyak stated, "These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes." Polyak continues, "Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone, and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux and are looking forward to sharing further development on this mailing list as work progresses."

This collaboration shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, given that SteamOS 3.0 is based on Arch Linux. All projects funded by Valve will stick to Arch Linux's development and consensus-building workflows and will provide more transparency into the work being done.