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Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

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Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#81

Post by benologist »

sandGorgon wrote: post #48
danssig wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is interesting news, but turn the OS market upside down? You can't be serious.

yes it will - Steam is a juggernaut which will trigger purchase/usage decisions. Creators of libraries and frameworks will have to comply with the standards that Valve will come up with (and come up they will). For example what audio framework will your distro use - Jack? OSS? Pulseaudio? They will have to use what Valve wants you to use, if you want to play their games. Multimonitor support ? HDMI? use the toolkits…

No it won't. Login to steam from a mac some time and watch the awesomeness unfold as 1/10th of your games are available.

Now make it 1/10th of 1/10th!

Unless they convince a significant number of other publishers to do linux versions (while they won't even do mac versions) it's not going to be very exciting.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#82

Post by freehunter »

NickPollard wrote: post #53
b0rsuk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I would use Linux only, but I like game X and Y." is incredibly common attitude among people who use dual boot. I'm not making this up, the phrase pops up very often on various forums, especially in context of linux ports for newly announced games. You don't see many complaints about GIMP being inadequate (and with the recent news that will be the end of GIMP complaints), or OpenOffice/LibreOffice incompatibility. Y…

Anecdotal, but I am exactly one of these people - I dual boot, and the only reason I have Windows is for games. Then when you suggest this to others, the dual boot puts them off, and they don't want to be without games either. Now there's a long way from 'Steam client for Linux' to 'Most AAA games available on Linux', but that is definitely the largest problem facing Linux adoption on the desktop.

A couple times a year I blow away my Windows install and go Linux-only. Then a AAA game comes out, and VMWare just doesn't cut it. I've recently gotten tired of Skyrim and put it away for a while, but then the GW2 beta is this weekend...

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#83

Post by freehunter »

codesuela wrote: post #42
onli wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Missing games are the last and only "serious" issue of Linux. Well, maybe apart from Adobes product. But that's quite seriuos: Not being able to play normal and modern games is why I have Windows installed, and it's why i couldn't convince my nonexisting kids to use linux solely. More Games means more user means more games (means better gpu-driver). It's a really old theory, and i think it's one that is soun…

Games are the only thing you can't run with good performance inside a VM. That's why you can always spin up a Windows VM if you need Photoshop but you HAVE to reboot if you want to enjoy a game. So yes, this would be definitely a game changer

I've had luck with VMWare and nvidia cards, as long as your processor supports virtulization. Near-native performance, minus the fact that you have Linux eating some of your resources. It gets pretty touchy though, and last time I tried it on an ATI card the drivers didn't support it.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#84

Post by freehunter »

kmm wrote: post #70
abrahamsen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the only reason: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Linux-users-contribute-twice... Linux users seem (or seemed in 2010) to have money to burn on games (and charity).

I notice this too every time with the Humble Bundle. I mean, go to humblebundle.com right now and Linux wins again. Can anyone explain this?

Along with icebraining's post, I can confirm the reason I give more in the bundle is to show there is a market for Linux gaming to make money.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#85

Post by km3k »

FreeFull wrote: post #64
idleloops wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As well as: * Poor web browser (not an issue now) * Poor flash support (better than it has been) * No Microsoft Office (partially surmountable) * Video and sound configuration issues (sound is still hit and miss for me) * Inconsistent desktop UIs and administration tools * Lack of simple point and click system control panel And that you couldn't easily find consumer hardware pre-installed with a Linux desktop (which…

I thought SuSE had a simple control panel thing for many years now (unless they changed that)

They have, just like Ubuntu and others. I think that post is referring to things that have typically been seen as problems, not necessarily things that are still big problems.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#86

Post by lgeek »

sandGorgon wrote: post #48
danssig wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is interesting news, but turn the OS market upside down? You can't be serious.

yes it will - Steam is a juggernaut which will trigger purchase/usage decisions. Creators of libraries and frameworks will have to comply with the standards that Valve will come up with (and come up they will). For example what audio framework will your distro use - Jack? OSS? Pulseaudio? They will have to use what Valve wants you to use, if you want to play their games. Multimonitor support ? HDMI? use the toolkits…

Audio: ALSA would cover basically all distributions. Pulseaudio is used or available for all recent releases. Plus, OSS, ALSA and Pulseaudio aren't exclusive. You can have all of them available at the same time.

Multimonitor support and HDMI have absolutely nothing to have with applications.

Packing format (for Steam) is irrelevant when you're just distributing statically compiled binaries. And the games themselves would be packaged in Valve's DRM-enabled format anyway, like on the other platforms.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#87

Post by soup10 »

qxcv wrote: post #11

Looks like this is going to be reality, Phoronix just published the promised article[0] which basically claims that Valve have ported L4D/Source over to Linux already! Exciting news indeed, AAA-titles for Linux could turn the desktop OS market upside down. [0]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve...

2012 is the year of linux on the desktop!

Seriously reading some of these comments makes my head hurt... even if valve does port the source engine and their games to linux, that's only a handful of games... Most developers are still not going to target linux because it's painful to develop games for* and the market is relatively tiny.

*I've never developed for linux but from what i've read the summary is: video driver support is a mess, low-level access to hardware often requires hacky work-arounds or is just not possible, and of course there is lots fragmentation with having different distributions which just adds to the already painful fragmentation already faced by PC devs with having to support lots of different hardware.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#88

Post by idleloops »

FreeFull wrote: post #64
idleloops wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As well as: * Poor web browser (not an issue now) * Poor flash support (better than it has been) * No Microsoft Office (partially surmountable) * Video and sound configuration issues (sound is still hit and miss for me) * Inconsistent desktop UIs and administration tools * Lack of simple point and click system control panel And that you couldn't easily find consumer hardware pre-installed with a Linux desktop (which…

I thought SuSE had a simple control panel thing for many years now (unless they changed that)

I used Yast in 2000, and generally had a good experience with Suse. The distro won out for me, as I could configure Yast through an ncurses interface. You had to surrender some control to Yast, which was both a blessing and a curse.

An issue is one of consistency across the distributions - which is partly the nature of the beast of Linux. And that's why I recommend a distro with a large community to a newcomer.

That's not to say that the underlying tools aren't there, it's just the GUI tool chains are missing or could be better and more consistent.

Re: Valve is developing Steam for Linux, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix

#89

Post by jasonlotito »

frunc wrote: post #24

See also: It's Official: Valve Releasing Steam, Source Engine For Linux! - Published on May 12, 2010 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve...

FTA: "The released Linux client should be available by the end of summer."

Keep in mind, we are talking about Valve Time[1] here, so Phoronix wasn't wrong. =)

1. https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

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