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Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more

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Re: Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more

#81

Post by prezjordan »

barrkel wrote: post #43
forrestthewoods wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam does have a very slow boot time, but the expected behavior is that Steam is always running in the background so I can't imagine it's a priority. I can't fathom a ~3 second wait when installing and launching a game being a real problem. Minor annoyance sure but that's less time than you'll be forced to see stupid splash screens for!

I just quit Steam (so it was fresh in cache, never mind relying on SSD etc.), and started a Steam game. It took 20 seconds before the game launched (not playable, just started). That's massive. Pretty much any of my non-steam games will be launched and playable within 10 seconds. (I also hate unskippable intro videos; I'm fairly sure I've collectively spent much longer searching for ways to delete / skip such videos…

Right Click on a game -> Properties -> Set Boot Options -> "-novid"

For all my Source games: "-novid -w 1920 -h 1080 -window -noborder"

Re: Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more

#82

Post by jiggy2011 »

sandGorgon wrote: post #80

I have a Dell Vostro with an ATI 6600m card running ubuntu 12.04. Putting "echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch" effectively boosts my battery time from 1 hour to 3 hours. What I'm seriously hoping from Valve is not a game per se, but a linux distro (or a standard) that is compatible with my drivers, multimedia devices (dual hdmi monitors - I'm looking at you) and audio/video. I would pay serious money f…

I don't think Yet Another Desktop Distro is really the answer to our prayers.

If fixing your laptop battery is as simple as that one liner , perhaps your can write a script that detects hardware at startup and runs that line if appropriate and then submit it back to Ubuntu?

Re: Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more

#83

Post by jebblue »

jlgreco wrote: post #32
Keyframe wrote: post #30

I don't use linux as my desktop OS for quite some time (now it's windows and osx, used to have Redhat and later fedora workstations). My question is, is it possible to target 'linux' in general as a single platform at all? I thought heterogeneous nature of linux distros is what would hinder that effort. Something like when you buy certain graphics programs, you get to have only this and that linux variant with this a…

In the 'enterprise' market, targeting 'Linux' means targeting RHEL. I don't think that would be the way for Valve to go though. If they are really going to release anything to the public for Linux I imagine they will just officially target Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is focused on delivering a great desktop. I'm not a fan of Unity and find that to get the same performance I used to have, I have to run my games on Unity 2D. Regular Unity (3D) eats a lot of my games's FPS.

If Steam picks Ubuntu then I hope they work with Canonical to get Unity to perform as fast for games as Unity 2D (and Gnome 2).

Re: Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more

#84

Post by helmut_hed »

sandGorgon wrote: post #80

I have a Dell Vostro with an ATI 6600m card running ubuntu 12.04. Putting "echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch" effectively boosts my battery time from 1 hour to 3 hours. What I'm seriously hoping from Valve is not a game per se, but a linux distro (or a standard) that is compatible with my drivers, multimedia devices (dual hdmi monitors - I'm looking at you) and audio/video. I would pay serious money f…

a linux distro (or a standard) that is compatible with my drivers, multimedia devices (dual hdmi monitors - I'm looking at you) and audio/video

yes, that would be great! Major distros (I use Kubuntu) are understaffed and concentrate on getting the new features from their upstreams integrated, not on making sure fancy hardware is supported. It's a question of resources. Although I think Valve is less likely than a hardware vendor to have a business reason for doing this work.

Re: Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more

#85

Post by jlgreco »

jebblue wrote: post #83
jlgreco wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 'enterprise' market, targeting 'Linux' means targeting RHEL. I don't think that would be the way for Valve to go though. If they are really going to release anything to the public for Linux I imagine they will just officially target Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is focused on delivering a great desktop. I'm not a fan of Unity and find that to get the same performance I used to have, I have to run my games on Unity 2D. Regular Unity (3D) eats a lot of my games's FPS. If Steam picks Ubuntu then I hope they work with Canonical to get Unity to perform as fast for games as Unity 2D (and Gnome 2).

That should probably be as easy as providing a way for games to tell Unity to turn off compositing, right?

Re: Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more

#86

Post by dawhead »

nitrogen wrote: post #60
s_kilk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most commercial studios would be running either Pro Tools, Cubase/Nuendo or Logic. There is nothing in the open-source world that comes even remotely close to rivaling any of these packages at the moment.

Ardour is probably the most similar Open Source project.

@s_kilk: in random order:

Roadmaps: http://tracker.ardour.org/roadmap_page.php http://ardour.org/development/post3.0

MIDI: those Atari apps you're thinking of didn't do audio.

General utility: perhaps you need to talk to various people who do, in fact, use Ardour instead of ProTools. As for the comparison with Reaper - Reaper is a very impressive project, but if you try it for pro- usage rather than home-style recording, you will very rapidly discover quite a lot of basic issues that they have not addressed, but were being done correctly by Ardour 8 years ago. I look to Reaper for good ideas and impressive development speed, but they really are focused on the needs of a different type of market segment than I really pay the most attention to.

It is true that there is no single DAW that is to everyone's taste, and Ardour is probably a more "acquired" taste than many others. At this time, I would say that more or less no DAW can easily "replace" any of the others. You can't really replace ProTools with Nuendo either.

jsprinkles: we distribute binary copies of Ardour from ardour.org that run on any Linux distribution (just about - we discovered a wrinkle that interferes with this on a few platforms, and the next release(s) will correct this).

disclaimer: I am the lead author of Ardour.

Re: Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more

#87

Post by jebblue »

jlgreco wrote: post #85
jebblue wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu is focused on delivering a great desktop. I'm not a fan of Unity and find that to get the same performance I used to have, I have to run my games on Unity 2D. Regular Unity (3D) eats a lot of my games's FPS. If Steam picks Ubuntu then I hope they work with Canonical to get Unity to perform as fast for games as Unity 2D (and Gnome 2).

That should probably be as easy as providing a way for games to tell Unity to turn off compositing, right?

I'd imagine that it would be some serious work to see whether just turning off compositing would be enough and what effects that has on running non-game apps that are in the middle of using compositing.

Re: Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more

#88

Post by freehunter »

jlgreco wrote: post #85
jebblue wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu is focused on delivering a great desktop. I'm not a fan of Unity and find that to get the same performance I used to have, I have to run my games on Unity 2D. Regular Unity (3D) eats a lot of my games's FPS. If Steam picks Ubuntu then I hope they work with Canonical to get Unity to perform as fast for games as Unity 2D (and Gnome 2).

That should probably be as easy as providing a way for games to tell Unity to turn off compositing, right?

Windows does this already for games that enable it. Turns off desktop effects when it goes full screen, then reloads it when the game exits.
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