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Valve joins the Linux Foundation

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Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#171

Post by adamors »

subsection1h wrote: post #167
venomsnake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well linux have 10 main desktop managers that are under development right now. Each and every one of them does roughly 80% of what I want from a desktop. And I have uncomfortable experience on all.

What's a desktop manager? I know about desktop environments, of which there seem to be 4-5 for Linux, and I know about window managers, of which there are many, thankfully. Please list the "10 main desktop managers" so I can familiarize myself with them. Thanks.

Haha, you've gotta love these armchair Linux critics man.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#172

Post by skinnycow »

venomsnake wrote: post #66
ds_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's broken about it?

Well linux have 10 main desktop managers that are under development right now. Each and every one of them does roughly 80% of what I want from a desktop. And I have uncomfortable experience on all.

Nonsense. There are, at best, a handful of desktop environments targeted at daily desktop users: Unity, KDE, Gnome-Shell, maybe LXDE/Razor if you're being generous.

I've love to hear a single specific complaint about an experience you had with KDE that isn't "it was different from windows", especially given that it's the closest to the Windows daily interactions.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#173

Post by phaemon »

scott_karana wrote: post #147
phaemon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GIMP. Select the selection tool(why???) Mainly because 99% of learning Gimp is learning how to use selections properly. Gimp is for image manipulation , not drawing buttons. If that's the kind of stuff you're doing, use Inkscape. Do the Tutorials under the Help menu. They're really excellent and it sounds like exactly what you're looking for.

Does Inkscape have any raster modification capabilities? Not all "buttons" are composed solely of vectors.

Yes, a few, but why not do those in something else...say, Gimp?

I can't think of a decent looking button (even for very loose definitions of "decent") that couldn't have been done with vectors. Can you give me a good example?

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#174

Post by marcosdumay »

venomsnake wrote: post #11
metastew wrote: post #5

What does this mean for Nvidia and AMD?

Nothing. The people that buy 250 watt, 300mm^2 GPUs to play games will continue to buy them.

Yep, they'll buy from one of them. How will they choose?

I think free drivers will become important. But maybe I'm wrong, and they'll just get the one that consume more watts.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#176

Post by kilburn »

malandrew wrote: post #91
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't think of OS X and Linux as two completely separate platforms in this regard, since they share a lot of relevant tech. I would imagine the work put in to making OS X ports translates well to Linux and vice versa and it's the combined sales that people will consider when deciding whether to port (or what base technologies to build on for brand new projects). As SteamOS takes off there's also the possibili…

On that note are there any changes or improvements on the horizon that would let you fast user switch between two or more booted and running operating systems. It'd be great in the future if you could allocate a small chunk of your RAM to keeping the background machine in a chunk of RSm so it switches faster than you can switch between users on the same OS. E.g. Of 16GB of RAM, 12GBis allocated to the foreground OS a…

This can be done today using kvm's memory ballooning. Essentially, you install a driver in the guest VM and it takes care of (1) reclaiming RAM from the guest OS when the host OS needs more; and (2) providing more RAM to the guest if needed and available.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#177

Post by PhasmaFelis »

adamors wrote: post #162
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gaming on OSX doesn't work as well as on a PC because you can't put OSX on custom hardware. ...What? That's a complete non sequitur. There are high-end and low-end Macs, just as with anything else, and high-end Macs play games just as well as high-end Windows boxes. And of course you can put OSX on custom hardware, it's just not a popular option. > You sound like an iOS developer. It's not like every Windows PC has…

> high-end Macs play games just as well as high-end Windows boxes Are you joking? Because even $2000 iMacs come with mobile GPUs. Not to mention CPUs that cannot be overclocked etc. That's comparable to a high-end gaming laptop , not a PC.

> Are you joking? Because even $2000 iMacs come with mobile GPUs. Not to mention CPUs that cannot be overclocked etc. That's comparable to a high-end gaming laptop, not a PC.

And what's wrong with high-end gaming laptops? My $1000 MacBook Pro has played everything I've thrown at it acceptably well, and it's not even particularly high-end. It's no longer the mid-90s, when you needed a new $2000 rig every year to keep up with current releases. For the typical gamer, overclocking your CPU hasn't been worth the effort in years.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#178

Post by grahamburger »

casca wrote: post #6

It will be interesting to see whether Valve can encourage the move to Linux gaming. Their biggest asset at this time is the distribution model of Steam, but that's not sufficient to get the big publishers to develop for OSX, never mind Linux. Edit: Valve's game list: http://www.valvesoftware.com/games/

They also have SteamBox. I think big developers will target SteamOS.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#179

Post by codygman »

gagege wrote: post #138
Aardwolf wrote: post #137

DOSBox and Wine make Linux quite perfect for gaming. Interestingly, for some games, running the Windows version in Wine works better than running a native Linux version they've made of the game. E.g. the native Linux version will complain that some library .so is not the correct version, or that it cannot connect to X, etc...

I appreciate and use Wine quite a bit, but it's far from perfect. A lot of things just plain crash from the get go. Also, I wish that Steam on Linux would attempt to install and run Windows games via Wine. If I want to play, for instance, Spelunky, I need to close Linux Steam (can't log in in multiple clients, last time I checked) and open Windows Steam in Wine. Maybe there's a way to get Wine games to run in Linux S…

You could put this in the launch command of your game in the linux client:

wine /full/path/to/windows-game.exe

I don't see any reason why that wouldn't work?

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#180

Post by anoncowherd »

neckro23 wrote: post #95
stinkytaco wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be contradicting yourself. Gaming doesn't work on OS X because it has too small a user base, but Linux's user base is much smaller. Playing on a Macbook is impossible (presumably for performance reasons?), but you talk about putting Linux on a 2002 PC for gaming. And Linux may or may not run on the latest generation hot stuff, depending on how much time you want to spend to get your newest graphics card w…

Gaming on Mac has gotten a lot better, mainly thanks to Steam. I'm a huge gamer type, but for assorted reasons my "real" gaming PC isn't actually at home so I'm usually "stuck" with my Macbook. SteamPlay has therefore has been a huge boon to me -- I apparently have 272 games on my Steam account, and of those 121 run on Mac. That's a really impressive batting average. Of course, a bunch of those I can't actually play…

>> I apparently have 272 games on my Steam account, and of those 121 run on Mac.

How many of those 121 are AAA-titles? I'd like to be a Mac gamer too, but it seems to me there are extremely few AAA grade games available for the Mac. What else is there besides Valve, Blizzard, and .. Borderlands 2 & Arkham City?

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