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Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

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Re: Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

#51

Post by throwaway64 »

StavrosK wrote: post #49
throwaway64 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam has a package so dependancies can be satisfied easily without resorting to "install xyz beforehand", and it runs an installer into your home folder because the user has to be able to modify the games directory for many, many games on steam, because stuff like configuration, custom maps, custom models etc, is stored alongside everything else. Also steam has diff based patching (which requires accress from whoeve…

This is irrelevant. They can add the Steam binary to their own PPA and update it as they update the client now. Steam will be able to do all those thing, like every single program in Linux can, while being installed as a system package. The way they're doing it now is plain unclean.

how is it irrelivant? if people are wanting games and stuff to be distributed through the package manager, all these issues very much apply.

Even the steam client package itself is something like 100megs, so it becomes painful without diff/delta patches. (steam updates a LOT)

Re: Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

#52

Post by StavrosK »

throwaway64 wrote: post #51
StavrosK wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is irrelevant. They can add the Steam binary to their own PPA and update it as they update the client now. Steam will be able to do all those thing, like every single program in Linux can, while being installed as a system package. The way they're doing it now is plain unclean.

how is it irrelivant? if people are wanting games and stuff to be distributed through the package manager, all these issues very much apply. Even the steam client package itself is something like 100megs, so it becomes painful without diff/delta patches. (steam updates a LOT)

I'm only talking about handling Steam updates, I agree with you on game updates. However, the Steam client can still access the user's home directory and create/access game data there, as all Linux apps do, so the current way of having Steam dump its binaries at the home dir is unclean.

Pretty much the only valid point is having to update the whole thing every release, but I've never seen the Steam client download an update that was less than 75 MB.

Re: Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

#53

Post by throwaway64 »

Maakuth wrote: post #44
thristian wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why. If the Steam-DRM'd version of a game requires Steam installed in order to play, they can just add the Steam package as a dependency. Possibly a bigger issue would be that Steam has incremental updates (fixing a bug in a game requires downloading a fixed binary but not the multi-gigabyte data files) while most Linux package managers do not support incremental updates (when Debian releases a new LibreO…

In Linux game packaging, this issue is often resolved by having a separate package for game data. This is also a neat workaround for licensing differences. For example Quake 3 is now open source, but the game data is still under commercial license. Distributions now offer just the game binaries built from the source and you have to buy the data yourself.

The problem with this is that with many steam games (such as TF2) the game data itself updates constantly aswell.

Re: Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

#54

Post by throwaway64 »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #43
throwaway64 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

path prefixes only generally apply to ./configure scripts when you are generating makefiles. As paths to libs and stuff are hardcoded as part of the ELF spec, it becomes difficult to implement something like this and ive not seen a package manager that can do it.

After looking more it appears that I was doing something that only works when targetting a chroot environment. My mistake. It would be interesting to think more about user-level applications and how that sort of trust would work, if it could.

theoreticly you could work around the library/datafile issues with LD_PRELOAD hacks to make it load stuff from your home directory instead, but thats pretty awful.

Re: Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

#55

Post by throwaway64 »

StavrosK wrote: post #52
throwaway64 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is it irrelivant? if people are wanting games and stuff to be distributed through the package manager, all these issues very much apply. Even the steam client package itself is something like 100megs, so it becomes painful without diff/delta patches. (steam updates a LOT)

I'm only talking about handling Steam updates, I agree with you on game updates. However, the Steam client can still access the user's home directory and create/access game data there, as all Linux apps do, so the current way of having Steam dump its binaries at the home dir is unclean. Pretty much the only valid point is having to update the whole thing every release, but I've never seen the Steam client download an…

the issue is, if you have a cluster of games/etc managed by steam in your home directory that is already not under the control of package management, what do you gain by splitting out the steam client itself? it is easier from valve's perspective to just allow steam to manage its own updates along with everything else it manages, than to have a rather arbitrary split that gives you no real advantages anyways.

Steam has always been designed on both osx and windows to be a portable folder that you can move around from system to system and run stuff out of wihout worrying about installers and dependancies.

Re: Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

#56

Post by Tuna-Fish »

mariuolo wrote: post #48

It doesn't work for me. Still saying it's a closed beta.

You need to update the client to fix that. Easiest way to do this is to evade the beta check (start steam with "steam steam://store"), then choose "steam/check for steam client updates" from the title menu.

Re: Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

#57

Post by StavrosK »

throwaway64 wrote: post #55
StavrosK wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only talking about handling Steam updates, I agree with you on game updates. However, the Steam client can still access the user's home directory and create/access game data there, as all Linux apps do, so the current way of having Steam dump its binaries at the home dir is unclean. Pretty much the only valid point is having to update the whole thing every release, but I've never seen the Steam client download an…

the issue is, if you have a cluster of games/etc managed by steam in your home directory that is already not under the control of package management, what do you gain by splitting out the steam client itself? it is easier from valve's perspective to just allow steam to manage its own updates along with everything else it manages, than to have a rather arbitrary split that gives you no real advantages anyways. Steam h…

By that reasoning, if you have one package on your system that's not managed by the package manager, you should discard the package manager entirely.

The more packages managed by the system, the better. Ideally, you'd want the games, too, but I understand why Valve might not like that.

Using the unclean alternative when there's a clean one that's just as good isn't a good decision, in my opinion.

Re: Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

#58

Post by lloeki »

improv32 wrote: post #21
thejosh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TF2 also has microtransactions so it will also earn them money in the short AND long run as well. Quite a smart business decision and I'm glad they brought TF2 over - I always thought this would be the first game to publicly release.

It was also the first game they brought over for the mac port, though I think that was before the in-game store.

Wasn't that Portal, which I got for free at that time?

Re: Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

#59

Post by 4ad »

emperorcezar wrote: post #22
jcastro wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://launchpad.net has a bug tracker and a blueprints function.

Can only say one thing about Launchpad, "ew". It has a horrible UI.

Speaking as someone who has to use it everyday, the horrible UI is the least of its problems.

Re: Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

#60

Post by Garoof »

StavrosK wrote: post #57
throwaway64 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the issue is, if you have a cluster of games/etc managed by steam in your home directory that is already not under the control of package management, what do you gain by splitting out the steam client itself? it is easier from valve's perspective to just allow steam to manage its own updates along with everything else it manages, than to have a rather arbitrary split that gives you no real advantages anyways. Steam h…

By that reasoning, if you have one package on your system that's not managed by the package manager, you should discard the package manager entirely. The more packages managed by the system, the better. Ideally, you'd want the games, too, but I understand why Valve might not like that. Using the unclean alternative when there's a clean one that's just as good isn't a good decision, in my opinion.

"By that reasoning, if you have one package on your system that's not managed by the package manager, you should discard the package manager entirely."

No?

Something like "I want to play TF2, so I should update Steam and TF2" is a reasonably common thing and it makes sense to want one thing to handle both of them.

"You should discard the package manager entirely" does not follow from that.

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