Gabe Newell: Linux is a “Get-out-of-jail free pass for our industry”
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Re: Gabe Newell: Linux is a “Get-out-of-jail free pass for our industry”
#2And he'll generously run the only store. What a pal.
Re: Gabe Newell: Linux is a “Get-out-of-jail free pass for our industry”
#3We should all applaud the huge advance gaming will bring to Linux. Just the side effects from the engineering are huge—nevermind the enormous political and financial benefits that gaming brings to Linux.
Next up, naturally: Steam for Android.
Re: Gabe Newell: Linux is a “Get-out-of-jail free pass for our industry”
#4I'm not particularly into video games, but I thought his whole talk about thinking of their games as a platform to enable their users commerce was very interesting.
I also now understand their decision to hire an in-house economist. They're looking at creating a much more sophisticated market.
Re: Gabe Newell: Linux is a “Get-out-of-jail free pass for our industry”
#5We should all applaud the huge advance gaming will bring to Linux. Just the side effects from the engineering are huge—nevermind the enormous political and financial benefits that gaming brings to Linux. Next up, naturally: Steam for Android.
They already have an app, now they just need to actually sell stuff with it.
Re: Gabe Newell: Linux is a “Get-out-of-jail free pass for our industry”
#6I'm an IT pro,so I run Linux servers for my job, but I'm also a gamer, and dual booting is a pain in the ass. Trust me, I would love to make Linux my primary desktop, and every few months when I have some time, I give it another serious shot. But I always end up back to dual booting.
Years ago, I was happy with OSS audio system, but that is controlled by one company so the FOSSies have done their best to replace it with a far inferior ALSA. This caused me so many headaches back in the day and still bothers me with its high latency. But lately my issue has been with the graphics subsystem. For my X1900 I have to chose between open source drivers with terrible performance and bugs or proprietary drivers that don't work with modern kernels.
Finally, X windows and gaming don't seem to mix. Here is a case, where I think Linux needs to change the interface. I think Wayland may be the answer. If not, at least X11 with decent full screen support would be a godsend.
So from my perspective for Linux to make it, it would have to use :
1) OSSv4 Audio Subsystem (FOSSies it's GPL'd already get over it)
2) Stable graphics driver interface ( or FOSSies stop breaking ATI and Nvidia's drivers )
3) Modern Display Server - maybe Wayland or throwing out all the kruff in X11 and fixing Full Screen graphics in games
Re: Gabe Newell: Linux is a “Get-out-of-jail free pass for our industry”
#7I feel like the title of this article was a little misleading, it makes it sound like he's chiding the industry for relying on use of linux and open-source software to make them look good (android is linux-based? yay it must be the best!), which I would kind of agree with. He's actually saying that it's there as a fail-safe for the possibility of Microsoft and Apple walling off their ecosystems from tinkerers and developers (which I also agree with).
Re: Gabe Newell: Linux is a “Get-out-of-jail free pass for our industry”
#8I'm an IT pro,so I run Linux servers for my job, but I'm also a gamer, and dual booting is a pain in the ass. Trust me, I would love to make Linux my primary desktop, and every few months when I have some time, I give it another serious shot. But I always end up back to dual booting. Years ago, I was happy with OSS audio system, but that is controlled by one company so the FOSSies have done their best to replace it w…
1) You can actually install it and use it.
Personally I had some difficulties with some missing card-features, but other then that it worked fine.
2) Both NVidia/ATI and Foss is at fault: one should go open source, the other should should do as you say :)
3) X11 is deemed beyond fixable. But you can run Wayland today. (It has X11 server-for-wayland.) The reason I didn't try yet is because it won't run my WM. (Well as far as I know anyway.)
Re: Gabe Newell: Linux is a “Get-out-of-jail free pass for our industry”
#9The explosion of Android as a platform has shown quite clearly both the power and flexibility of the Linux kernel, and the usefulness of hiding the complexity and providing a platform-neutral API. The VM-backed programming environment is what Valve perceive as the new gaming market here: they don't want just a console, they want their own iDevice or Kindle Fire.
Mr. Newell mentioned that Valve's games were shifting to a free-to-play scheme. The Steam Box might be something like this: a Linux-based OS, some sort of runtime/VM, a game-writing API (Source-based API?) and an online, on-console marketplace. Whether the VM is Android or even based on Java at all would remain to be seen.
The basic Source (or successor) engine might be distributed built into the Steam Box, with expansions ranging from full-on games to amusing hats available for immediate purchase and automatic delivery. Probably some back-catalog goodies will ship with the box/be registered to your Steam account, too.
Re: Gabe Newell: Linux is a “Get-out-of-jail free pass for our industry”
#10For all my love for Steam, Valve, Linux and Newell himself, I cannot help but gag a little every time he opens his mouth as of late.
Not a single fuck was given about Linux prior to the release of Win 8. Then, suddenly, once Valve's profit margins and business model is threatened the company shows some interest. This is all--of course--perfectly rational behavior, but there's no need to be all righteous about it and feed into our superiority complexes as Linux users. We don't want an 'us vs them' mentality here. What we want is for all the Windows users to get curious and come explore what Linux has to offer, not dig in and defend their OS just because they were pissed off by smug flamebait rethoric.