Steam coming to Linux!

[skoften]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/a ... -live.html

"Valve has also confirmed that it will make Steam available to Linux users in the coming months."

yay', dual boot here. Steam runs awfully bad with Wine. I'm happy they confirmed it.

[no00dylan]

you and, well... just you. Sorry

[Vicpop]

I don't really see Linux as a desktop environment, and I don't think I ever will. Even if it's "stable", the amount of effort put into having intuitive and functional design is going to be considerably inconsistent unless those developers (working largely for free) get really really close together and start to cooperate (and feel motivated without earning money especially if their talent would be of use to a company willing to pay them to develop for [X] operating system).

To show you what I mean, here's a partial list of the X Windowing System desktop environments available:

Code: Select all

KDE   
GNOME   
Xfce, LXDE and ROX Desktop   
Étoilé   
EDE   
Enlightenment   
awesome   
Blackbox, Openbox, Fluxbox and Icewm   
Ratpoison, wmii, dwm, xmonad, WindowLab, and Ion


A large chunk of applications designed for Linux are based around only the GNOME desktop environment, especially because it provides some more stuff (think DirectX versus OpenGL) for developers; but then when one develops for GNOME using whatever stuff it provides exclusively, there goes potential support (practically speaking, at least) for another desktop environment to work with this application.

This occurrence is really not limited to desktop environments. It's everywhere, from audio drivers (ALSA (new) versus OSS (deprecated)), graphics drivers (ATi proprietary drivers (ethics) versus open-source reverse-engineered drivers (stability)), webservers (Apache (average) versus something like Lighttpd (faster but smaller dev team) or nginx (fast but no dynamic content)), system loggers (sysklogd, syslog-ng, metalog), to cron daemons (dcron, fcon, vixie-cron).

It's ridiculous to try and develop for everyone when it comes to Linux. You have to develop for a particular crowd of Linux users-- but then you're filtering out people in what's already such a tiny (relatively speaking) user base, not to mention any caveats you'll have to deal with when working with whatever set of libraries you need to.

Anyways, if more developers start to make games for OS X, I'm switching over.

[Unreal_Me]

...
It's ridiculous to try and develop for everyone when it comes to Linux. You have to develop for a particular crowd of Linux users-- but then you're filtering out people in what's already such a tiny (relatively speaking) user base, ...

By that logic developers should stop making PC games entirely.

For all we know throwing steam on linux will broaden the user base. I'm not saying all the PC gamers are going to flock to linux any time soon, but it's a step.
Plus, not like there's any downside to this

[dissonance]

Fucking CALLED IT.

Vic, the DE is like the wrapper around a product. It's not really doing much other than drawing buttons and windows. All the good stuff is being done underneath, closer to the kernel.
I don't mean to talk shit, but the modular-ness of linux is something windows users take some time getting used to.

[skoften]

I can finally map while h4x1n' j0 !

[korge]

Fucking CALLED IT.

[Dionysos]

Fucking CALLED IT.

Vic, the DE is like the wrapper around a product. It's not really doing much other than drawing buttons and windows. All the good stuff is being done underneath, closer to the kernel.
I don't mean to talk shit, but the modular-ness of linux is something windows users take some time getting used to.

Important part. Kernels can be updated, packages (like drivers) as well. Apart from that and in the times of Ubuntu, I don't even see how one can not call it a stable desktop environment... I know several old people quite contend to use Ubuntu over Win7 because it's easier. /flameout

I really don't know whether this is too good to be true... if Valve really pounces on Linux it could mark a significant turning point for multi-platform gaming (together with the Mac version). More competition, hopefully more innovation and re-thinking... there're a lot of untapped crowds in the linux and mac communities.

[Spike]

I use Linux everyday since 4 years ago and all I can say is it sucks

[Vicpop]

...
It's ridiculous to try and develop for everyone when it comes to Linux. You have to develop for a particular crowd of Linux users-- but then you're filtering out people in what's already such a tiny (relatively speaking) user base, ...

By that logic developers should stop making PC games entirely.

For all we know throwing steam on linux will broaden the user base. I'm not saying all the PC gamers are going to flock to linux any time soon, but it's a step.
Plus, not like there's any downside to this

I'm talking about the Linux user base, not Steam's user base. Let me paraphrase what I said: of all the Linux users, only a portion are likely to be using Linux in the correct configuration for "the application" being developed for it. If there was a downside, it would be the additional stress on the developers to make the effort to have it work on Linux as well as everything else (what about those developers making games that are totally cross-platform?). I might even say that I really do not want the *nix community to be homogenized by developers that decide to concede and make a "generic" collection of software (libraries or what have you) as a result of people like gamers that just want things to "work".

Vic, the DE is like the wrapper around a product. It's not really doing much other than drawing buttons and windows. All the good stuff is being done underneath, closer to the kernel.
I don't mean to talk shit, but the modular-ness of linux is something windows users take some time getting used to.

I've been using Linux for around 3 years now as a server environment. I've tried using various distributions as desktop operating systems and each time I've ended up coming straight back to OS X or Windows. I used the desktop environments solely as an example of the wildly varying software configurations among Linux users.

For the record, I'm running Gentoo after a year or so of trying a shit ton of different distributions (BSD, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS), and having had two different graphical environments while on Gentoo. I'm trying to say I have experience in both server and desktop environments with Linux. I've used OS X probably equally as much as I have Windows.

I don't even see how one can not call it a stable desktop environment...

If you're implying that I said it wasn't, I didn't.

[YokaI]

Vic... Why you got to rain on this parade?

And this is coming from me.

[staberas]

I use Linux everyday since 4 years ago and all I can say is it sucks

BLASPHEMY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

a squad of Linux nerds has been dispatched to your location...

So i use linux (fedora 12 ) on my netbook and i am happy i managed to "play" once tf2 & hl2 [with wine ]

[Psy]

Are the ATI drivers still awful?

[YokaI]

Are the ATI drivers still awful?

Probably

[Dionysos]

Are the ATI drivers still awful?

Well, define awful. They're apparently not fully compatible with the latest Xserver and unless you apply a workaround patch the maximizing/minimizing of windows takes half a second. Everything else works well, video, games etc. Not as convenient as Nvidia but nothing showstopping imo.