Steam coming to Linux (for real this time!)

Pocket

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Nov 14, 2009
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From the Escapist:

Steam Coming to Linux Soon

The open-source OS will finally get some gaming support.

Linus Torvalds had a great idea in 1991. To shake off the necessity of big corporations like Microsoft and Apple dictating how we use our computers, he founded Linux as an open source code project to give users more control over their operating system. The Linux OS movement has grown into a viable option for PCs, with several different branches and distributions based on the Linux kernel released by Torvalds. The only drawback to installing Linux over Windows is the lack of support for many games, but Gabe Newell and Valve's Steam service might just reverse that trend for good. Valve has hired dedicated Linux developers to port the Steam client and the Source game engine to run natively on Linux. Michael Larabel of Phronoix.com confirmed the news after visiting Valve's offices and speaking with Newell himself. Expect a Linux release of Steam in the next few months.

"This Linux work just is not some half-assed attempt by [Valve] to make it look like they are a Linux-friendly organization," said Larabel. "Gabe's vision to support, embrace, and promote Linux are amazing, assuming they execute, which looks to be very high probability at this point."

The game Valve has chosen to be the guinea pig for the Linux version of the Source engine is Left4Dead2, mostly because the stability of that code is rock solid. There have been a few snags in programming, but Gabe Newell is now personally overseeing the project, so the process has momentum. The flat management structure of Valve - detailed in the recently leaked employee handbook - was actually the reason for the delay of bringing Steam to Linux.

"There have been developers working on the Linux support for sometime, but not until recently has Gabe Newell become personally involved with the Linux client work," Larabel said. "In fact, his desk is currently in the current Valve Linux development camp!"

Larabel also mentioned Newell's personal distaste for Microsoft's new Windows 8, which perhaps has to do with the Valve chief's new desire to branch out. "Listening to Gabe Newell talk about Linux for hours made me wonder whether he was a former ex-Microsoft employee (where he actually did work in his pre-Valve days in the 90's) or the director of the Linux Foundation," Larabel said. "His level of Linux interest and commitment was incredible while his negativity for Windows 8 and the future of Microsoft was stunning."

The whole idea of Valve's Steam service and Source engine using Linux as a native platform is refreshing and has implications beyond the small percentage of current users who run Linux on their machines. With a controlling interest in the PC gaming market, if Newell is serious about using his influence to encourage other developers to adopt Linux as a viable option, the dark days of Linux gaming might be over. And it may actually herald a greater shift away from Windows or Mac OS to Linux for all computing needs.

Crap, I might just convert to running Ubuntu myself.

Source: Phoronix
 

StickZer0

💙💙💃💙💙
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Nov 25, 2008
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Sweeeeeeeeeet, means I can use Ubuntu way more.
I honestly mostly just use Windows 90% of the time for Steam, I rarely play games on it
<3
 

Sel

Banned
Feb 18, 2009
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Sweeeeeeeeeet, means I can use Ubuntu way more.
I honestly mostly just use Windows 90% of the time for Steam, I rarely play games on it
<3

dude, fuck ubuntu.

Unity and Gnome 3 are the shittest uis I have ever seen.

KDE4 is so much better
 

Pocket

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For the record, I'm very skeptical about how well this will work out. Valve has a history of getting excited about some new project and then getting bored and abandoning it like a child with a new toy. The Steam-on-Mac project from 2010 is an appropriate example: Two years later, half their game library still hasn't been ported over, they never delivered the mod support they promised, the Steam client has major issues, and the new bugs their "updates" introduced to games like Half-Life 2 still haven't been fixed or even acknowledged. Furthermore, the people they brought in to work on all of that stuff don't work there anymore.
 

Terr

Cranky Coder
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Jul 31, 2009
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And they all laughed when I made my apps in Java... ;)
 

Terr

Cranky Coder
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Jul 31, 2009
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Just as long as you're hating for the right reasons.

I need to get off my ass and back to messing with IDE plugins...
 

Pocket

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I've been experimenting with Linux since around 2000, back when the best user-friendly distro was Caldera OpenLinux. And then came Red Hat, and then Ubuntu in college. Never did manage to get a proper working install on my own machine, though. There was always something that wouldn't install right, and 90% of the time that something was a driver. (Valve has no idea what they're getting into in that respect, by the way. If they thought driver support on the Mac was tough...)

Right now the big hurdle is having no hard drive space left. (I blame Steam for that too.) Though it would be fun as hell to get a Kubuntu install or something going just to try out Linux!Steam and complain about everything that doesn't work on SPUF.
 

Verumae

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http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5NTk
I wish they'd put this stuff on a distribution that's free. While Ubuntu is pretty close to being free, Canonical is definitely a company that wouldn't hesitate to start closing off the source, tightening licenses, charging, monopolizing, etc and ruining Linux' chance of getting anything else.
 

Pocket

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EA's desperate attempts at playing me-too with Valve keep teetering between funny and sad.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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I signed up last week despite my lack of any real experience. I figure if they were naïve enough to let me get my hands on the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta, it's worth a shot. Still haven't bought that new hard drive, but NewEgg is doing this "Black November" thing where pretty much everything is on sale all month, so I'll be ready to snatch one up if and when that coveted Steam pop-up appears.
 

Pocket

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Either I am a very lucky bastard or Valve is very lenient with their betas. You know that new hard drive I bought? Yeah, I had a specific reason for it besides being out of room for new games...

steaminstaller.jpg


The first run installer in all its awful bitmapped font ridden glory. On the right there is a sample of the rigmarole I had to go through to get the package unpacked, because it's a 32-bit app running on a 64-bit system and, well, Linux isn't as accommodating toward that as Windows and OS X are. Good thing Dolphin has a "Run command line from this folder" option in its right-click menus, because I cannot for life of me figure out where the "Downloads" folder actually is relative to /home.

steamlibraryg.jpg


And the library, complete with a game that's not listed as actually being available. I'm sure you're all wondering, "Is the client as buggy and uncooperative as it is in Windows?" I'm pleased to report that the answer is yes. No sooner do I start downloading TF2 than it freezes up and refuses to let me click on it. Some things never change. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go find out what Kubuntu's equivalent of the Windows Task Manager is.

EDIT: Found it. And the app has frozen up for the third time in as many hours. This is going to be interesting.
 
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Pocket

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Progress Update: So far game support appears to be all-or-nothing; Amnesia and World of Goo are completely indistinguishable from their Windows counterparts, and TF2 won't run at all because my driver doesn't have enough OpenGL in it or something. Luckily AMD is aware of their poor Linux support and has set up a site specifically for Steam users to yell at them to fix things, so hopefully this will get ironed out soon. Maybe Valve will finally get to put that "Check for driver updates" feature to good use; it's always seemed redundant in Windows and I don't think works at all on the Mac, but Ubuntu's built-in support for tracking down up-to-date proprietary drivers is pretty lousy.
 

Pocket

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Thought you might like to know how this has been going. Well, AMD ported their latest driver to "legacy" cards like mine, so TF2 now works but poorly (low framerate in some maps, especially Gorge for some reason, and it crashes if I try to turn on antialiasing). A new driver is in beta but only for the newer cards for now. Bug reports on their website are met with complete silence. Valve's GitHub, on the other hand, is abuzz with activity from both sides, the first solid evidence I've seen in years of Valve communicating with its users.

Aside from TF2 and CSS, all of their Linux ports seem to be concurrent with their SteamPipe migration. Half-Life 2 Deathmatch was ported over when it went to SteamPipe a few weeks ago, Half-Life and Counter-Strike were ported earlier this year, and all their other GoldSrc games are in beta. Yes, even Ricochet. And they finally got around to porting the GoldSrc games to the Mac, along with a pleasant surprise: Half-Life: Opposing Force and Half-Life: Blue Shift finally got their original soundtracks back!

And as of about an hour ago, a beta of Portal for Linux was unlocked (I assume there's a SteamPipe beta waiting for me when I get back to Windows). Left 4 Dead 2 was supposed to unlock this week as well, but so far it looks like announcing a release window jinxed it as usual.
 

Sel

Banned
Feb 18, 2009
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Oh right, it's this thread.

Alright, so I run Kubuntu on my laptop, and decided to give this stuff a go.

Kubuntu 13.04
Intel Core2Quad Q9000 @ 2GHZ
Nvidia 9600m (Using proprietary drivers)
4gb ram

Tf2, which is all we care about here, runs great (On medium-low settings, same as it would run on windows, in 1920x1080), no problems at all.

I also tried Psychonauts, and it performed abysmally, so I guess porting your game is really hit or miss idk!
 
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Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Funnily enough, I got perfectly fine performance from Psychonauts, other than AA not working there either (turning it on just has no effect).

The Left 4 Dead 2 beta just dropped tonight, so that's two games in as many days. Based on my experience with TF2, I think I'm just going to sit that one out. Portal did pretty well, other than the occasional half-second halt when I placed a portal.