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Steam Not Coming To Linux
dkd903 writes "A rumor has been going around for about four months that Valve was working on a Linux version of Steam and this had a lot of people in the Linux community very excited. But, Valve has now officially killed the rumor. And it is not what people wants to hear – there is no Linux version of Steam in development. Doug Lombardi, the Marketing VP of Valve Corporation, in an interview, has put an end to all the rumors by saying that they are not working on Steam for Linux right now."
Last I checked it ran pretty good in Wine (the Source engine too), so it's not a total loss.
Developing for Linux is a lot like developing for OS X - pthreads, POSIX, OpenGL, and all. Besides, if they need their games ported to Linux, all they would have to do is contract Ryan Gordon.
Umm, yes, because so many enterprises have adopted Mac OS...
Insightful my arse. Linux is much bigger than Mac in the enterprise.
I do dual boot, but I wouldn't have a need to dual boot if the games ran native in Linux. The only reason windows exists on my box is to run games, bringing the cost of games to $cost_of_games+$microsoft_tax. While I like free things as much as the next guy, I expect to pay for games (just not monthly, screw Blizzard.) Steam's DRM is unintrusive and very rarely causes me inconveniences.
I think its less to do with some ideology about only using free software, but with the license under which ubuntu is packaged, where it can't automatically opt you into closed-source software
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
But more Linux users will actually pay and pay more for good native games. They just won't pay for something of which they can legally get working free equivalents
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
A program that allows machine code to be run on a system which does not accept it natively. For example, software that allows compiled powerPC code to run on an x86 system would be an emulator.
WINE by itself allows windows programs compiled for x86 to run without Windows, but only on systems that are also x86. The machine code is never interpreted. It instead provides a compatibility layer for the Windows kernel and API.
The people who actually wrote WINE knew what emulation is, and that they weren't doing it. You should listen to them
I'm not a big fan of Phoronix and it's multi-page click through articles, but saying the rumor had no basis in reality is a bit of a stretch. The short of it is there was never an official announcement. Phoronix pointed out, and many others verified, there was several references to linux in various portions of the Steam client. This all came to a bit of a frenzy as some binaries that appeared to be the early workings of a linux client were found available from a valve server. They were up for several weeks, during which several people played with them and got them to some degree of running, and then the binaries disappeared. Some, including Phoronix, speculated that this was in preparation for getting that client ready for release.
Most likely there have been several pushes to port things to linux, but never enough follow through, so there are linux compatible bits strewn all over the place.