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Phoronix Confirms GNU/Linux Steam and Source Engine Clients
nukem996 writes "After initially reporting in 2010 that Valve was working on a native GNU/Linux client, one has finally been confirmed. Michael Larabel recently visited Valve's Bellvue, WA based office and has been able to see it himself. Included in the article are screenshots of the client running and speculation of a release."
Valve has yet to officially comment, but you'd hope they wouldn't invite someone up to their offices and send them home to spew lies.
I know this isn't going to be a popular sentiment on /., but a Steam Linux client is going to please the Linux community for all of about 5 minutes. The applause won't even have died down before they're bitching that there aren't enough games, it's not open source, it doesn't look right in their obscure distro of choice, etc.
The Linux community *should* embrace and celebrate this, but my experience has been that a large (or at least largely vocal) part of that community is made up of idealists and professional bitchers who think everything should be open source and free. Introducing a closed source client that charges for games into that group isn't going to please them. Nothing is going to please them.
Okay, now everyone mod me troll for pointing out something you know is true.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
The entire reason I *have* an Ubuntu partition is so that I *can't* play all the modern games I'm used to having. With this and how well WoW runs under Wine, I guess that programming Skynet will have to wait.
Thought this might be handy for those who wonder what else they might be able to get on Linux Steam:
http://steamlinux.flibitijibibo.com/index.php?title=Native_Games
What if their rumored steamBoxStation console is a "PC" running linux?
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
There are a number of users that will be happy to buy from steam if it is available for Linux. I am one of them and here is the description
I have grown used to buying apps for my Androis phone. The reason are:
- It is convenient
- prices are not outrigeous, so I can do impusle buying
Now, I don't use Windows and I don't feel like rebooting into it just for playing. I don't feel like maintaining the Windows OS, so I don't play games except the few Free/free Linux games coming in my distro. But I will purchase and play some of the classic games if they are available in Steam for Linux.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Well, if you bothered to read even the title, you'd see that says Source, which is Valve's game engine. That's a lot of games and mods, not to mention that they are all very good games. There are also a fair number of titles on Steam with Linux versions anyway, and this opens the way for more to happen. You can't expect it to be instant, but this gives devs a reason to release Linux versions, and a way to reach Linux users.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Regardless of the open-sourceness of Steam, the problem is still the same as it as always been with Linux : the marketshare is way too small for major companies to do Linux port, and most people who use desktop linux have Windows somewhere too.
Apart from Valve and indie games, I highly doubt we will see AAA games for Linux in the next few years.
And then there is the issues of video drivers.
Even if there have been good progress done recently, compatibility and performance are still way below Windows drivers.
Still, it's a good news, and it might be the first step that is needed to start.
Yes. And? No one is ever going to make wine perfect or port every game to Linux. At some point if gaming is going to happen under Linux, someone needs to make a move like this. No, there will not be a massive library to begin with, that doesn't make it wortheless. People might still want to play the games they can, and it makes it easier to release stuff in future. If I want to play Portal 2 on my Linux PC and it's availible, why wouldn't I? There is a point to it, even if it isn't every game. For some people, every game they want might have a Linux version. More likely, some won't, but that doesn't mean it's a no-go.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
245 Mac titles at the moment http://store.steampowered.com/search#category1=998&os=mac&advanced=0&sort_order=ASC&page=1
The following are just the ones that cost money and are directly from Valve.
This is already 14 games. Adding in the free stuff like Lost Coast and modds will greatly increase this list, but even 7 Vavle games on linux would be big news.
Half Life
Counter Strike
Blue Shift
Opposing Force
Half Life 2
Half Life 2: Deathmatch
Half Life 2: Episode 1
Half Life 2: Episode 2
Left For Dead
Left For Dead 2
Portal
Portal 2
Team Fortress
Team Fortress 2
It's an Elite-like: I develop it natively on Linux, although it runs on Windows also. However, the project is pretty close to dying on the vine for lack of any discernible interest. It's just a personal project done with no budget (at all), so wouldn't compete with major studios in the graphics department, but I think it's at least semi-credible on that front for a one-man indie game. (If curious, see Part1 Part2 Part3, though be prepared for amateurish presentation. I'm genuinely curious, since I thought there'd be some in the Linux community who'd like such a game).
It's a bit sad, but I suspect the project would have had far more interest if I *had* chosen to DRM it and sell it on Steam, but I'm about as anti-DRM as they come, even for a project I've put a year of my life into. I'll give up the whole thing before I'll allow DRM anywhere near it, even if that means it cannot succeed.
I've said for years and years and years, the main reason I don't use a Linux box as my main is because I can't play any games without messing with emulators or dual boot or some such, and quite frankly, I've never want to deal with it.
However, if this goes over well, and developers/publishers start actually using it? I'll probably finally switch over to some form of Linux.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see how this plays out.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Yeah, a "niche market". It isn't like Steam regularly has ~4 million users on it at any given time. By comparison. Xbox Live has peaked (peaked) at 3 million (Steam regularly breaks 4.5 and has peaked at over 5). Granted, that isn't a completely fair comparison, since a lot of steam users are likely to stay logged in 24 hours a day, but the fact that Skyrim had 350,000+ concurrent players near launch indicates that no, it isn't a "niche" market at all, by any means.
Oh and Valve currently has 2 games in playable beta status (one has 50,000 concurrent players regularly) and just released a game last year.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Wow all valve games? So that's like 7? OMG!
I'll take 7 good-to-awesome games over 4000 shitty ones any day of the week.
Quality, comrade, not quantity (lol, tity...).
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Valve is what I call "nice DRM". The things it stops you from doing are generally pretty mild - can't be online in more than one place at once, can't run games you haven't bought. As long as you're in online mode, you'll never even notice it. Offline mode is about as tricky as some DRM platforms' online modes - basically, as long as you've been permitted to play the game before, you'll be allowed to do so in offline mode (although patches have an unfortunate tendency to break that, making you go back online). As far as I know, it's never been found to do any sort of secret spying on the user - even the hardware survey (checks what hardware you're running on, so Valve knows what kind of computers they should be optimizing for) is opt-in.
It lets you do things many DRM systems would not allow - you can run on any computer you want, even simultaneously (although only one can be in "online" mode). You can play on LAN in offline mode, even against "yourself" - I regularly duel my brother in CS:S using just one copy of the game. You can copy and modify game files. Nothing is encrypted EXCEPT games that have not been released yet - many games will let you "prepurchase" them, start downloading a week or two before release, then all you need to do on release day is decrypt the files, usually takes about five minutes.
Compared to other DRM, Steam is at worst "tolerable". If what you care about is "playing games", Steam is fine, because any minor impediments it puts up are offset by it making many games more available. Steam's competitors, like Origin, tend to cause much more headache, and even most gamers only use them for the platform-exclusive games (I'd bet 90% of all Origin accounts have Battlefield 3 and/or Mass Effect 3, and nothing else).
tl;dr the only people butthurt about Steam's DRM are the people who don't actually like games, they just like complaining about "oppressive" DRM.
There's more and more games for Linux all the time and games which have Windows releases and are distributed via Steam often have a Linux release which could also be distributed via the same system. If Valve is bothering to do this they will likely produce Linux ports of future games produced within their engine. It paves the way for a future Steambox which is not running Windows.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's also talks about Source Engine being ported to Linux.
Now, I'm not really privy to how high-end game development works, so I can't really say how much the engine lets developers really keep their hands off of DirectX/OpenGL stuff, but I have let myself to believe that stuff really is handled mostly by the engine.
Ergo, if the engine handles the graphics stuff and it's ported to use OpenGL on Linux, it should, in essence, make Linux & OpenGL at least a little bit less repulsive choice for game devs.
The issue about 3D video drivers still stands, though. However... if people are able to put up with closed-source, proprietary stuff like Steam Client, Source Engine and the games themselves in the first place, they are most likely going to have proprietary binary blob drivers, too.
Note: I don't do much current gaming, I am only in near future going to switch all-linux, and haven't really had any experience how good or bad the binary drivers are. So take my comments with a grain of salt.
I believe Linux gaming will also accelerate development of Linux and drivers. Think about it, the more people stress our graphics stack with intensive 3D the more development will happen, bug reports, fixes, etc.
Next up, audio.
Please help me in getting both sound and in-game VoIP running in the Linux-native ETQW. I have spent hours and hours on this and had it working once, 3 years ago.
I've messed with Pulse Audio, ALSA, OSS-emulation, Arts, Esound and a couple of others all to no avail. I can get sound fine, but VoIP either doesn't work or causes a segfault.
The fact that all those different audio subsystems exist at all is the issue.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The rest of the comment was about one of the two major problems I have with Steam, and I happen to know more than a little about software development, so I'm going to speak up about that one point: The ability to collect runtime information is both very helpful for debugging and very invasive to the host system. Give the owner of the system the ability to enable it only if & when it is needed. Problem solved. Insisting on having it running at all times makes it spyware, which is rather telling about the publisher's intentions.
Hell, if nothing else, just do what Canonical suggests third party devs do and just install your binaries/libraries to /opt, put an icon in /usr/share/icons and put a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications. Problem solved. It ain't that hard, people.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.