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Valve's Steam & Games Coming To Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Valve's Steam and Source Engine-based games are coming to Linux. Michael from well known site Phoronix.com has been invited to Valve's office and was able to spend a day with the developers and Gabe Newell himself. He is confirming the rumors about Linux ports from Valve, and has been able to play the games and work the developers himself. Attached in the article are pictures from Valve's offices with games running on Linux."
Ever get that Deja Dupe feeling?
Seriously, one the same day: http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/04/25/1241241/phoronix-confirms-gnulinux-steam-and-source-engine-clients
The Year of the Linux (Gaming) Desktop is finally here!
I don't care if it's open source or not, just as long as i can play my beloved counter strike at a decent fps and not have to switch back to windows. Anyone who says different can just suck on it
And if that doesn't work here's another source.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I would assume left it in?
I haven't been following this whole thing, but I assume it's going to be closed source. Much as I'd prefer it open (like everything) and am sure it will be a nightmare to get running (and keep running) in my distro of choice (gentoo) I'm cool with just the functionality for now.
Never with a dry hand, that's for sure.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Stay classy, samzenpus.
Isn't it sad when the editors obviously don't even read their own site?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I already play Valve games on my Linux computer using PlayOnLinux (http://www.playonlinux.com/). That's been very stable for me, but I'm hoping that a native Valve client will allow even better system performance while gaming.
Unquestionably, Steam has DRM, but it is some of the least intrusive DRM out there.
I can play games offline. I can download copies of my games as many times as I want on other devices. I don't get limited activations. Steam doesn't break anything else on my box. And Steam routinely has really cheap prices.
I don't like DRM. I feel it punishes paying customers without stopping pirates. But frankly, I think Steam is worth the trade-off. The DRM doesn't get in the way, and the benefits are pretty good.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It's not for the open source community. It's for gamers who use Linux. Not every Linux user has the same ideologies.
I wonder if this Steam Linux client will act like PlayOnLinux and download Whitelisted Wine Clients that Steam won't flag as "cheating." I say this because I have a family member that keeps one Windows 7 machine just because he plays Left 4 Dead 2, and Steam once banned a whole sloth of Wine Users because their DLL files did not match the database Steam had.
Supposedly, Steam keeps a whitelist of known Wine DLLs to prevent this.
Just because Steam will now run officially on linux doesn't mean all the titles existing for windows will magically be available for linux. It only means that developers who had already ported to linux may market it as such. Same thing happened with desura for linux. And you can see how limited the Mac selection on steam is as compared to windows (I'd expect linux to be even less).
The only positive side to this is that, hopefully, companies will have a bit more of an incentive from NOW on to port to linux.
On the other hand, companies that already WERE porting to linux anyway, and in a nice non-DRM manner, will probably opt to do it via steam now instead.
Agreed. I used to bitch at people buying digital only assets (ITunes, I'm looking at you) as a no win situation. Steam is all the opposite of that. They get insane rebates you'll never see in stores. They let you play offline, redownload countless times, they have automated patching of games which is worth gold, gone are the days of waiting on gamespy servers and going through hoops becasue the publishers will make you go to shady ad infested download sites with their "wait half an hour or pay for a gold memebership" crap. They even have plus values such as notification of new video cards drivers and it can even patch it for you (opt-in) The only thing I hate is that I can't be logged in from several computer at once on the same account, I could play a game on my pc while my gf plays one on my laptop...I guess shared accounts would be a rampant problem. I used to hate the very idea of it...but getting top notch games for under 20$ helped me cope.
We should have been
So much more by now
Too dead inside
To even know the guilt
Isn't it sad when the editors obviously don't even read?
FTFY
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
TFA shows Valve dev workstations running L4D2 under Linux.
shashdot? Step away from the beer bottle ..
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Right? Why doesn't the most successful online game distribution platform and developer of all time just open source their entire livelihood?
look for the goodies on steam workshop.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Would make sense if the rumors of a Steam Box are true.
I just installed Steam under wine, and it worked. I bought HL2, and it worked. Then a terrible thing happened, and I accidentally the whole .wine directory.
Guess what happened when I reinstalled Steam again? The first time I fired it up, it popped up a little message saying that it couldn't see the installs of all the games I'd bought, and would I like it to go and download them again? Well yes, of course I would, so I clicked "OK", had a cup of tea, and boom, HL2 just plain worked, again.
This isn't like anything else I've seen of DRM. This is just plain handy.
Uh, yeah, that's known as "Steam".
I can play games offline.
Except when you can't. I've had a handful of times when steam wants to connect even when I tell it to play offline. And it refuses to do anything else. It has pissed me right the hell off each time. That's DRM getting between me and what I paid for.
Steam is a pretty good distribution system. And Valve has a lot of sales which make it enticing. But as far as DRM goes, it's still too much.
What good timing. There just happen to be a bunch of Kickstarter projects that will need a way to distribute their promised Linux clients.
No sig for you!!
Not half-life, not Portal, not TF2, not Counter Strike
You might like to open the link pointing to the article. You don't even need to read anything, but you can just look at the pretty pictures and then go facepalm in your corner!
If you need someone to answer that for you, just buy the Mac. I could think of several reasons why *I* would rather use the Linux desktop, with the principal reason being it's cheaper.
I want to know how they are gonna divide the games, will the Linux guys only be able to buy from a special Linux section? The reason I ask this is the one criticism I have for Steam is on their big sales it is often difficult to see at a glance which games use ONLY Steam DRM, and there are plenty of games on steam that use TAGES, SecuROM, even GFWL ON TOP of Steam. of course since all of these require kernel hooks Linux simply won't allow none of these games will be available.
It will be an interesting experiment to see how the Linux community reacts because no matter how you slice it Steam IS a form of DRM, its just a form of trivial DRM most of us, at least on the Windows side, have no problem with. But with so many in the Linux community being almost religious in their hatred of all things DRM it will be interesting to see if they will allow or tolerate Steam being on Linux.
I'll say congrats to all the Linux users out there but I bet you're gonna be in for some nasty fights with the zealots in the coming months and of course i bet RMS rails against this like its the antichrist. It does bring up an interesting question though: Are you willing to accept the publishers terms in order to gain share? after all linux will never become a mainstream OS if the users can't have the games and programs they want and many of the publishers have made it clear they will NEVER release their stuff under GPL or give up DRM, and considering what happened to Loki they probably have a point. Will Linux users compromise? Or will the side that treats GPL as a religion simply overpower the pragmatists? Time will see but I bet in either case it will bring up some most interesting questions and help determine which direction Linux goes. In either case congrats Linux fans, and don't forget to be ready for the big Steam sales, man you will be able to load up on games during those!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I can understand why Steam is such a successful platform, but I bought two games on it and got burned badly enough by them that I got rid of it.
The first pretty much killed it for me. It was a $60 AAA game that took several days to download over my DSL line, which by itself was fine. However, after waiting all that time to get it installed and playing it for exactly 1 evening, it came out with a patch that took about 48 hours to download. As soon as the patch was available, Steam locked me out of the game without warning and started downloading it. Soon after I finished downloading that patch, there was a new one that locked me out again. Steam wouldn't let me choose whether (or even when) to download a patch. I could force the download to stop, but that just kept me locked out of the game indefinitely until I restarted and completed it. In the first month I was only able to play the game two or three evenings because it pushed me up to my ISP's bandwidth cap. I explained my problem to Steam tech support, and asked for either a way to disable the lockouts or a refund so I could buy a copy of the game that I could actually play. They told me to piss off, and I told them I was done buying things on Steam.
The second was a game I'd bought first, but that I ended up playing for a while after. At some point, Steam ended up locking me out of the game with a cryptic error message. I don't recall the exact message (it's been a while), but when searching Steam forums for it, they recommended a number of things (including deleting the game and re-downloading it, re-installing Steam, etc.), but nothing worked. I would've contacted tech support, but fortunately that game had only cost $10. At that point I decided that $10 was a cheap price to pay to be able to uninstall Steam and walk away from it forever.
The reason I ask this is the one criticism I have for Steam is on their big sales it is often difficult to see at a glance which games use ONLY Steam DRM
Huh? It's not, really. In the game details (where the publisher, etc are displayed) for the game and even sometimes in the system requirements, it will say "Uses 3rd Party DRM" and often which form of DRM it is. Games that require you to be online (Ubisoft crap) will have an online disclaimer under the description which states this fact as well.
Some games omit this information but any time I've seen this happen it always seems to have been an oversight rather than having no intention to mention it.
Never tried slackware-current, eh?
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Currently, if you own game X on Windows you automatically have its Mac OS counterpart show up in your games library when it's available. I would imagine Linux games will be the same.
Sorry, but as someone who regularly uses Windows, OSX and Linux on the desktop, I have to say it's been very aggravating the past two years especially in desktop Linux... Binary drivers are even more of a pain to get running on a recent distro than in the past both for nVidia, and AMD/ATI.. though the FLOSS drivers have had a lot of progress, none of them (for AMD/ATI or nVidia) are sufficient for gaming. Beyond this, I had issues with Intel graphics around Ubuntu 9.04 (iirc), regression issues in the driver that most laptops used at the time.
The fact is, for those interested in gaming, Windows is the best bet.. on the high end, if you want a unix-like OS, you're better off with OSX. For servers, Linux now rules the roost, so to speak. That doesn't mean that Linux is in any way, shape or form at a usable desktop level. Ubuntu was close in the 8.x releases, but has slid. Mint is about as good as it gets today, imho, but still has a lot of rough edges for a typical user. There's a huge difference in what you/I will put up with from a free OS, and what your typical customer will.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
You got your Twitter in my Slashdot!
No, you got your Slashdot in my Twitter!
ATI
- quality of the proprietary drivers has increased lately. though they tend to only support the last few generation of GPUs only. (Early Radeon HD will be dropped soon).
- open source drivers: they are officially supported by ATI. That's their recommandation for anything not supported in Catalyst anymore (Currently everything up to Radeon X). They are stable although not as goof performance wise for latest hardware as the Catalysts.
- If you want hardware that will supported for long ATI is the thing to go for, thanks to their oopensource drivers policy.
Nvidia:
- the quality of the proprietary driver is really good, though it doesn't play nice with a lot of modern Linux technologies (no KMS, no EGL, no up-to-date Xrandr, no Wayland for that matters, etc...) and miss features that their Windows counterpart offer (no stereo on anything but expensive workstation cards, etc.) Also therewas a recent debacle with exploits against these drivers, and a hasty update that broke performance.
- open source drivers: No support from Nvidia, so developpers have to reverse-engineer everything, but at least Nvidia don't sue either. Performance and quality is patchy. Middle range slightly older cards are best supported and have best performance.
- If you want the best of best current gfx cards, and change for a new one evvery few months, go for Nvidia and proprietary drivers.
Intel:
- their official drivers are the opensource ones, and they have rather good performance (well, for Intel hardware anyway...)
There are signs that things have improved:
- Browser developpers (Firefox and Chromium) have moved from only whitelisting Nvidia binary drivers for hardware acceleration, to whitelisting Nvidia, ATI and Intel for both closed and open source drivers.
- Icculus' Gordon has changed his mind progressively. Whereas last year he was ranting that opensource drivers are catastrophic, this year he mentionned that things have improved dramatically.
Also, according to other Phoronix reports and according to Valve's Gabe's twitter, Valve is hiring not only OpenGL Linux developpers but also Linux developpers with kernel developping skills. One can expect that Valve is going to put some paid workforce to improve driver quality.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You're not kidding. Slackware 9 was my introduction to Linux, and after accidentally deleting my Windows partition, it was all I had. It took 2 weeks just to figure out how to configure my DSL connection. Two of the best weeks I ever had, I might add.
The penguin made me do it.
I didn't see anything about this compatibility layer in the article, but I guess it would be similar to the OSX version, if the OSX version is slower than the windows version on the same hardware then likely it would be on Linux as well. As far as I could tell from the article though, they don't use wine, so if they do use some sort of compatibility layer I would assume (without knowing much about graphics programming) they probably have a wrapper to map direct3d calls to opengl in the source. In that case I would guess that it wouldn't be slower than windows for any reasons related to the game itself at least, but perhaps due to drivers.
This bit me last time I lost my internet connection too. The solution is to enter offline mode at least once while online so your computer gets authorized for offline use.
My UID is prime... is yours?
The reason I ask this is the one criticism I have for Steam is on their big sales it is often difficult to see at a glance which games use ONLY Steam DRM, and there are plenty of games on steam that use TAGES, SecuROM, even GFWL ON TOP of Steam.
It'd be nicer to have better indications on Steam itself about DRM status of games (in sales and out of), but there's this community maintained list if that's at all helpful: http://steamdrm.flibitijibibo.com/