Slashdot Mirror
Steam For Linux Will Launch In 2012
An anonymous reader writes "Gabe Newell has responded to an email asking if Steam for Linux will be released this year with the simple answer 'Yes.' That means at some point in the next 7 months anyone running Linux will be able to download Steam and start playing a number of games, including at least one Valve title (most likely Left 4 Dead 2). After that the emphasis will be on game developers to start porting their Steam games over to Linux. 2012 could be a great year for gaming on Linux. The news follows the revelation in April that Valve was indeed working on a Linux port of its digital games service. At the time though, and as with all Valve software, we had no idea when it would get released."
...
The bigger question is, will it motivate developers to port to Linux?
Great!
Remember that all games from the current and previous Humble Indie Bundles (overview of all games) have a Linux version, and most of them are on Steam too. So that's already a nice range of games to start.
DRM in Linux is practically nonexistent, and I'm glad to see this gap filled! I was starting to feel lonely without being groped by a lawyer.
Nope, just kidding. Still, excellent news!
Seeing as just about all of the Valve games on the Source engine have been ported to Mac, would I be correct in thinking that it is a vastly reduced job to then bring them to Linux?
Anyway, this is great news.
2012 - Year of the Linux Desktop!!
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time
That sucking sound is all my productivity flying out the window when this goes live. The last few years since the dvd drive on the family Wii console died I have gotten so much done. After all, on linux we all know the fun is in the coding and productivity tools (albeit a rarified kind of fun that you gotta immerse yourself in). If steam goes live with good games, well, I could see the 15 minute break I take when stumped by a coding challenge stretching into a week...
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
this may be the Year of the Linux Desktop... at least for me, and I'm guessing there are others like me.
Very few people will switch to Linux because Windows 8 is a mess. They will simply keep using Windows 7.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Considering the direction Microsoft is taking with the desktop (Windows 8) and rumours I've heard about Gabes opinion on Microsofts decisions with 8 (apparently extremely unhappy / disapointed) I suspect Valve is looking towards a future where linux is on significantly more desktops than it is now.
Admitedly, it's highly unlikely but you never know, Microsoft really are making a mess with Windows 8
Wait, so Phoronix has a screenshot from *someone* which shows an e-mail from Newell...and this is "evidence"?! What the hell is wrong with the Internet?!
While Steam on Linux isn't a bad thing, a screenshot of someone's gmail window is hardly evidence of anything, due to how easy it is to fake. Hell, even if it is a real GMail window, Firebug makes it trivial to add new output directly to a live page.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Debian is 250 % more effective than MyCleanPC, already the first millisecond. Debian then just goes on and on, beyond the pathetic performance of MyCleanPC.
Check out www.debian.org.
Debian makes MyCleanPC look like a virus.
Debian wipes the floor with MyCleanPC.
Check out www.debian.org.
Debian has about 30,000 apps for free.
There is no need to use MyCleanPC.
Debian makes MyCleanPC look really bad.
Check out www.debian.org.
...so it acts like apt-get for games.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There is only one reason STEAM is doing this, and it's pretty simple.
When they decide to release their own console (oh and they will), they want to make sure their platform will work on it, and that game developers have already started thinking about porting them over to *nix. Why pay a licensing fee for some OS to put on a console (or a licensing fee to XBOX or Sony to get STEAM on their platform), when they can instead make sure their platform works flawlessly on *nix, and then create a console using *nix.
the desktop *nix community will be like a beta test for their console, without all the demands of "I want a fix yesterday" that you would get from the Windows community.
Long term, they will end up taking a significant chunk of the current consoles market share.
Apple opposes you buying and using their OS if your computer isn't a Mac.
If you buy a computer and it has Windows 8 preloaded and you hate it, Mac OS may be available to you as a pirate, but Apple's position is that your computer is a doorstop, not a ludicrously overpowered computer which can be salvaged by installing decent software. They aren't going to try to directly use that machine to increase their OS market share.
They don't hope to get you as a customer until n years later when that machine is finally obsolete (and I think n is getting to be a pretty big number), and they're counting on you remembering how unhappy you were with your previous purchase being non-Apple hardware.
Except that when that day comes, you may have been running Mint for n years and probably don't actually have negative feelings about your hardware purchase. Turns out, the non-Apple hardware was fucking awesome (probably; most of today's shittiest garbage computers are just incredible, or at least in my experience). It's the preload you have bad feelings about.
There are a few angles; maybe you will keep Windows on the machine despite your unhappiness, so the bitterness will last longer. Maybe your otherwise useful machine has something weird for which drivers are hard to get or don't work well (e.g. realtek wifi), so you can't ever upgrade the OS. Maybe you'll recommend Macs to your friends and family, so someone else might get a Mac due to your purchase of a Windows-preloaded box.
There are opportunities for Apple, but most of them seem pretty fringe.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
You can still release closed-source programs on Linux, there is no barrier to stop that (examples include games from Introversion Studios and Cisco Packet Tracer). The real issue, as I understand, is supporting multiple distributions. Each distro use its own naming and packaging conventions to install the same library which turns application support into an unholy nightmare.
You don't read EULAs. You fetch your cat and make it walk on the keyboard until Enter is hit.
Given that games are being ported to the mac now (library is still small, but) - which is using OpenGL, OpenAL and OpenCL, then porting to linux if a mac port is already done should be relatively trivial - all those libraries are cross platform.
Don't expect DirectX ports any time soon though, the mac doesn't appear to get them either. But, its a start. Also, the beauty about Steam is that if the game is available on Linux as well as Windows, you can deinstall Windows, install Linux and not have to re-purchase. This works on the Mac at least.
The "barrier to entry" of having to re-purchase all of your software is lessened somewhat.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The problem is that we have too many distributions that attempt to package everything on the internet.
Pick a set of core packages, keep them up to date, anything else can be installed from source / pre-compiled binary under /usr/local.
However, doing that would require some sort of direction and choice to be made by someone and the community appears to be averse to that - much spin is given to the fact that you're free to customize everything in an unlimited way.
This is great, but it means there's no real base platform guaranteed to be in place and is guaranteed to not break when package foo is installed. Trying to audit and fix dependencies on 10,000 packages or more is a big problem, and I'm sure most users only have a very tiny subset of those packages installed on all of their machines.
Maybe statically link any "add on" applications to eliminate dependency hell? Disk (and memory) is extremely cheap now.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.