Ask Slashdot: Should Valve Start Their Own Steam Linux Distro?

Duggeek writes "There's been a lot of discussion lately about Valve, Steam and the uncertain future of the Windows platform for gaming. While the effect of these events is unmistakably huge, it raises an interesting question: Would Valve consider putting out its own Linux distro? One advantage of such a dedicated distro would be tighter control over kernel drivers, storage, init processes and managing display(s), but would it be worth all the upstream bickering? Would it be better to start anew, or ride on a mature foundation like Fedora or Debian? Might that be a better option than addressing the myriad differences of today's increasingly fracturing distro-scape?"

Comments

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[Billly Gates]

Hardware support sucks on Linux. Sorry slashdotters but more than half use crappy intel graphics with 2002 era performance and can't run any modern games unless they dumb the graphics down big time. Worse their drivers are buggy for Linux and are software optimized to make us pay for icore7s instead of icore3s with a better GPU instead. Another chunk like myself use ATI graphics which are also unacceptable for gaming. At least under Linux. I have got compiz to work on my ati 5750 a year and a half ago but I doubt wow would run decent compared to WIndows.

What Valve really needs is a dedicated console where they can control the hardware. Game makers can target just that as well as device makers. It is the only way Apple has made great macs. If they made just the OS it would be a buggy nightmare with things almost working or not at all.

If not it wont work as Linux is too difficult to target and support would be a nightmare. Game companies do not want calls from people with ati graphics drivers black screening xorg and having the customer blame them instead of ATI etc.