Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Worst case, static link the binaries.
"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."
I think you're talking out your ass to suit your obvious agenda.
Can I run $newgame? Probably not. That's not because of drivers, though; that's because the vast majority of demanding programs made use DirectX, and the best we have to make up for that is wine's reverse engineered interfaces to translate DirectX to OpenGL. They are astoundingly good for what they are, but obviously, are about 2 years behind in support and somewhat touchy.
I might have some graphical glitches and update issues from time to time, but even using a fairly new ATI card (generally regarded as the worst possible situation to be in), I still have perfectly and fully functioning 3D acceleration, including shaders. Performance of what I can run is effectively identical to that of the same programs on windows. Native OpenGL applications (try the Ogre demos) in fact run substantially better.
As for lowering the quality to make it run better? That basically proves you are clueless. Anyone who has actually run into driver issues on Linux can identify that speed is not an issue unless it is an extreme issue, ie, it is not that the drivers are magically slower (think about it...), but that sometimes they do cause issues that drag the system into the dirt. These are rare. The common driver problems are generally visual corruption and general failure, NEVER performance.
Don't let the facts get in the way of your screed, though.
Great Intellect...
Hey, Linux has had 15 years to get it's own shit together.
It's sort of like the Apple MP3 player thing. When the iPod launched it was far from the first MP3 player. But it was the first MP3 player that wasn't 100% crap to use. Completely took over the market and dominated everyone. But you know what? Five years later all the other MP3 players were still crap to use. Even after Apple showed how to do it right Creative and Sony and everyone else was still trudging along with crappy syncing utilities and even worse UI on the MP3 player itself.
Nothing was preventing them from making a good player and good software before or after Apple entered the market.
Same way, with or without Steam, nothing is preventing Linux and the distros from getting their shit together. Nothing is preventing them now. Nothing was preventing them five years ago. Steam comes out and turns a branch of Linux into RMS's worst nightmare? The rest of Linux will have no more or less opportunity to make a good package than if this whole Steam thing crashes and burns and never gets out of beta.
Indeed.
When I started with Linux, it seemed the choices were few: Slackware, or Yggdrasil (Red Hat, Suse, and Debian were a few years hence). Matt Welsh's fabulous book "Running Linux" focused on Slackware, and so did the rest of the Linux Documentation Project (is the LDP even still alive?). a.out was still a viable, and used, executable binary format.
Package management was shit: You installed a new package on your existing system with (at best) a "./configure&&make&&make install" as root (WTF is sudo?), ran ldconfig, fixed whatever it broke, and moved on.
Today, there are a myriad of safe (and unsafe) choices. And while the capitalist in me says that choice is good, the pragmatist in me says that it's really a burden.
The reasons for the crop of shit that we've grown are obvious: There is an incongruity between the folks who want to pay for an OS (Red Hat), the folks who want a free (libre) OS (Debian), folks who want an efficient OS (Gentoo FTW), and folks who want an OS that Just Works (Ubuntu).
So I'll be the first to say it: Yes, the community can stand to have a distribution wherein games Just Work. Because in having games Just Work, it's likely that proper low-latency audio will also Just Work. And from there, it's easy to have video Just Work. And at that point, it starts to sound a whole lot like what BeOS was...except it's still *nix, and it works on modern hardware.
Does it route packets? Does it run VMs with seamless precision? Can I do backups on an ancient Travan drive using ftape? Does it speak Arcnet or Token Ring? Who cares! Seriously. (I write this as a geek who has done all of these things, with a love for computing history, who has a thermal teletype, a box of paper, and a dedicated spot in the living room with suitable wire already installed, just waiting for a modernly-useful application that would benefit from such placement, as opposed to the dual-core 1.2GHz Linux box that I carry in my pocket.)
What the world could use right now, in my humble opinion, is a free(ish) OS that can do useful things with games media with great expediency and reliability.
Why?
Traditional user applications have run so fast ("faster than instantaneous" as a someone once told me is a bit of an exaggeration, but does fit with the current user experience) on any new hardware for nearly a decade that it's silly to even consider them as a goal. For all we complain, both Firefox and Open Office work fine even on rather ancient hardware (for instance).
Scientific applications increasingly rely on GPU calculations which rely on drivers for video cards which are primarily written for gamers. And as a scientist, one shouldn't need to care of the OS is totally free (libre), but whether or not the math is good and fast.
And server apps, well...gosh, Linux has done that very well since nearly day 1. The market needs no relative improvement in this area. It's nailed.
So a focus on low latency, for both video and audio, is a boon for gamers. A focus on making modern graphics, sound, and input hardware work well (through driver and API improvements) is a boon for both gamers and the scientific community. Give these goals a profitable shot in the butt by making games snappier than on other systems, and the rest of the demanding applications that common consumers actually use (AV production, graphic arts, fucking Youtube/Facebook/et al.) will happen naturally -- while also benefiting the rest of the users in the scientific community, and maybe (but not likely) in the sever realm.
(The above is just a dream from me, a random dude, who has used x86 computers for a couple of decades.)
Kid-proof tablet..
A platform suited to playing the newest DRM games? They should call it Windows.
No. Call it "Portals". "Windows" is already trademarked.
There is already such a thing. It's called Windows. I want Steam on _my_ installation of whatever distro I prefer. If I had to reboot whenever I want to play, it would negate the advantages of having Steam on Linux (for me), because I already do it this way with Linux & Windows.
Sorry but after several years using it Ubuntu is not the distro that 'just works'. Thats Debian and Im sorry I didnt discover it sooner.