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Valve Blog Announces Dates For Steam Linux External Beta
An anonymous reader writes "In the third post to the new Valve Linux Blog, the Linux team has announced that starting next week they will begin their internal beta, with an external beta of 1000 users to begin mid 'some time in October.' There will be an external beta sign up page made available 'soon' according to the blog."
but as someone who ditched Windows back when Win2K was still new I'm not really up on it.
Is it closer to an iTunes like store, an Apt like installer, or is it some sort virtual machine running a standardized program, like Flash, Java, or a console emulator?
Also - how does it compare to something like the Ubuntu Software Center I used to install Torch Light and the rest of the recent Humble Bundle stuff.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
"an external beta of 1000 users"
Wow, they are rolling it out to the entire Linux gaming community at once with plenty of spots to spare.
Heart skipped a beat there.
The intent is more to get Steam users off Windows and onto Linux than to take advantage of the current Linux market.
With Windows 8 announcing an app shop and scaring the hell out of small time developers we could finally see a real push for Linux adoption.
you can't sign away your legal rights
This would be clicking away your rights, that is totally different, and probably patentable.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
if Steam works on Linux with enough games I may just skip Windows 8 and everything after that.
I doubt Gabe Newell is familiar with hunger strikes.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
The main issue with running under WINE is that they have to use proprietary code for the mouse and input drivers.
What this means is that the mouse doesn't work in 80%+ of games. It's a known issue and they refuse to deal with it, despite having had a working solution when they were still offering their commercial product. They pontificate on their forums about how they support free software only and take the usual neckbeard cave-dweller *IX hard-line about "no commercial anything anywhere, any time." All the while while they HAVE the code.
They even go so far as to delete posts and requests about mouse problems from their forums and claim that there's no problem, or that it works fine. Wine are complete assholes about it. I can run Mass Effect 1 perfectly except there's ZERO control of the character with the mouse - it's just dead. No fix at all.
When I had Cedega, it ran perfectly. They killed Cedega and presto - everything simply broke due to worthless drivers.
You can bet that Steam will have no such issues getting the mouse and joystick working properly.
They're doing the initial beta (and possibly initial release) only under Ubuntu, to limit the number of complications.
Why Ubuntu? There are a couple of reasons for that. First, we’re just starting development and working with a single distribution is critical when you are experimenting, as we are. It reduces the variability of the testing space and makes early iteration easier and faster. Secondly, Ubuntu is a popular distribution and has recognition with the general gaming and developer communities. This doesn’t mean that Ubuntu will be the only distribution we support. Based on the success of our efforts around Ubuntu, we will look at supporting other distributions in the future.
Source: Valve Linux blog, entry "Steam'd Penguins", posted July 16 2012
And all that means, really, is that they currently only "support" it on Ubuntu - it will quite likely run fine on other distros, although probably with some work involved. And, if it's a reasonable success, they may make it supported on other major distros.
Another way you won't have to use Steam to benefit from this: The Steam development effort has already brought a lot of driver patches along, improving mostly 3D performance.
I think you're correct that OS X users are more likely to shell out cash.
However, Linux gamers have consistently paid more for Humble Bundles than those using other OSes; the total amount compared to Windows, anyway, is still relatively small. I'm curious to see how this plays out. As others have suggested, this may be a path to a non-Windows set-top box and store.
It depends. Some games are going to be trivial, some are going to be neigh impossible to port. An example of a trivial port will be most of the old games that were originally made for DOS. Steam plays those games by simply running an instance of dosbox, so these should be able to be ported by doing the same method in Linux. Some of the games already have linux versions (see the humble indie bundle games a good chunk of them are also on steam)
Mostly true, but Steam is also a storefront wrapping a DRM system. Some Steam games can run apparently without Steam running and signed in (none of the ones I've tried, though), but many can't. To be fair, that's sometimes because they use Steam for in-game features (multiplayer matchmaking and such) but often it's just for the DRM. There are almost no free (as in cost, much less freedom) games on Steam, so it's not much like a typical Linux package management repo in that way either.
As DRM schemes go, Steam isn't that bad; it can run in an offline mode for up to a month or so without connecting to Valve's servers, and it quite handily avoids the whole "You have used up your limit of X activations" BS. It brings a host of other problems, though, like the inability for two people to play two completely different games at the same time if they were purchased on the same account. It also has the usual "you don't really own it" BS of DRMed media, such as the complete inability to resell any game.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
This is something we have needed for a long time. Reducing overhead in OpenGL could trickle down to Windows users as well and may give other development houses an incentive to drop Direct3D. The fact that Valve was able to get AMD, Nvidia and Intel to work towards better graphic drivers is almost Herculean.