Valve Starts Promoting Steam For Linux To Windows Users

An anonymous reader writes "Steam is now being used by thousands of gamers running a Linux OS, and Valve has got to the point where they are happy to start urging Windows users to make the switch. Proof of that comes from a 'Join the Beta' promotion on the homepage of Steam suggesting you try Steam for Linux. There's even a download link to get Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which removes yet another barrier to entry. With Gabe Newell's clear hatred of Windows 8, this shouldn't be a surprising move. We aren't going to see another version of Windows appear for a few years, so in Valve's eyes pushing Linux to gamers makes a lot of sense."

Comments

annual windows

[genericmk]

It is worth pointing out that Microsoft has promised a more regular windows release so the comment of a few years wait for next Windows isn't correct. (or maybe not, maybe Microsoft will not deliver on its "promise").

Re:annual windows

[The MAZZTer]

To be fair Valve is the one who was first to promise new versions of their flagship product in shorter periods of time and look what happened! :)

Re:annual windows

[RedHat Rocky]

Seriously? You seriously put forth Microsoft does NOT have a extensive past history of delivering on promises?

I'm really hoping that was a dry joke, not something to make something like me pop out.

Re:annual windows

[RedHat Rocky]

Curses, semi-annual Why Can't I Edit Or Abort Said Post occurrence!

"put forth Microsoft does NOT have a extensive past history of delivering on promises?"

1. Microsoft has a long history of delivering on promises.
2. Said history is clear: they suck at delivering on promises.

Re:annual windows

[marcosdumay]

Microsoft always take some two or four years more to deliver Windows than they promissed. Will this time really be different?

(If so, when is the release date?)

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I am Linux Zealot, while in Linux terms, a lot has happened, saying that something happened to windows user is laughable. There is dozen of games, and only 2 or of them can be called higher tier. Not even high Tier. Serios Sam is exception. But again, it's not the best game ever, but very good non the less. Apat from it: Team Fortress and Killing Floor, Amnesia, Red Orchestra 1.

Rest are simple 2D games more or less. Not that they are not fun, but non the less, 2D

There is nothing on Linux compared to Windows from perspective of windows user.

Re:annual windows

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention until they find a way to fix the BIG PROBLEM which is a good 90%+ of the games are built around DirectX and therefor won't run on Linux? You can give it up. I mean who wants Steam on Linux when it has less selection than the already piss poor Steam for Mac?

Sure they could try to incorporate Wine into Steam but I wouldn't be surprised if Valve ends up with a couple of years worth of lawsuits from MSFT which rightly or wrongly most likely MSFT WILL WIN since most of the Wine development is done in Europe where the laws on reverse engineering are VERY lax compared to ours. In the USA you had better use clean room procedures with strict separation between the one looking at the code to be reverse engineered and the guy writing the replacement.

So I'm sorry but I just don't see how this is gonna get any traction. Not only will you not find Linux being sold on any machines in any B&M stores but when all the hottest games use a framework that you don't have and won't run without serious hoop jumping? Hell the whole point of Steam is its a "push button and get game" service and if the only way you can run the majority of games is to deal with a couple of pages of CLI crap and a LOT of finger crossing because most of the games run DirectX I don't see many people putting up with it.

I still think this is all smoke and mirrors though, the REAL reason for Steam on Linux is Valve's Steambox which will run a GPL V2 only Linux (so they can use the hardware DRM that consoles require) and they are just letting the community beta test the software before it goes into production. Makes sense, if the console is a hit they can talk more devs into porting to OpenGL on Steambox and if they put out a console it needs to be solid on the software front, hence the beta testing. I just don't see how Steam on Linux could be the end goal, not with so many show stopping problems.

Re:annual windows

[hairyfeet]

The release date is 2015, which makes it a standard 3 years per release. Since they have already said ALL versions, not just Pro, will get a full 10 years of support this will allow businesses to skip a couple of releases (as they did by skipping Vista for 7, and are now skipping 8) without losing support while basically using the consumers for the beta testers for the features that will end up in the business friendly odd releases.

Frankly I don't know why FOSS users would bitch about this since they are basically copying your "odd/even" or "LTS/regular" release concepts. If the reports are correct, which we've seen no indication that they aren't and a lot of evidence (Surface, MSFT stores, MSFT building their own hardware) that they are what you are gonna see with Windows is the same thing Apple users have had with OSX for ages, a $40 a pop upgrade and faster releases because like OSX instead of trying to come up with a shitload of new features to justify a $100-$200 price point they will just add a couple of things to each release and sell more of them on the fast release schedule.

Personally I don't give a shit as long as the next "LTS Business release" aka Win 9 gives us the choice of getting rid of that damned metro crap in favor of a standard desktop and they make system builders and OEM pricing cheaper and more transparent.

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I just don't see how Steam on Linux could be the end goal

Of course you can't see it. You can't see anything that isn't spelled MSFT. Same old hairyfeet beating the same old drum. Why don't you and the monkey dancing chair cannon get a room and let us idiots be. You weren't successful in your first billion attempts at convincing us all that Linux is a toy OS that will never amount to anything. You won't be successful now.

Go away and take your dated noise with you.

Re:annual windows

[dbIII]

I'm still waiting for the wonderful things that Balmer said "were already in Longhorn" back when that was the code name for what ended up as Vista.

Re:annual windows

[dbIII]

Not to mention until they find a way to fix the BIG PROBLEM which is a good 90%+ of the games are built around DirectX and therefor won't run on Linux?

WINE gets most of that right, but since DirectX is a moving target there is a lag so the stuff it misses out on is the most recent bits of DirectX.

Also if a game has been anywhere near most consoles it's not going to have DirectX.

Re:annual windows

[moronoxyd]

I'm pretty sure that Windows 7 and Windows 8 ware released on time.

So recent data contradicts your statement.

Re:annual windows

[Teun]

Curses, semi-annual Why Can't I Edit Or Abort Said Post occurrence!

Because some posters would edit their original trolling posts and flamebait remarks to better their karma.
Maybe /. could implement a system like Wikipedia where some extra clicks will show the changes?
Regardless, edits would break a lot of threads.

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

It works on Reddit?

Re:annual windows

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...DirectX really isn't much of a moving target since Win 8 has flopped, I'd say a good 80% of the games either are or still have support for DirectX 9C while I can only think of a couple of games that are DirectX 10+ only (Halo 2, Just Cause II being the only ones I can think of) so if you could incorporate a perfect DirectX 9C you would have probably 80%+ game support.

Again though rightly or wrongly our system on reverse engineering is a LOT more strict than the EU or Asia and since a large portion of the game development is done in the USA that is gonna be a serious problem. Frankly MSFT could shut down and block Wine from the USA, might even be able to get it blocked by anybody that signed Berne because of how lax the Wine team has been with regards to reverse engineering. Just look at how ReactOS was brought to a screeching halt when allegations of MSFT code was leveled, with Wine it would be worse because you can go to their dev boards and they come right out and say they don't use clean room.

So until somebody can come up with a product capable of replacing Windows (Linux is too fiddly and is more a loose collection of programs than an OS, OSX too expensive, ChromeOS too locked down and web only) its gonna be really hard to get game devs to give up on DirectX and really who can blame 'em? OpenGL has been a mess for the better part of the decade, with Khronos caring too much about backwards compatibility to make the CAD people happy than actually competing with DX, this is a case where somebody like Valve really needs to fork OpenGL away from Khronos and put it back on a fast track so that once again it can be ahead of DX on features and work closely with GPU makers like they did during the days of HL 1 and Quake.

Re:annual windows

[slim]

the BIG PROBLEM which is a good 90%+ of the games are built around DirectX

I find it very hard to believe that any serious developer codes directly to DirectX. Anyone with any kind of foresight has half an eye on portability. If Linux isn't on their radar, PS3 and Wii are, or Android, or Mac, or [insert future platform].

So you put in an indirection layer. Basic software engineering. That's how the big boys release on all the consoles simultaneously. That's how the indie developers have Linux, PC and Mac ports.

A sensibly architected game will be pretty easy to port to Steam for Linux. Even if it's been coded directly for Windows, a developer can make something stable with Winelib and perhaps some code tweaks.

There's a chicken and egg situation, and it may take some time to get going. I can see it building like this:

  1. A few thousand gamers switch to Linux
  2. The few games available on Linux sell well to that captive audience
  3. A few dozen developers notice the captive audience, and realise that the small effort of making a Linux port will result in enough sales to make it worthwhile.
  4. The Linux game catalogue grows, and a few tens of thousands of gamers are motivated to switch
  5. Feedback loop continues until almost all developers make a Linux build as a matter of course.

Re:annual windows

[dbIII]

since a large portion of the game development is done in the USA

Is it?
I'm in Australia and there's quite a few US titles getting outsourced to here to avoid healthcare costs (we have one of those scary socialist systems that delivers actual healthcare out of taxes instead of making insurance companies fat) or whatever makes your programmers more expensive.

Re:annual windows

[konaya]

Frankly I don't know why FOSS users would bitch about this since they are basically copying your "odd/even" or "LTS/regular" release concepts.

I'm sorry, what? My systems use rolling-release. Putting two equals signs between FOSS and Ubuntu is as silly as putting two equals signs between PC and Windows.

Re:annual windows

[VGPowerlord]

I still think this is all smoke and mirrors though, the REAL reason for Steam on Linux is Valve's Steambox which will run a GPL V2 only Linux (so they can use the hardware DRM that consoles require)

We'll come out with our own and we'll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That'll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can. We're not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination

-- Valve CEO Gabe Newell in an interview with The Verge earlier this month.

Besides, Steam is a software DRM system; why would they need hardware DRM?

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_games_developed_in_Australia
The list really digs deep and includes "The Hobbit" (1982 video game).
It's still substantially shorter than the "A" section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_games_developed_in_the_United_States
Just sayin'.

Re:annual windows

[marcosdumay]

I'm still waiting from the WinFS that would launch with Cairo by 92.

Re:annual windows

[marcosdumay]

Frankly I don't know why FOSS users would bitch about this since they are basically copying your "odd/even" or "LTS/regular" release concepts.

Funny, before I read the replies to that post, I couldn't think of a single FOSS project that used odd/even releases. Linux used to use it, but they reflected upon that and realised it was a dumb thing to do. All that before MS adopted it.

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

As an outside observer, who owns quite a few games on Steam and elsewhere that mostly all of which only work on Windows (I haven't tried Wine, thanks) here's my thinking. Steam on Linux is probably the end goal along with steamboxes in the living room as an ET center and the showstopping problems for offering a decent suite of games on Linux are fixed through the console. The showstopping bugs to running the software are solved through this beta program and the early adopters of the steam box. How many games do the 360 and PS3 have working at launch? How many of those games are blockbusters? Very few. Is their backwards compatibility support which is lackluster to say the least a showstopper in terms of consumer adoption and future game development? No. Does the PS3 lack DirectX but still manage to get most 3rd party console games ported to it? Yes. Do quite a few big name engines just recently add Linux support? Yes. My point is this: valve can release a console without an existing huge library of games like the other consoles do every time.

Furthermore if all the steam box is in terms of library, language, OS, and engine support, is a x86 PC with a Linux distro and steam slapped on top, they can build up a library of games over the course of 5 years. Also since it's Linux + (presumably) OpenGL + whatever else for sound etc but is essentially OSS, they never have to make this switch again. That is, when they release a new console, its not a backwards compatibility breaking thing like a new xbox is. It's simply an updated hardware spec plus software updates which can be pushed to the older gen. If hardware sales are slow they can do two things: license out the steambox spec so other manufacturers hop in and lower the price through competition and secondly slow down hardware production. They don't have a 2-3 year timeline which is make or break for the console, since there's no EOL date for the spec. Its continuously rolling. In other words, its a very sly business move designed to lose them the least amount of money if it fails spectacularly and if it doesn't fail horribly it can simmer and be a quiet success five years down the road as they slowly ramp up number of users and number of games.

I don't know if this be a success or not, and I think a lot of what happens will depend on MS's response to this. Also, I don't think MS cares about this as much as gamers might think. Right or wrong, MS cares a lot more about the mass market (a la Apple) and the business market then they do the gaming market. As a consequence their response may be essentially be keep doing what they're doing now (ignoring it) and focus on the direction they want to go. That along with Valve's quality control (which in my experience is hit or miss) are probably the two biggest factors for this contraptions success.

-AC because I haven't been here in a while and forgot my login. FWIW the comments here seem even more stupid, childish, myopic and selfish to the point of missing the bigger picture or other's motivations then when I left.

Re:annual windows

[Githaron]

Ubuntu doesn't do even/odd but they definitely have LTS releases that they promote commercial support for.

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

[quote] if you could incorporate a perfect DirectX 9C you would have probably 80%+ game support[/quote].

Sure, but most people play net games, not the old ones. Just because you can't think of more than 2 directx 10+ games doesn't mean there aren't any (far cry 3, planetside 2, crysis 2, etc).

Re:annual windows

[Shirley Marquez]

They already did make the system builder license more transparent. (The new terms only apply to Windows 8, not to earlier versions, though they might apply to copies of Windows 8 Professional where the downgrade right to Windows 7 or Vista is exercised.) It now contains the Personal Use License clause: System Builder product may be used: As the operating system on a PC you build for personal use. As an operating system running either on a local virtual machine or as an additional operating system in a separate partition. System Builder product may not be used: As an upgrade license for an existing underlying Windows operating system. To legalize a non-genuine Windows operating system. To license more than five copies of the software (in total) for commercial use. That "more than five copies" clause is part of the Personal Use License and applies to commercial use by the builder. It does not preclude selling more than five commercial use copies to a customer. The old "full retail license" - the really expensive version of Windows - is essentially dead and Microsoft should discontinue it. People buying computers from major manufacturers will, as they have for years, get OEM licenses. People building their own computers and small boutique computer builders will use the System Builder version. All but the tiniest corporations will use one of Microsoft's volume licensing programs, which start at five seats. There isn't a market niche remaining for the old full license.

Re:annual windows

[lengau]

Of course there isn't much now. Heck, some of the games that have native Linux ports through their software houses weren't available for Linux on Steam the last time I checked. But I think that's part of why Valve are promoting their Steam beta. If they can say "well, 5000 of our users are using Steam on Linux," they can get a few games ported. If they can say "well, 5 million of our users have Steam on Linux," developers are far more likely to port their games. Given that Valve will be releasing what appears to be a Linux-based console soon, I imagine they're quite interested in getting as many games as possible ported to Linux, and in having them well-tested before the console gets released.

Re:annual windows

[lengau]

I'm fairly certain that the "odd/even" remark was referring to the old Linux kernel practice summarized by Torvalds himself as follows:

2.6.<odd>: still a stable kernel, but accept bigger changes leading up to it (timeframe: a month or two).

2.<odd>.x: aim for big changes that may destabilize the kernel for several releases (timeframe: a year or two)

<odd>.x.x: Linus went crazy, broke absolutely everything, and rewrote the kernel to be a microkernel using a special message-passing version of Visual Basic. (timeframe: "we expect that he will be released from the mental institution in a decade or two").

Re:annual windows

[lengau]

There's no real reason for them to discontinue it. The small amount of work it takes to manage it is likely made up for by the number of people (small though it may be, it's likely in the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands) who buy it.

Re:annual windows

[snadrus]

Wine's DirectX to OpenGL translator presents DirectX-capable video cards to Windows VMs on Linux. Valve can use it as a library for a closed-source Linux app could and no one would know unless you reverse-engineered the game.
And with Valve making a console, you'll never know it's a "fiddly" Linux system underneath.

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course MS is going to rush out a new version. 8 is to 9 as Vista was to 7.

I guess it took them a long time to figure out that if you try to force a tablet/phone interface onto a desktop, no business will want and few consumers either.

Given that the vast majority of their profit comes from other businesses they decided losing them in an attempt(failed, yet again) to grab significant embedded market share is a bad idea.

The fact that it never occurred to them during the 8 debacle speaks volumes of the competency of MS.

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

If it hard to see anything with your tough shoved up Ballmer's asshole.

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Oracle has proven, it was not their goal, that API's are not copyrightable.

With a complete listing of all of Direct X's public facing functions, you can implement your own version and MS can't say boo about it.

I don't know if MS has given the wine project any assistance, but you can use wine to get certain MS application updates such as IE.

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

MS has a rich history of not learning from others.

That is why they are so irrelevant today and getting less relevant every second.

Re:annual windows

[TsuruchiBrian]

First of all, "Linux" is not a collection of programs. It is *only* a kernel. A "linux distribution" is a collection of open source software including the linux kernel. These are referred to as "linux distributions" as a matter of tradition, but really linux is only one part (albeit a pretty big one). There are other open source kernels (e.g. hurd) but Linux is just the most popular and mature.

I don't see how being "a loose collection of programs" is a bad thing. What is a typical computer running windows but a loose collection of programs. Windows is a boot loader ntldr, a kernel ntoskrnl.exe, and a million exe and dll files.

I am not saying linux is great at everything. If you want to play games, you need windows. I am saying that I don't thing the approach taken by linux is flawed. It's a really good design. Linux just needs some better drivers from Nvidia and AMD, and for game makers to make cross platform version of their games and, bingo it's basically just as good as windows. Windows has problems. Linux has more problems, but they are not insurmountable.

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I think hairy douchenozzle meant DX 10 only games, but who the fuck knows what that idiot meant

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Win 8 is an epic fail

Win 7 is missing features promised of Vista.

MS's incompetence contradicts your statement.

Shipping shit on time is meaningless.

Re:annual windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny considering that OpenGL provides far better performance than the DirectX 3D library.

Lunux desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the year...

Re:Lunux desktop

[cod3r_]

Hopefully a new era of game dev is upon us. This is not only great for linux, but great for people like myself who only use windows for games. Hopefully the video card makers will beef up their effort writing drivers and software for compatibility.

Re:Lunux desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully a new era of game dev is upon us

As a developer of an unusual forthcoming FPS (i.e. FPS gameplay very far from CoDfield 6 & co.), I will be doing my bit. Linux and the BSDs are first-class citizens here.

Hopefully the proportion of game developers giving Linux that treatment will keep growing at an accelerating rate.

Re:Lunux desktop

[PopeRatzo]

Hopefully a new era of game dev is upon us. This is not only great for linux, but great for people like myself who only use windows for games. Hopefully the video card makers will beef up their effort writing drivers and software for compatibility.

The resurgence of PC gaming started a couple of years ago and has only been picking up steam (see what I did there?). 2012 brought us some PC-centric games that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when we believed PC gaming was dying.

The moves Valve is making will only be wind at the back of PC gaming, and by the time the ultra-expensive next gen consoles come out, the landscape is going to look plenty different.

The future of gaming is not handheld. It's not console and it's not behind a walled garden. From AAA to the rawest indie title, PC gaming's future has not looked this bright in a long time.

Re:Lunux desktop

[phantomfive]

The future of gaming is not handheld. It's not console and it's not behind a walled garden.

And that is a good thing.

Re:Lunux desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

A shining new era is tiptoeing nearer!

Re:Lunux desktop

[nozzo]

ay sir this is indeed the year of the Lunux desktop. I've been waiting for, ooh, 3 seconds.

Re:Lunux desktop

[theurge14]

Doubtful, until the PC gaming industry adequately tackles these long standing issues:

1) Rampant multiplayer cheating due to modding, aim-botting, wall-hacking, etc.
2) Game piracy

Steam is arguably the best solution that exists for these issues, but is it enough?

Re:Lunux desktop

[CronoCloud]

The resurgence of PC gaming started a couple of years ago and has only been picking up steam (see what I did there?). 2012 brought us some PC-centric games that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when we believed PC gaming was dying.

Oh it's not dying, but it's just being the niche it's always been. The current PC game market is like the late Amiga market. Ports/cross platform games, games from developers too small or too cheap (Like all those Euro-devs) or too PC partisan (Blizzard) to do a console title.

Take a look at PC Gamer's games of the year list, the Game of the Year, Single Player FPS of the Year and even the Strategy game of the year are all cross platform titles. and last year...the MMO of the year was also a cross-platform title (DCUO) Even PC gaming was as vital and thriving as in the past, NONE of those would have been cross-platform titles.

Re:Lunux desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

bullshit. Its all about the consoles these days.

Re:Lunux desktop

[PopeRatzo]

Take a look at PC Gamer's games of the year list, the Game of the Year, Single Player FPS of the Year and even the Strategy game of the year are all cross platform titles. and last year...the MMO of the year was also a cross-platform title (DCUO)

That proves my point. You can't have a game of the year without having it on PC. The number of notable console-only games has shrunk. And, the people who want the best experience, the most glorious graphics, the highest technology - in other words, the serious gamers - still need a PC and not a long-in-the-tooth console.

Re:Lunux desktop

[PopeRatzo]

Steam is arguably the best solution that exists for these issues, but is it enough?

That's like saying "Is the Playstation 4 enough?"

Steam is the shining example the others are trying to emulate.

Compatibility

[Doodlesmcpooh]

As soon as the games I already own and play work on Linux I will switch in a heartbeat.

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd switch if I just knew I could count on the major upcoming AAA titles working, I've wanted to for a while, but I have to have my games

Re:Compatibility

[spire3661]

As soon as all my old Xbox 1 titles work on Xbox360, ill upgrade.....

Re:Compatibility

[Synerg1y]

already own (older games)... would be really stretching it. A Linux version of new big title games would be a gigantic improvement over the current state. Looks like Linux users at least have Steam games to look forward to including... SKYRIM!!!.

Funny how crazy marketing / another crappy OS can remove the chains off the competition. Reminds me of what happened to Apple... oh wait what's going* to happen to apple.

Re:Compatibility

[Marxdot]

But those are the worst sort of games.

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't discount Wine ( winehq.org ), it continues to get better and better :)

Re:Compatibility

[Gaygirlie]

As soon as the games I already own and play work on Linux I will switch in a heartbeat.

Hmh, meh. I won't be switching even then. It's very, very unlikely that all of the games that I will be wanting in the future will become available for Linux. Then in addition to that Linux is still very much of a hit and miss - adventure, with inconsistent, buggy desktop environments, missing drivers, clunky package-management systems and so on. Being able to play games on a free-as-in-beer OS just ain't worth the aggravation.

Re:Compatibility

[DadLeopard]

Have your Cake and Eat it too! Dual-boot Linux and Whatever your current flavor of Microsoft OS is! Then after you realize you haven't use that MS OS for 6 months or so except to do the monthly updates, You can go ahead and switch over altogether!

Re:Compatibility

[TsuruchiBrian]

Linux's 2 big issues are driver problems (i.e. lack of stable drivers with full feature support) and lack of games designed for it.

Not every desktop environment that runs on linux works well. Some (maybe even most) are buggy. They are not all buggy and you are not forced to use the buggy ones. I see more options (even if some are bad) as a good thing. Windows is fairly stable now, but it wasn't a few years ago and you didn't have the option of using alternate desktop environments in windows (although I suppose you do now with windows 8 and metro :))

Clunky package management system? The package management systems in linux are far superior to windows. In windows you just download your own executable and install it yourself. This is like complaining that going to the store in a car is "clunky" than just walking there. Yeah there is more involved in having a functional car (gas, maintenance, traffic laws, etc), but it is a more powerful mode of transport.

The point of linux is not mean to be "free as in beer". I would agree that a free as in beer OS is not worth the aggravation. A pirated copy of windows is a similar "free as in beer" OS that is not worth the aggravation. A "free as in speech" OS is a far more worthy goal. It means that it can't be owned or controlled by anyone else. It means that you always have the choice to decide what the software on your computer does. A "free as in speech" OS is extremely powerful in the sense that you are not prevented from modifying it (or using the modifications of others) in any way you choose.

The difference between a free as in beer OS and a free as in speech OS is the difference between a benevolent (for now) dictator and autonomy

Re:Compatibility

[shutdown -p now]

Games like Left 4 Dead, or Skyrim, or Deus Ex: Human Revolution are the "worst sort of games"? Elitist much?

Re:Compatibility

[PRMan]

And then when you update your Linux once and the entire thing crashes and burns, you'll go back to Windows. At least, that's what keeps happening to me when I try to switch to Linux.

Re:Compatibility

[DeathFromSomewhere]

Clearly tuxracer is all the thrill he can handle.

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

I was holding back with windows only because of games, that were not possible to run on Linux. At first I couldn't run on Windows my favorite DOS games, then some Windows95 games, and then I couldn't run Civilization 2 and even Civilization 3 on Windows 7 and not speaking about running MOO2. With windows 8 it seems, that I will be again like a lab rat on testing how to adapt again, because there will be many programs and games that were running in previous version and now won't work. And I feel like we are now in some age of 32-bit -> 64-bit OS switching phase, like it was back in days when Windows 3.1 was cool 16-bit OS and W95 was even cooler, only it took some time till everything started to work. I'd rather switch to Linux and make the same effort in running these oldies with the help of wine, than stay in Windows. And as I understand, Windows 8 is not dual-boot friendly, so bb Windows - I do not like wasting electricity and space in my apartments to keep extra PC. If nothing else, then I'll at least will play Minecraft on Linux. As the rest for my average user needs are there already - web, video player and what else.

Re:Compatibility

[Marxdot]

The latter two are good, but that does not reflect the majority of "major ... AAA titles".

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean update or upgrade? Which distro? Do you know how to make clean installs? It's sometimes better to do clean installs instead of upgrades (like with any other OS) although you shouldn't have major problems (usually).

Re:Compatibility

[Orcris]

Isn't L4D 2 already coming to Linux?

Re:Compatibility

[gmhowell]

Clearly tuxracer is all the thrill he can handle.

I'm a Mac user stuck with the little puzzle thing where you slide the tiles. I would love to have access to the gaming awesomeness that is Tux Racer.

Re:Compatibility

[taz346]

Don't know what you've tried Linux on but I've been running Kubuntu and Ubuntu (separate partitions) on my desktop for more than two years and it's never once crashed after a security/software update, and they come pretty often, once or twice a week usually, sometimes more. And I've done major version upgrades several times on each, again without problems. I started with Ubuntu 10.04 and am up to 12.04 now. I think I started with Kubuntu 10.10 and I'm also up to 12.04 on it. I use it most of the time now and I can't see how any other OS could possibly be more stable. It just keeps on working.

Re:Compatibility

[Gaygirlie]

Not every desktop environment that runs on linux works well. Some (maybe even most) are buggy. They are not all buggy and you are not forced to use the buggy ones. I see more options (even if some are bad) as a good thing.

The less-buggy ones are also the ones with less features, the ones with less appeal and promise than the others. XFCE is, for example, a quite fine DE for a geek and it sure seems stable from what little I have used it, but it's not exactly appealing in looks, it feels dated, and there's a lot of rough corners here and there. Now, take KDE in comparison: it's chock-full of features, it doesn't feel nearly as dated and it can be really pretty on the eyes. On the other hand, it's buggy as shite, I can still get whole Plasma to crash just by adjusting the panel, it's extremely confusing, and even people who have used KDE for years still have trouble figuring out where things are or how to work them -- I popped in on #KDE a while ago and I couldn't find a single person there at the time who knew how to use activities, for example.

Sure, there's a lot of DEs to choose from, but they're cannibalizing each-others on the amount of available developers and the end result is seemingly that no project has enough skilled developers and designers.

Clunky package management system? The package management systems in linux are far superior to windows. In windows you just download your own executable and install it yourself.

Yes, clunky. For one, you can't install stuff to a location of your own choosing without dropping to console. No, they'll always be installed system-wide and in the default location. If you're using a years-old distro --for stability or whatnot-- for which there are only security-updates available any longer and you want e.g. a newer version of some web-browser what do you do? You can't just download the package from the Internet as it most likely depends on newer libraries, too, that just aren't available in your repos. Secondly, there's too many incompatible systems. If you want to install something that isn't available via repositories you'll have to know which system is in use on your installation and then download the corresponding package-type. It may still not work, though, if the package wasn't specifically for your distro. Thirdly, it doesn't allow you to install only parts of the package or versions with differing features. On Windows you can e.g. download LibreOffice and choose which parts to install and which ones to omit. On Linux, well, usually you install libreoffice and just end up with everything with no customizability. And what if you want e.g. an alternate version of a package, with this or that feature that is disabled by default? Under Windows you just download the executable and install it. Under Linux... well, even the easiest route generally involves having to enable some extra repository or two.

Yes, keeping the things that are already installed up-to-date is a whole buttload easier under Linux and I do really like that. Nevertheless, I still see these package-management systems as too rigid.

The point of linux is not mean to be "free as in beer".

Indeed, I know it isn't. But try selling the idea of "free as in libre" to any Average Joe and see how far you get. From a purely pragmatic point of view it just doesn't really matter for most. And atleast to me it still ain't worth the aggravation on the desktop.

Re:Compatibility

[mortonda]

Clearly tuxracer is all the thrill he can handle.

I'm a Mac user stuck with the little puzzle thing where you slide the tiles. I would love to have access to the gaming awesomeness that is Tux Racer.

Seriously? Try again.

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Most Indie games are complete trash too and the best AAA titles are far better than the best Indie games. I'd say that the average quality of Indie games is far lower as well...

Re:Compatibility

[davydagger]

AC troll trollying trolls hard, more news at 10

Re:Compatibility

[davydagger]

1999 called, they want their strawman back.

1. What does MS have for package management? anything that compares to even slackware's primative system? They have still easy to hack web app updates. Linux systems have GPG signed packages. You can even add third party repos to make all packages on the system update together.

Don'e get me started on microsoft's C++ redistributables. GLIBC has been ABI stable since 4.1 which was like what, EONs ago?

If you need packages in linux, they are pulled, from a central repo, which is managed and supported, not installed by your shitty app. Only one set of libraries.

2. inconsistant buggy desktop enviroments??? you mean like windows 8. Here is a fuc

3. Drivers. laughable. Linux had USB 3 drivers 3 years before windows. There is right now a giant glitch with windows USB3 drivers, where linux has rock solid USB3 support. Hands down. Most drivers are baked into the kernel. If they are modules, most systems will autoprobe them at boot.

Windows has to carefully manage drivers. Linux is so idiot proof, the concept of a "Live OS", is viable. One OS installed on a CD or USB stick will work on virtually all desktops, no driver installs needed.

I've used linux live OSs on many many many machines. rarely do you find unsupported hardware. I can probably name them. the old broadcom 43xx series wireless chips need firmware which is license restricted, but otherwise work well with the b43. They haven't been made for years. (superceded by b44xxx, which works as intended), and a few intel cards which need easy to include non-kernel drivers.'

4. buggy desktop - read any review of windows 8. read the feature list and it sounds like gnome 3, released 3 years ago.

only diffrence, people can un-install gnome3 and use other desktops.

which believe it or not, are compatibly thanks to freedesktop.org standards. My desktop from XFCE works in KDE. So do my settings. And all the desktop managers will recognize and list the major DMs, and even enlightenment.

So don't believe the FUD. the only people who write horribly unsupported crappy software is MS, its because for years there was the illusision that you had not other choice, and FUD like the above comment.

The only real problem with linux is the lack of AAA games, and big name software titles, much of that has to do with Windows relentless campaign of FUD dirrected at GNU, Linux, and associated projects, and community as a whole.

Steam is the beginning of the end. There might be a few titles on Linux to start, but there will be more, and it will convince more companies to target linux.

Once this happens, people are going to ask why they give a shit about windows in the first place.

Re:Compatibility

[davydagger]

"Yes, clunky. For one, you can't install stuff to a location of your own choosing without dropping to console. No, they'll always be installed system-wide and in the default location"

seriously?

lets compare, this to windows of which software is distributed as self extracting installing executable files with no consitance in interface, and you leave it to the installer program to update some registry so it can be uninstalled, and trust it. then how do you upgrade software in windows? MS software can be updated through a web interface, secured by known to be broken SSL. Further compare this to OSX where you need to drag the program into the "applications" folder convientaly hidden in system. Compare this to Linux with one click installs 3 years before the app store.

Now, as far as default install location goes, why does anyone who is not an advanced user need to modify this?, the type that can be expected to use a command line.

Another great feature of linux package management is that third party software never gets installed with a program you get from official repos. Add ons are generally other packages, with optional non-coerced options for installing.

Now lets get to updates. Clunky is running 10 programs at once to update your windows system, with exe installers and everything, all which might crash because your running other upgraders/installers/uninstallers.

If you really want to talk about "clunky" package management, lets talk about non MS software on windows.

Re:Compatibility

[davydagger]

"by PRMan "

this.

Re:Compatibility

[dbIII]

The only real problem with linux is the lack of AAA games, and big name software titles, much of that has to do with Windows relentless campaign of FUD dirrected at GNU, Linux

Also since a fake CD or other way to get around copy protection is so trivial in linux the game studios were worried about getting paid. Internet authentication before you play a game may be annoying but it now assures game companies that they have their hands on your money before you get to play the game, and that's made it more likely for them to port to linux.
I bought Win7 purely to play games and I don't know why I bothered - it's a very clunky and intrusive environment for playing video games. It looks like you have to work out on your own to turn off a pile of different annoying notification sources one by one, and after all that native multi-screen support still sucks worse than the Matrox drivers supplied for Win2k! Switching from full screen game to web browser seems to be a certain way to crash the game or entire system if you do it enough times in a session. I can see why consoles are selling well.

Re:Compatibility

[TsuruchiBrian]

You can install linux applications from executables just like in windows. There is nothing that prevents you from copying all sorts of files wherever you want to. In fact most applications provide packages for popular distributions *and* source code for you to do whatever you want with. You have more choices than windows. You have the option of allowing the package manager to organize things for you, or have ultimate control (more control than even windows allows).

Almost everything you need comes in the default repositories for the more popular linux distributions. Also adding a repository is not any harder than going to a website to download an exe. Both involve remembering or googling a URL. You can install parts of packages in linux. apt-get install libreoffice-calc. It will even figure out all the dependencies for you. You don't have to figure out that you also need java to get it to work. The fact that people are used to installing applications on windows, does not mean it is universally easier. In fact windows is moving towards package management systems. Like android, apple, and amazon, they are going to have a store that installs things for you.

"free as in libre" is not meant to directly benefit the average joe. Just like how democracy doesn't directly benefit the average joe who is too lazy to vote. The average joe, however indirectly benefits from open source, just like he benefits from democracy. He benefits from people who care contributing their time and energy to continue the march of progress. The average joe benefits from cheap routers, android phones, and cable boxes running linux. He doesn;t care that one major reason these devices are so cheap is that the bulk of the software to run them pre-dated the device and is free for the manufacturers to use and modify.

Whether average joe wants to use an open source OS for his desktop are not relevant. Open source software makes it possible for many people to make new and great things which average joe does care about. Imagine a world where using calculus required paying royalties to the family of Isaac Newton. People who hate doing math wouldn't care because they wouldn't be doing calculus anyway, but how many applications that indirectly benefit average joe require calculus to function? A world where calculus is open source is a better world than one where it is proprietary. I am not saying everything should be open source. I am just saying that we should appreciate that some people have given us their creations for free and in a way that allows them to keep on giving through improvement and refinement.

Re:Compatibility

[I. M. Bur]

Most Indie games are complete trash too and the best AAA titles are far better than the best Indie games. I'd say that the average quality of Indie games is far lower as well...

I encourage you to compare Diablo 3 (very clearly an AAA title) to any of the other recent ARPGs (most notably Path of Exile).

AAA titles usually have good sales due to hype, but that doesn't equal to game quality in my book.

Re:Compatibility

[jones_supa]

You can install linux applications from executables just like in windows. There is nothing that prevents you from copying all sorts of files wherever you want to.

Sounds like good grounds for malware then... :)

Re:Compatibility

[jones_supa]

What hardware?

Re:Compatibility

[davydagger]

"Also since a fake CD or other way to get around copy protection is so trivial in linux the game studios were worried about getting paid."
More FUD

1. If your going to copy games to begin with, you can just as easily copy windows games in linux, or OSX. You can play most windows games in wine. How well? Thats depending on the game.

You ca

2. "fake cds" don't get around copy protection. There is nothing special about Linux that makes it easier to, or more apt to crack CD keys. I don't see how physically copying data makes games easier to pirate. Most windows cd burning programs like nero have an option to "copy disk". Its just in linux, there are better file handling utilities.

Its not my fault that modern linux desktops come with the functionality of:

winzip + winrar, plus every other archive format
divix and every other codec you'd ever come accross.
magic iso burner
nero cd burner
Office

Re:Compatibility

[IRWolfie-]

You have to allow them to execute first.

Re:Compatibility

[dbIII]

FUD? The "everything is a file" paradigm allows you to route around many dodgy MS Windows style copy protection methods as damage and leaves horrible *nix copy protection bullshit such as "flexlm" as instruments to punish the innocent.
The fake CD point was not about cracking CD keys but about copy protection that relies on having the original media, a situation also made irrelevant by the trivial cost of burning CDROMS but considered relevant when this "no gaming on linux" issue came up some time prior to 2000 and id + loki having a go (before loki was killed off by the tech crash).
It's all moot anyway with internet based methods to authenticate with the person instead of the machine which work just as well or badly on any platform.

Re:Compatibility

[synapse7]

Yes Yes Yes. I can not wait to make the switch either, but so far not enough of the games I play have linux support. I haven't had time to try wine...

Re:Compatibility

[VisceralLogic]

Have your Cake and Eat it too! Dual-boot Linux and Whatever your current flavor of Microsoft OS is! Then after you realize you haven't use that MS OS for 6 months or so except to do the monthly updates, You can go ahead and switch over altogether!

This would be great, if the cake weren't a lie.

Re:Compatibility

[Machtyn]

Torchlight 1 & 2 is also a really good series. Some concepts in Torchlight 1 can be found in Diablo 3.

Re:Compatibility

[thinsoldier]

Nothing runs on my two old mac minis. Most things run on my Mac Book Pro but they sure as hell don't have the frame rate to be enjoyable.

Re:Compatibility

[TsuruchiBrian]

Yes you can install malware on linux if you try hard enough. The kernel will undoubtedly require you to provide the root password a few times, but once you do that, you can permanently bypass all security measures, including modifying the kernel. There is fundamentally no difference between windows and linux in this regard. It used to be common for the default windows login to be root (administrator), bypassing even the requirement to provide a root password before making dangerous changes, but that changed with vista to a more "linuxy" model.

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Games that put eye candy over game play are the worst sorts of game. Nearly ever AAA in the past decade qualifies as the worst sorts of games.

Brand new Shiny RPG or FPS #4555 is no different than FPS #500, just prettier graphics.

Re:Compatibility

[mortonda]

I have an old pc with a P4 hyperthread, running Windows XP, and it can't run much more than solitaire anymore either. What's your point?

Re:Compatibility

[Stuarticus]

Why not use a rolling release distro if you find updates so onerous?

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

DRM is bullshit.

It wastes more money than it ever stops in losses.

Most DRM-ed games are cracked before it is even released.

Re:Compatibility

[davydagger]

prior to 2000, we had kernel 2.2 which was not prime time ready.

now we have kernel 3 which is more than capable than windows.

I'd like to get on this team action.

[future assassin]

Where can I download it, I can only find Steam.

Re:I'd like to get on this team action.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://store.steampowered.com/about

Re:I'd like to get on this team action.

[RzTen1]

Here's a direct link to the install package: http://media.steampowered.com/client/installer/steam.deb

Re:I'd like to get on this team action.

[jones_supa]

Whoosh.

Fingers Crossed

[Sigvatr]

Fingers crossed this is the trigger to begin the revolution.

Re:Fingers Crossed

[Eirenarch]

I am eagerly awaiting the moment when Steam exits out of beta on Linux and Valve releases their next major title on Linux at the same time as Windows so I could laugh at the next batch of excuses why people don't switch to Linux.

Re:Fingers Crossed

[Anonymous Coward]

Video card drivers blow, the solution for the 4000 series rad eons stinks!

Re:Fingers Crossed

[IRWolfie-]

I wouldn't expect much switch over. I just don't think there are that many people that would switch, but are waiting for games to be on linux before they do.

People can dual boot both if they want to play games, but they don't. This seems to indicate they probably aren't interested in switching unless it was completely hassle free (there will always be some hassle in using a new operating system) or they lack the ability to install a new operating system no matter how basic the installer is. Many are also just not interested in using Linux because they are happy with what they have.

I think the big thing will be that those who dual boot will now have one less reason to keep the windows partition.

Re:Fingers Crossed

[Anonymous Coward]

Next major title? I'm still waiting for some of their last generation of titles. I picked up HL2 and all the "source" series years ago. There have been rumors of games like L4D and L4D2 being pushed to linux (remember that article about L4D2 running faster in linux?), which in my mind is basically making sure the source engine works in the Linux backed openGL environment.

I think steam on linux is a great thing, and I check the linux section of steam in windows, as well as on linux, probably every couple weeks or so. Until they get more than those ~15 games, not including those add-on packs for other games that get thrown in the mix to inflate numbers, then i think we can start to see some usage numbers creep up. On another note, If I picked up a humble indie bundle and was able to get both steam keys for windows and native linux installers, why the hell can't I play those games on linux?

"team is now being..."

[x0d]

*Steam, FTFY.

Re:"team is now being..."

[oodaloop]

But which team is Steam on?

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apart from support open source software why should I switch from Windows 7 to Linux? Are there any benefits in terms of speed or reliability?

Re:Why?

[MBGMorden]

Well, for one, if you build your own PC's and don't want to pirate software, then Linux is free. Saving the cost of an OS is big for me. You also have a system that is FAR less likely to be affected by malware.

Also, once you get good on Linux the power of having a Unix command line available really becomes a boon. It took me a good year to 18 months of primary use on Linux, but at this point I truly feel more comfortable and efficient in Linux than in Windows. I use a 2nd computer on a KVM switch that runs Windows for playing games, but that's literally the only thing I do on that system - I genuinely dislike using Windows beyond that. If the games were available for Linux then I'd have little reason to keep a Windows machine/install at all.

Re:Why?

[desdinova 216]

and that less affected by malware thing will go away once Linux becomes popular

Re:Why?

[Osgeld]

nope

Re:Why?

[h4rr4r]

Doubtful. Apache is more popular than IIS and still people target IIS for malware. IE6-8 just had yet another remote exploit days/weeks ago.

Re:Why?

[agm]

I would say "yes", though it depends what software you use. Not having to run a virus checker is a big bonus.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it will never become popular because it's still too difficult for the novice to set up and use. Yes, even ubuntu. You still have to worry too much about whether or not your hardware will work properly.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apache is usually set up by people who are at least partly knowledgable in what they are donig- IT admins or at least computer enthusiasts. Most PCs are operated by regular people who know how to use facebook and youtube and don't even knoe they should update their OS

Re:Why?

[cduffy]

Maybe, maybe not.

Windows is still trying to be backwards-compatible with an API and end-user experience that was designed around single-user systems, whereas the UNIXy legacy is from large university systems where users were expected to be hostile (and, frequently, were).

Security on Windows has been getting a lot better over the last decade and a half, and it's going to continue to get better as Microsoft stops supporting legacy APIs and continues to modify workflows to adjust user expectations, but I'm still not much inclined to accept the assertion that there's no remaining difference that isn't directly and exclusively caused by the delta in marketshare.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

same with windows 7

Re:Why?

[cod3r_]

Not even remotely true. Not every linux box is going to have all the same libraries and all the same programs tons of browser tons of email programs etc... The malware will have to be written in the most basic form not depending on ANYTHING.. It's not going to have privileges to create an init script and even if it starts in the user init it will be so simple to get rid of. Killing the program would be as simple as "kill -9 malware" Not to mention linux has many free firewall apps that would catch it trying to do something on the net.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is slightly faster on recent PC. It remains fast when your PC gets older. As a result, Linux is a lot faster on older machine. The main benefit for me is that my system is stable. It does not get broken with automatic updates. Desinstallation of a software is complete. If I want to reinstall a system (for example to replace the hard drive), it is trivial to preserve all the softwware configuration.

The main problem of running linux is that almost noone does it.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily, Linux seems to be much more secure by design, unless of course people run as root, with old kernels with known security flaws.

Which will probably be the case..... damn....

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

People said that about mac stuff too. As it turns out, designing a system to be more resilient to that kind of thing up front really does help, along with the "many species" state of things. You can't count on 100% identical suite of system software across countless distros.

So, bigger target? Maybe someday. But not equally vulnerable.

Re:Why?

[patchmaster]

Also, once you get good on Linux the power of having a Unix command line available really becomes a boon. It took me a good year to 18 months of primary use on Linux, but at this point I truly feel more comfortable and efficient in Linux than in Windows.

This would be a valuable observation if you had first spent 18 months at the Windows command line. Of course, very few people are going to be willing to spend 18 months to get up to speed with using an OS.

For the expert, the command line is hard to beat for speed and efficiency. For anyone who isn't an expert, the command line is a major hindrance. They do far better with the point and click graphical interface. So I'm not sure better efficiency after 18 months of training is really a big selling point to most people.

Re:Why?

[sonofd]

Yes, even ubuntu.

Are you kidding? What is so challenging about booting to a cd, and then clicking "install"?????

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any benefits in terms of speed or reliability?

Games run faster/smoother in Linux. DirectX may be easier to code for, but OpenGL is superior if implemented correctly.

Re:Why?

[ekgringo]

At least if Windows 7 doesn't recognize your video card, it will at least show a bad quality GUI. With Linux, your video card isn't recognized, if you're lucky, you'll be stuck at a command prompt with an X-windows error that says something like, "No Screens Found" (which is ironically displayed on your screen).

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

This would be a valuable observation if you had first spent 18 months at the Windows command line.

This too, would be a valuable observation if you actually could accomplish everything from the Windows command line. Anything you can do from a Linux GUI, you can also do from the command line. The same cannot be said about Windows.

Re:Why?

[Chryana]

Also, once you get good on Linux the power of having a Unix command line available really becomes a boon. It took me a good year to 18 months of primary use on Linux, but at this point I truly feel more comfortable and efficient in Linux than in Windows.

Yeah, that's a very strong argument for switching, I'm surprised that it is not used more often.

Re:Why?

[Hatta]

This would be a valuable observation if you had first spent 18 months at the Windows command line.

Window's command line is garbage, so that's not a fair comparison at all.

For the expert, the command line is hard to beat for speed and efficiency. For anyone who isn't an expert, the command line is a major hindrance.

For the expert, the written word is hard to beat for precision and expressivness. For anyone who isn't an expert, the written word is a major hinderance. And yet, here we all are communicating with the written word.

Re:Why?

[Spad]

PowerShell has kind of rendered the CLI argument obsolete; sure, you can argue it's just a clone of Bash et al, but it's a damn good clone and I really struggle to manage without it these days.

Re:Why?

[cheater512]

A virus would just be statically linked. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_library
No issues with missing libraries and so on.

Thats how commercial software does it on Linux where you aren't allowed to recompile it to use newer libraries.

There are simply far more barriers for remote code to execute on Linux.
That is the primary security benefit.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really?

You can easily type an OpenOffice document or spreadsheet from the command line?

I know most utilitarian programs have been command line on Windows as well, and now applications are coming out with PowerShell libraries for further automation.

There's limitations to both operating systems. Making outlandish promises about one OS over another doesn't help anyone. Including yourself.

Re:Why?

[MBGMorden]

You have to understand where people are coming from. Before I made a serious effort to switch to Linux I had been using Windows for around 15 years. You have to expect a transitional period there, though if the switching user was never really that proficient with Windows in the first place then that period can be shortened.

Re:Why?

[cheater512]

No not most people, but this is Slashdot. He was answering the AC not talking about your grandmother.

The Windows command prompt is next to useless. That's why Microsoft made the Powershell to try and compensate.

Re:Why?

[mmell]

So what you're saying is that an IIS hosted website represents "low-hanging fruit" to hackers?

I happen to agree - I just thought someone should say it out loud.

Re:Why?

[Barlo_Mung_42]

"IE6-8 just had yet another remote exploit days/weeks ago."

Too bad. There is no reason a home (game) machine should still be running IE6-8.

Re:Why?

[gbjbaanb]

not really - do try to keep up.

One thing Microsoft has done with Windows is to pinch all the great ideas in Linux, so today you have package managers and partition tools and all the other fancy things that a few years ago were Linux only.

One of the ideas they stole is the powerful command line, only they made it slightly less like an inbuilt scripting language and made it into a full-blown scripting language. Then they relented and made it into a full-blown scripting language built into a command line. Its called Powershell and you might like to check it out. Of course there's still a few bits of crap floating in the clear waters, like the abysmal implementation of WMI and the fact its mainly VB (but I suppose VB is a good language for easy accessibility) accessing a load of badly integrated .NET objects, but hey - you can't have everything.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Recent versions of Apache have had far more security vulnerabilities than IIS. Feel free to check Secunia or other vulnerability disclosure websites...

Re:Why?

[armanox]

Not that I want to say something good about a MS product, but powershell lets you do that.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto

Re:Why?

[aztracker1]

Really!?! I've had plenty of linux systems break when using the built in update tools... At least some of the software I was using... and, ironically enough, it's happened to me far more than my osx or windows systems. As for preserving configs, for a while the default user config locations changed from ~/.appname (file) to ~/appname/file to ~/.config/appname/ and different apps doing it differently.. not *that* easy. There are a *LOT* of reasons to choose Linux over windows what you are talking about isn't it.

Re:Why?

[aztracker1]

Why not consult the great and powerful Carmack. Since he was one of the biggest proponents of OpenGL over DX.

Re:Why?

[unixisc]

Yeah, it's not like people are going to go from Windows 7 to Linux. If Valve hates Windows 8, they can avoid supporting it at all, and just guarantee that Steam works under Windows 7, but not 8. Those who try running it under 8 will be doing so at their own risk.

I have a different point. They are pointing people to Ubuntu, but what does that mean? Will Steam work under all DEs - Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu and Xubuntu? What if some future release of Ubuntu breaks something in steam? Is Valve now going to get into the 'roll your own distro' business?

I think Valve would have done well to have done what it did, but under PC-BSD, where breakage b/w versions is less common, and since BSD is the full system - both kernel and userland, as opposed to GNU/Linux, Valve wouldn't have to worry about weird dependency issues. If they wanted, they could also have made their own game specific BSD based on PC-BSD and run it. Or, in case they'd like running it on really lightweight hardware, they could even have tried it w/ Minix.

Re:Why?

[RedHat Rocky]

Ah, no. Security is an engineering objective, not a history from legacy systems.

Yes, Linux is UNIX-based, but old UNIX systems were NOT security poster boys. It takes time, effort and review to accomplish good security. Linux safety is based on current, active effort.

  Microsoft (yeah, they are responsible for Windows) has not had security as a priority for a long time and given last couple of releases, still putting it behind marketing features (more important to have bling than safe).

Re:Why?

[markdavis]

But the true power of the Linux command line is that it is not something just invented. It is Unix/Bourne/Shell, something that has been used by professionals and taught in schools for many decades on dozens of various Unix/Linux variants. It is even mostly the same on MacOS. There are hundreds of good books and it has a lot of mind share... probably many times that what "Powershell" will be able to obtain under MS-Windows.

Re:Why?

[jnork]

More than one mouse button confuses me. That's why I only use Mac.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe on most "user friendly" distributions you would get an unaccelerated X with xf86-video-vesa.

Re:Why?

[Chryana]

I see that you are being sincere here, so I won't make another sarcastic reply. I just think that stronger arguments than that will be needed to convince people to switch over. The command line is a non starter for most people who have no special interest in information technologies. As for the cost of the OS, it is rather immaterial right now, because few people buy it at retail, so they never see the bill. Finally, I think the gaming crowd is not the best one to cater to for an alternate OS, because
1. there are not that many games on Linux;
2. the small community makes it difficult to get support when it doesn't work, for instance sound issues are pretty frequent, at least in my experience;
3. I have seen some performance issues, but that was a few years ago and the situation may have improved;
4. Gaming rigs can be expensive, so again, OS price is less of a factor.

I would expand on these points, but I have to go now. Please accept my apologies, for I will not be able to answer any reply you make to this post in less than several hours, perhaps even until tomorrow.

Re:Why?

[Osgeld]

typically, but not always

Re:Why?

[Eirenarch]

I bet you will get pretty good with PowerShell in 18 months with the current resources.

Re:Why?

[Hatta]

One of the ideas they stole is the powerful command line, only they made it slightly less like an inbuilt scripting language and made it into a full-blown scripting language.

That's the problem. If you wanted a full blown scripting language on Windows, there was always VB, or you could install Python or Ruby or what have you. A full blown scripting language is a poor substitute for an interactive shell however, or we'd all be using Perl instead of bash.

Re:Why?

[devent]

I'm a long time Linux user myself, I don't really get the point with the command line.
All problems aside now, why is it more complicated to copy&past a few commands then to click through multiple menus, multiple dialogs, etc. to do the same?

In Linux command line I can do just mark the commands, copy them, paste them to the terminal and press enter. No brains needed.

For example, to change the duplex mode on Windows I need to follow that:
http://www.home-network-help.com/speed-and-duplex.html
For Linux I just need:
sudo ethtool -s p1p1 speed 10 duplex half

(p1p1 is the name of the network interface. In KDE you can click on the small icon for the network manager and it will show you that name [you don't have to use the command line for everything]).

Now be really honest. What is more complicated? To follow 10 and more steps, involving 3 or more dialogs, or just open your terminal and copy & paste the one line command and press enter?

It is really a sad state. The computer user should be liberated and educated, not dumped down. The schools should teach kids today the command line and the proper usage of the computer.

Re:Why?

[shutdown -p now]

Doubtful. Apache is more popular than IIS and still people target IIS for malware.

It's not that much less popular that it wouldn't be a lucrative target. It's what, somewhere around 15% vs Apache's 60%? That's still millions of servers.

Curiously enough, when I went to look up the stats on Secunia a couple years ago, IIS 6+ actually had less known vulnerabilities than the corresponding versions of Apache (i.e. covering the same time period). Don't know if that is still the case, though.

Re:Why?

[shutdown -p now]

There are simply far more barriers for remote code to execute on Linux. That is the primary security benefit.

The primary security benefit on Linux is the fact that people that are running it typically know what they're doing. Vast majority of Windows malware isn't using any form of remote code execution exploits (to which Linux isn't immune, either, and it had its share of them) - they rather just ask the user to download and run some .exe. Which a typical Windows user promptly does.

Re:Why?

[shutdown -p now]

You don't need hundreds of good books to learn bash (or PowerShell) - you only need one.

Re:Why?

[shutdown -p now]

PowerShell is an interactive shell, and where there is a difference between "typical scripting language" and "shell" lines of thinking, it follows the latter. For example, all tokens are strings by default, and you splice in variables by using dollar signs. Similarly, it has the usual short commands to deal with input/output streams (redirect, pipe output to input etc) and so on.

The biggest difference between PS and bash is that PS streams are streams of objects, not necessarily text (but all objects have a text representation, and so you can always feed an object stream to any regular non-PS app that expects text). This is handy, because you don't have to muck around with sed/grep/awk much - for example, ls gives you a list of objects representing files, so if you want to filter it in various complicated ways, you just query directly against properties like "name", e.g.:

ls | where { $_.name -eq "foo" }

It also is a full-fledged scripting language in a sense that it has variables, functions, conditionals, loops etc - and even lambdas (curly braces in code snippet above are actually a 1-arg lambda that's passed as a parameter to 'where' cmdlet). But then bash has most of the same, as well.

Re:Why?

[Orcris]

It's not that it's too hard to set up. All you need to do is boot up a live CD, go through some easy configuration, and click install. If you are missing a driver, it's more complicated, but I think most hardware is supported. The problem is that most users go with the OS that comes with their computer, rather than installing a different one.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

how would you know that unless you were consorting with the enemy? tsk, tsk...

Re:Why?

[vux984]

That's why Microsoft made the Powershell to try and compensate.

And some people would even argue that powershell is better than bash.

(Personally, I'm mixed; I like the simplicity of bash as all the output is plaintext... but while the object oriented output of powershell may be more complex it's so nice not to have to parse the results you want out of plaintext all the time.)

Re:Why?

[Anguirel]

Did you just seriously use a "mind share" argument for Linux over Windows? Nearly every professional that has touched a computer at some point has used Windows, and nearly every school will teach something that includes Windows (and particularly MS Office). It's even mostly the same on MacOS. Book counts between Windows and Linux... yeah, not even touching that. You might want to re-think this line of reasoning a little.

Re:Why?

[markdavis]

When it comes to shell and scripting? Yes, indeed I did :)

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually what he's saying is that most of the hacks now target shitty web apps rather than the servers themselves, except for a small handful of attacks on IIS directly and a smaller handful of attacks on apache (like sloworis).

Shitty wordpress extensions installed by idiots are exploitable on either platform.

Re:Why?

[Qzukk]

A virus would just be statically linked.

You'd think that, but for a long time the first sign that you've been hacked is that when you run "ls" it segfaults.

Re:Why?

[jbmartin6]

IIS and IE are completely different things. It's been quite a few years since IIS (NOT IE) was any more of a target than Apache.

Re:Why?

[Bengie]

Are you talking about all of the unpatched VPS systems running unpatched apache and PHP software?

Re:Why?

[vux984]

Now be really honest. What is more complicated?

lol, linux, by far.

In your particular example when you reboot the pc it reverts.

To make it permanent its a bit more complicated, and depends whether its like Debian or Red Hat.

Furthermore, for your linux solution to be easy it requires that -someone- prep the command(s) for you, blogs them or something so you can find them. With windows, a reasonably competent individual the duplex settings could likely find them on their own, and its pretty obvious to see what it is currently set to, and how to change the setting when you find it.

Your 'copy-and-paste-commands' doesn't even begin to hint at how to find out how to check what it is currently set to. For that you'd have to start from scratch, google a new command and copy-paste it. That's not being liberated and educated that's "cargo-cult-computing".

At least with the windows step by step method, you could actually retain some useful information that will be applicable in the future. With the copy-past-command method its just gibberish you slavishly reproduce.

The ethool option you indicated at least is relatively semantic; but something like:
  tar cvfj pkg3.tar.bz2 pkg3/
is practically gibberish.

Re:Why?

[Bengie]

Too bad OpenGL doesn't support Multi-threading like DX11 does, not that it matters since almost no games support it.. /cry Civ5 gets a huge boost from threading with DX11.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

"but under PC-BSD"

      PC-BSD also has their PBI system for packaging. So valve could put all the libraries and support programs in a PBI package and it's a double click and it's installed. The program, libraries, etc. would be installed and run in an self-contained directory with it's own library versions independent of the operating system thereby avoiding collision issues. Plus the BSD license does away with viral non-sense.

Re:Why?

[westlake]

Well, for one, if you build your own PC's and don't want to pirate software, then Linux is free.

The enthusiast can live the with the weight and bulk of the DIY PC. But the desktop form factor is clearly evolving towards the style and convenience of other home appliances: Sony VAIO L Series 24" Multi-Touch All-in-One Desktop Computer

Also, once you get good on Linux the power of having a Unix command line available really becomes a boon. It took me a good year to 18 months of primary use on Linux, but at this point I truly feel more comfortable and efficient in Linux than in Windows.

The geek is like the backyard mechanic who spends all his spare hours under the hood. Most of his neighbors would prefer a relaxed cross-country drive. There will always be some overlap. But fundamentally they have a different set of skills and a different set of values.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The command line is a non starter for most people who have no special interest in information technologies.

Ah, but gamers tend not to be your average sort. Opening the Half-Life console and typing "sv_gravity 0" is second nature to most (or at least those old enough to have played Half-Life). That's why I'm optimistic about Steam on Linux. The Windows power-users, gamers, and tweakers likely have enough technical expertise to learn Linux and appreciate the customizability.

Unless, of course, the purists insist on subjecting them to the quagmire of compile flags, makefile errors, and downloading twenty gigabytes of code to create a two megabyte binary. But maybe the projects I follow are just user-hostile (i.e. lazy developers coding just for their machine).

Re:Why?

[HJED]

Yeah but ubuntu will automatically install security updates by default and you usually don't need to reboot.

Re:Why?

[HJED]

ubuntu usually uses a standard VGA driver in that case, and does display a desktop (or it did before unity, I haven't been in that situation since) it then ask you if you want to download the proprietary nvidia or amd driver.

Re:Why?

[HJED]

BSD is far less popular on desktops then linux, and as Steam is using a .deb package to distribute its software it probably will work on all of the DEs, it might however depend on lots of bloat from a diffrent DE to do it similar to how installing KDE apps in a Gnome environment requires you to install all the qt and kde libs.

Re:Why?

[armanox]

Because my jobs requires me to manage various different kinds of systems (Windows, Solaris, Linux)? Got to eat you know.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

"but under PC-BSD"

        PC-BSD has the PBI system that allows all the libraries to be packaged and installed in the same directory with the program. That way different library versions don't affect the operating system. Valve could bundle anything they want into it and the game would use whats there without version collisions or dependency problems or GPL violations. Just download the PBI package, double click, and play. Valve should be using this just for this capability alone. Also having a business friendly license helps as well.

Re:Why?

[celle]

"If they wanted, they could also have made their own game specific BSD based on PC-BSD and run it."

      Yes they could. And with the PBI packaging system which installs and runs all the support programs and libraries from the same directory as the main program(game) there wouldn't be any dependency,collision, or version issues with the operating system as Valve would be providing everything needed by the program. It's one package, just download, double-click to install, and start playing. It's basically a windows like install operation. And the BSD license is a plus with developers and commercial entities averse to the GPL and potential license contamination with linux code.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, an Ubuntu user. I had something happen like that one time when I ran Mandrake, too, but Ubuntu was the worst. After the last time their updater broke my system I put my hands on my hips and said "Fuck it! I'm running Debian now." I switched over to stable, and have a system that never needs fiddling about with ever again. You can keep your bleeding edge shit, I've been cut too many times, and I'm getting too old to dick around with my main desktop for shits 'n' giggles, that's what my antique laptop is for. I expect my main desktop to be like a production server: 99.99% availability, and so far, Debian Stable has been the only thing to do that for me.

  So, I guess what I'm saying is "Yay, Debian!" Heh.

  Hey, my capctha is "easier!" See, even slashdot know what's up!

Re:Why?

[davydagger]

"Are there any benefits in terms of speed or reliability?"

yes, and most complete lack of adware/badgerware/spyware, because most little apps are open source, and don't try to spy on you, or impede your function to get you to buy the full version.

Linux is really fast, drivers are better. Oh yeah, most drivers work out of the box.

don't believe me, try the linux mint installer CD. you can use mint off the CD, without making any changes. If you don't like it, you can remove the CD, and you are back to normal.

http://linuxmint.com

If you do like it, you can install it from the same CD.

it costs you 10 cents for a burnable DVD and 1 hour of your time.

Re:Why?

[unixisc]

Fully agree - all these advantages are what I had in mind. As you and the 2 ACs point out, PBI is a lot smoother and does a better job w/ the dependencies. And there ain't a plethora of distros to worry about here either - if it runs on PC-BSD, it would automatically run on FBSD as well, and can probably be ported w/ some minimal effort to NBSD and Minix. I don't see too many other BSDs - OBSD and Dragonfly are almost exclusively server OSs.

Re:Why?

[unixisc]

Since the bulk of them are Debian or Ubuntu based, that might seem okay on the surface, but once a distro upgrades a library that it uses, from say Qt or GTK+ or glibc, will such a package still install? Also, what if the user is on PCLinuxOS, or Vector Linux, or Chakra or Sabayon - all of which use different packaging from .deb? Why would Valve want to maintain all of that?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an obscure case. Nvidia, ATI, Intel all work out of the box well enough for most things that aren't games. If gaming is your thing you can install Nvidia/ATI drivers that can do 3D stuff without using a CLI. It's been that way for some time now, you need to update your FUD because it's obsolete.

Re:Why?

[HJED]

Yeah, but you where asking about different desktop environments of ubuntu (kubuntu, xubuntu, etc) which all use the same reppos. Probably Mint will work, and debian unstable will remain as unstable as it ever is, different distros will probably not work correctly without working out tonnes of dependencies, but some posters are saying there is packages for Arch and Fedora. Most debian packages usually work with newer updates of libraries, but not new major releases, so I assume this will be the same.

Re:Why?

[Ash-Fox]

PC-BSD also has their PBI system for packaging. So valve could put all the libraries and support programs in a PBI package and it's a double click and it's installed. The program, libraries, etc. would be installed and run in an self-contained directory with it's own library versions independent of the operating system thereby avoiding collision issues.

You don't even need a system to do this on Linux, you can just build against yor own libraries in a directory and package it with your application.

Plus the BSD license does away with viral non-sense.

That's not true. BSD licenses have "viral" things about copyright notices, endorsement, promotions, disclaimers (add, remove which ones as necessary per BSD license version) etc. Please don't misrepresent the issue of "viral" terms not being present in licensing being applied to derivative works.

Re:Why?

[Ash-Fox]

/cry Civ5 gets a huge boost from threading with DX11.

Runs like shit on my Windows 7/Core i7 system.

Re:Why?

[h4rr4r]

So how do you install IE9 on XP?

Re:Why?

[h4rr4r]

That is the biggest problem with it.

Streams of text are easy to handle, streams of objects are basically someone saying "What if we could have a shell with all the BS boilerplate of Java?"

Also most windows programs do not expect text input. Almost all are clickfests. So automating on windows is largely a pointless matter.

Re:Why?

[h4rr4r]

No it is not.
If it was a good clone I could use it instead of having to install winexe on linux to interact with windows machines.

The stupid thing uses objects, lacks normal tools people are used to and as far as I can tell does not bring along a proper text editor. No I will not waste time learning another shell that MS will just deprecate and replace in another couple years.

Re:Why?

[jones_supa]

Then why can't you say good things about MS products?

Re:Why?

[jones_supa]

Linux is slightly faster on recent PC. It remains fast when your PC gets older. As a result, Linux is a lot faster on older machine. The main benefit for me is that my system is stable. It does not get broken with automatic updates.

Meh. Win 7/8 are clear winners in these departments. Linux desktop was the speed king a decade ago but has been gaining a lot of weight. You have to run something really barebones like XFCE or LXDE to attain good speed these days. The newer Windowses, however, run snappily on older PCs too. The updates, while their installation can sometimes fail, are far less likely to break your system catastrophically than with Linux systems.

Re:Why?

[damnbunni]

The same way you install games like Just Cause 2 and Battlefield 3.

You don't.

There's no reason for a -gamer- to be running XP at this point. While not many games REQUIRE DirectX 10 or 11, games that support 10 look better, and games that support 11 run much faster.

Try finding a game that supports all three levels of DirectX, and run it in each. There's quite a visual difference between 9 and 10, and a big speed boost from 10 to 11, in most games I've tried them in.

Re:Why?

[celle]

"you can just build against yor own libraries in a directory and package it with your application."

        The BSDs can do that too. Except commercial vendors like Valve want a standardized in operating system way to install their software with minimum of hassle(self-contained), PBI would allow that.

"That's not true. BSD licenses have "viral" things about copyright notices"

          Now you're just spreading FUD. The current 2 clause BSD license doesn't interfere with code reuse. GPL3 plainly does. And before citation needed pops up. You're on the internet. Look it up yourself.

Re:Why?

[armanox]

Notice I said "want" and not "can." I can say good things, I just don't like to. I can say plenty of bad things too.

Re:Why?

[Ash-Fox]

The BSDs can do that too. Except commercial vendors like Valve want a standardized in operating system way to install their software with minimum of hassle(self-contained), PBI would allow that.

LSB resolved that a long time ago. Many vendors just don't make use of it because they like doing their own thing.

The current 2 clause BSD license doesn't interfere with code reuse.

Sure it does, it attaches conditions to the code, such as copyright notices and disclaimers (Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.), endorsements restrictions (The views and conclusions contained in the software and documentation are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing official policies, either expressed or implied, of the FreeBSD Project.) etc.

You're on the internet. Look it up yourself.

I already know the licenses.

GPL3 plainly does.

I did not say GPL3 did not. I said you were misrepresenting BSD's viral nature (isn't the majority of core Linux stuff GPL2?).

If you really cared about freedom from viral licensing that effects derivative works, you would use something that allows the freedoms of code usage with rights that equal public domain releases (with the exception of making this a license that grants the rights, as some countries do not support the concept of releasing something as public domain before the copyright term is up).

As far as I can tell, you just don't like the GPL's terms, rather than dislike viral licensing.

Re:Why?

[cduffy]

Ah, no. Security is an engineering objective, not a history from legacy systems.

It's both.

If software you want to be backwards-compatible with assumes that it's going to have the rights to write to the area of disk where its executables are stored? That's a security issue. (End users are accustomed to granting business software written with the above assumptions escalated privileges on a regular basis? The end-user training to evade security that provides is definitely a security issue).

If you have a large selection of 3rd-party drivers written to an API which assumes that they run with kernel-level privileges (rather than keeping them sandboxed in userland, as with a decent microkernel)? That's also a security issue.

This is where I've said that Microsoft is changing (for at least one of these examples, has changed) its API and user expectations to allow them to fix longstanding, large security holes -- but for someone with as much to lose by breaking compatibility as they have, it's a slow process.

Re:Why?

[h4rr4r]

I don't have any windows computers so I can't really try that.

I only wanted to suggest that lots of home users would be impacted. XP is still very popular.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously?
1. You are on slashdot
2. I know several friends that have a PC mouse on their mac so that they can have multiple buttons to do their work.
3. If you seriously use one button, then I would bet that you do not use your mac to its full potential.

If you were tongue in cheek, I am sorry. ... Seriously.

Re:Why?

[ButchDeLoria]

Have you tried installing Windows lately? I've never seen an operating system that requires as much preparation (with a Linux LiveCD), arcane rituals and hope.

Re:Why?

[V for Vendetta]

For Linux I just need: sudo ethtool -s p1p1 speed 10 duplex half [...] Now be really honest. What is more complicated? To follow 10 and more steps, involving 3 or more dialogs, or just open your terminal and copy & paste the one line command and press enter?

The problem I face when dealing with Linux once in a while is not using a command line. The real problem is finding out that for changing the network card's duplex mode, "ethtool" is used. Once that's done, figuring out the necessary parameters/switches is the easy part.

That's the advantage of a GUI - giving visual/textual hints for task you seldom do. And don't get me wrong: I hate click-fests. I appreciate scriptable tasks. My preferred file manager is the console-based FAR.

Re:Why?

[shutdown -p now]

That is the biggest problem with it. Streams of text are easy to handle, streams of objects are basically someone saying "What if we could have a shell with all the BS boilerplate of Java?"

Yeah, because extracting individual fields from the text output of ls with regular expressions is so much more convenient.

And can you point where "the BS boilerplate of Java" is present in my code snippet, exactly? OO != Java, and PowerShell is not even OO (it works with objects that come from elsewhere, but it doesn't let you write classes etc). For all practical purposes, you can consider PowerShell objects to be just records of data.

Also most windows programs do not expect text input. Almost all are clickfests. So automating on windows is largely a pointless matter.

Most Windows GUI programs do, but there's plenty of console ones (including a lot of the same software that's available on Unix - like, say, ImageMagick). Furthermore, in the last few years, there had been a concerted effort to make Windows itself more administrable from command line - and specifically from PowerShell. In Office 2010, PowerShell cmdlets were added to cover Exchange and SharePoint. In Win8, you have cmdlets for package management of store apps. More will follow.

Re:Why?

[lannocc]

The biggest difference between PS and bash is that PS streams are streams of objects, not necessarily text

That's very interesting. It's good to see Microsoft finally bring some modern concepts into their CLI. I have not taken the time to use PowerShell yet because I switched away from Windows some years ago and just haven't seen the need yet, but you give me a compelling reason why I might want to at least play around with it.

Now, based on your example, these "object" streams you speak of are still a certain class of object. They may be more than text but they are still something the shell has to be able to interpret (for property names, etc.), correct? Or will the I/O operators (pipe, redirection, etc.) pass _any_ data between processes (`cat movie.mpg | do_something`, for example) but the `where` command is limited to just scriptable objects?

I am interested in the behaviors of other shells because I am writing a shell of my own, for the web. The idea of a "web" shell is that it works with URIs and HTTP streams instead of simply local resources. It is designed as a webapp so you interact with it with a browser, follows a file hierarchy pattern similar to what you see in most Linux distros, and is modular so that additional transports (ftp, ssh, etc.) could be installed. It's nearing its first beta release so I invite you to have a look at it: IOVAR Web Shell.

Re:Why?

[devent]

When was the last time you have to figure something like that for yourself?
Back in the days there were books on how to do it.
Now you can just google (or bing) it. With the days of Internet I rather have a one-line that I can copy&paste then to click through x dialogs and x menus.
How I really like the Windows registry: Go to HKFOOBARZZZ, click on FOOBAR, Local User, Applications, Windows, Internet Explorer, Version Xxxx, 50 clicks and more... In Linux: just open /etc/foo in your favourite text editor, enter a one-line, finished.

Of course you could still read books, like Linux Admin Books. Or you could use "apropos network". Manpages are quite useful.

Re:Why?

[devent]

Btw, only if something is console-based. It's still a GUI. The graphic have only 80x25 resolution (the classical DOS resolution), but it's still a GUI...

Re:Why?

[MBGMorden]

Depends on what you're doing really. I use both GUI and CLI for different tasks.

I will say for sample that CLI works wonders for moving files around based on name.

If I want to move everything with the world "contract" in the name form one folder to another for example, then in a GUI I'm stuck looking through the list and Ctrl-clicking on each one until I've found them all and then cutting and pasting. Sorting by name doesn't work because the word may appear anywhere in the list.

In the CLI, I can just do:

mv source/*contract* destination

and I'm done. I can also create bash scripts that automate things. For instance converting from mp4 to avi. There's generally a lot of steps involved in a GUI - opening the file, setting my output options, going through and resaving the file, etc.

Using bash I can setup a script with all my desired options ahead of time and then just do:

mp4toavi source.mp4 output.avi

And it runs exactly how I want it to.

Now granted, for video EDITING (rather than coversion) I'd never give up a GUI, nor would I give it up for browsing the web or anything like that. It's about mixing them up and using each style of interface when the particular tasks suits it.

Re:Why?

[shutdown -p now]

PowerShell is built on top of .NET, so objects are .NET objects. And it can be any object at all, not some specific predefined ones. When you access their properties (or invoke methods - which you can also do, although it's relatively rare in PS scripts), it uses reflection to discover what the object actually supports. So, yes, in practice you can pass any data, organized in any way you want (since you can always have a stream of one object, and said object can have properties that return other objects - so really it can be an arbitrary rooted graph). Generally speaking, standard commands try to produce instances of standard framework classes - e.g. 'ls' produces streams of FileInfo and DirectoryInfo.

The way this interacts with traditional text streams is pretty simple: strings are also objects in .NET (System.String), and every .NET object has a ToString method - so PS can always treat an object stream as text, or text stream as object, as needed. That's pretty much what it does when you have a regular program anywhere in the pipeline, or for the last step in it (the results of which you want to print out).

In practice, it's somewhat more complicated, because ToString does not necessary return a pretty-printed human-readable representation of the object, so it also has its own formatting layer there - the various Format-* cmdlets, like Format-Table (aliased as ft).So you can do things like:

ls | ft name,length -g extension

i.e. print out entries one per line, in two columns representing file name and file length, and grouping them by file extension. If your last step in the pipeline is not ft (or something else that produces a text stream), it tries to guess formatting depending on object type.

The 'where' command in my example does not actually do any parsing. It just takes a predicate function as a parameter, applies it to its input stream, and only outputs those objects that match the predicate. The {} syntax defines a single-parameter lambda function, where $_ is the name of that parameter in the body of the lambda - it's all built-in PS syntax, 'where' doesn't know anything about it.

Re:Why?

[lannocc]

Okay, I may not have phrased my question very well but I think you answered it indirectly. Does PowerShell only know how to deal with commands that are built on top of .NET, then? That is, let's say you install a program (not built with .NET) that outputs some binary blob to standard out (such as a video file or PNG image) then can the pipe operator still handle it? This is assuming of course that the program you're piping to knows how to handle this binary blob of data.

In Linux this is of course supported (the shell itself doesn't need to know anything about the data passed between processes) but there is no easy way to identify what type of data is getting passed, you just have to know what each command is expecting. In my web shell there is a little more flexibility because HTTP data is all identified with a MIME-type, so processes can have some smarter data handling./p.

Re:Why?

[shutdown -p now]

Okay, I may not have phrased my question very well but I think you answered it indirectly. Does PowerShell only know how to deal with commands that are built on top of .NET, then? That is, let's say you install a program (not built with .NET) that outputs some binary blob to standard out (such as a video file or PNG image) then can the pipe operator still handle it? This is assuming of course that the program you're piping to knows how to handle this binary blob of data.

It will basically just treat the input and output of any non-cmdlet (cmdlet is a PS-aware program) as a string object. This actually does cause some headache, since .NET strings are Unicode, and it tries to translate using the encoding specified in system locale by default, which messes up binary data - so you have to muck around specifying encoding explicitly to get 8-bit clean pass-through. IMO, it's a design flaw - they should have just used byte arrays instead, and only convert to/from text when a cmdlet needs text to work on (such as e.g. sls - the PS equivalent of grep). So if you don't process the contents in the pipe as text at any point, it should just remain a bunch of bytes.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

>This would be a valuable observation if you had first spent 18 months at the Windows command line. Of course, very few people are going to be willing to spend 18 months to get up to speed with using an OS.

I used DOS from 3.3 to 6.2 with 4Dos CLI replacement (to make it bearable), then windows from 3.1 to XP (yes, all of them, even ME), for a total of 15 years. I then discovered FreeBSD and Linux and was instantly awestruck by the powerful command line(s) available. There's been the odd game I've had windows briefly installed for but at home I've used *nix-like operating systems for the last 7 years.

Once Valve makes a native 64 bit client I'll be throwing money at them.

Re:Why?

[V for Vendetta]

How I really like the Windows registry: Go to HKFOOBARZZZ, click on FOOBAR, Local User, Applications, Windows, Internet Explorer, Version Xxxx, 50 clicks and more

Let me introduce you to reg.exe.

See, that's exactly my point: once you know what tools are available and where to find out more about them, everything is easy.

Now you can just google (or bing) it.

Of course I do that. But that one works in Fedora, this one in Ubuntu, that in Debian (deliberatly naming distros here, not saying that's exactly that) ... it wasn't easy.

The graphic have only 80x25 resolution (the classical DOS resolution), but it's still a GUI...

Sure, it's a GUI ... but with the command line always present, where I con do my net use, arp or whatever I need to do. And - that's the most important part for me - I need no mouse at all.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying "Windows is better". I stay away from those cultistic flame wars. I was just describing what's difficult for me to get the hang for Linux. If I would have started out using Linux, I'd most likely say the same about Windows.

Re:Why?

[devent]

So how did you find out about reg.exe? Is that something "competent users" can figure out by themselves?
It's the same on Linux so I don't really see your argument.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

To call BSD license viral is fucking retarded to the nth degree.

Dragging along a simple text file is hardly viral.

Re:Why?

[Ash-Fox]

To call BSD license viral is fucking retarded to the nth degree.

I don't really care for perceptions based on incorrect assumptions that you have been honing for what is likely many years.

Dragging along a simple text file is hardly viral.

It's viral if it enforces terms in derivative works. Does the BSD license do that? Yes. Therefore, it is viral. Sure, the terms are less restrictive when compared to the GPL, but it still places terms that are applied to derivative works.

In addition, the terms are more than just including a text file as I expressed earlier, misrepresenting the BSD terms will not make your point any more valid. In fact, it actually makes you argument look worse. I even expressed how a non-viral license could be created earlier, it should be easier for you to compare the differences between a viral and non-viral license.

Re:Why?

[Pherdnut]

Speed, definitely. I remember moving large quantities of files around and being really surprised at how much faster things were. If all I needed was basic productivity and web I would use Linux exclusively and I would have spent a lot less on my last custom-PC. If you have an old junker somewhere, try wiping Windows out and putting Ubuntu on it to really get an idea.

The real core problem is lack of heavy-hitting commercial support on the hardware front. The graphics card companies in particular don't have a lot of motivation to support Linux since game companies all prefer Direct X. I'm no game dev, but I've heard openGL isn't exactly a hoot to deal with compared to DirectX. As a web dev, however, I'm generally much happier working in Linux. Setting up and installing/configuring the tools I like to use tends to take minutes rather than (sometimes) hours.

It's also a better environment for power-users. Pick up a book on Linux an you'll quickly see that there's really very few layers of abstraction between you and any given piece of hardware on your machine.

But that does bring up something I tend to find annoying about Linux, which is the old-school IT attitudes of a lot of its community in general. Everybody wants to tell you the one true way to do everything but they never seem to feel obligated to explain why. I get it. It's annoying when non-tech people don't even try Google first, but when a programmer is trying to understand what the deal is and can't get a straight answer, that's kind of obnoxious. So you have to be good at self-educating if you want to do anything more than just use Ubuntu the same way most people use Windows. Sadly, I've gotten more useful info from books on Linux than the web.

That said, it is liberating to explore your hardware through something other than Windows. Dual-boot is really very easy to do now (I still prefer partitioning for getting the "proper" file system but to most that won't matter and for all I know is irrelevant).

At the end of the day, the only way to know is to try it yourself and that's really not that hard to do now.

Windows 9 or 8.1 / 8SE may hear sooner then

[Joe_Dragon]

Windows 9 or 8.1 / 8SE may hear sooner then you think and adding the back the old desktop and go a long way and be done easy.

metro just needs to be run in a window.

Re:Windows 9 or 8.1 / 8SE may hear sooner then

[rock_climbing_guy]

Run Metro in a Window! Best Windows 8 improvement I've heard of, so far.

Now if only I could make those awful mandatory Windows Updates run in a window, too!

Re:Windows 9 or 8.1 / 8SE may hear sooner then

[amicusNYCL]

Windows 9 or 8.1 / 8SE may hear sooner then you think and adding the back the old desktop and go a long way and be done easy.

That's right, all of those things may be true, like North Korea may open itself up to the internet.

Re:Windows 9 or 8.1 / 8SE may hear sooner then

[Anonymous Coward]

The desktop is already there in Windows 8. Metro can already be run in a window. The start menu can already be added back to Windows 8. Maybe you should stop worrying about Windows 8 and start worrying about your English.

Re:Windows 9 or 8.1 / 8SE may hear sooner then

[reboot246]

Right now the new Windows is being called "Windows Blue". From what I can gather, it won't have a Start button and the Start Screen will be the main interface. Not much change from Windows 8 - just polishing the turd again.

Re:Windows 9 or 8.1 / 8SE may hear sooner then

[Spad]

What do you mean? I love having a full-screen blocking pop-up on my 2012 servers every time there's a windows update to install.

It's like living in the future.

Remove More Barriers To Entry

[hduff]

How about doing it with a Steam download that runs on _any_ modern Linux?

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[Anonymous Coward]

You want them to focus on a smaller percentage of a small percentage that has a tendency to think "no closed source on my system, ever!!!!"?

Get over yourself.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[Microlith]

Because as you get away from Ubuntu and its derivatives the number of users drops off, with it falling even further as you get away from Fedora.

That said, Steam has been packaged up since the closed beta for other Distros.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[h4rr4r]

If you want to do that, you should be able to do it yourself. That is clearly not something they will support.

It runs fine on 12.10 64bit by the way.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[Anonymous Coward]

It does. I'm running it just fine on Gentoo, and I've installed it on Arch as well. If you are incapable of taking a .deb and extracting what you need from it, you are better off using one of the distros Steam supports anyway.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[Anonymous Coward]

Because that's what they officially (I guess) support. I think valve has talked about making it more distribution agnostic in the future. http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/846939854324291029/

Other distributions that are not supported will obviously repackage it. Archlinux has it in the AUR and it works fine. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/steam/

I'm fine if they only officially support ubuntu as long as they don't do too much ubuntu specific stuff. For example I think they still have no tray icon, only the indicator stuff. That's not so nice.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[hduff]

You want them to focus on a smaller percentage of a small percentage that has a tendency to think "no closed source on my system, ever!!!!"?

Get over yourself.

Who is that? Fedora? SuSE? Mageia? ARCH? None of them have "no closed source" problems.

And it's not impossible to package software to run on a broader range of modern Linux distros. Other commercial vendors seem to be able to do it.

Until they offer more universal packaging, they should more accurately call it "Steam for Ubuntu".

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[h4rr4r]

ARCH already has it in AUR. So you can drop that off your list. I am also fairly confident I read something about rpms being made for fedora or instructions to do it yourself.

Maybe if installing packages for another distro is too hard for you, you should just stick to the supported one.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[Microlith]

He's thinking of the distros few people use, like Trisquel and whatnot.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[CanHasDIY]

How about doing it with a Steam download that runs on _any_ modern Linux?

Last I checked (Saturday), the current build is confirmed to be working on Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, Debian Squeeze, and the latest Arch distro.

Some folks have had luck installing the .deb on Fedora, but this is unconfirmed by me.


Side note - There are, of course, some driver issues, mostly in the graphics department; I can't run TF2 on my old Dell laptop, as there is apparently no current nor intended support for older Intel GM45 series video cards :(

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenSUSE had a repository and 1-Click Install setup for the Steam Linux Beta. It was taken down by the OBS team due to lack of clarity in licensing according to this. Before that you could convert the .deb into an .rpm using alien or other tools, though. I've been playing TF2 using the native Linux client on openSUSE 12.2 since before the Steam Beta was opened and it is really very simple to workaround for most distros if you do not want to use Ubuntu.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, just install Ubuntu in an LXC on your distro of choice and stop being a whiny little bitch.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[jedidiah]

> How about doing it with a Steam download that runs on _any_ modern Linux?

Use alien to turn the deb package into a simple tarball.

Then use ldd to see what libraries you are missing.

There's no magic in this sort of thing: Lay down some files. Then lay down some more files to make sure the first set works. Perhaps throw up some advertising and a progress bar.

Chances are that "modern" Linuxen are already going to have what Steam needs since Linuxen are all ultimately the same upstream projects repackaged.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[lister king of smeg]

Would probably run on debian and mint to

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[ChunderDownunder]

They should just provide Java based installer :-)

Visit steam.com, browser exploit downloads linux iso, flashes image to usb key. Reboots system.

On bioses set to boot from usb, it's a zero-click install!!!

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[armanox]

Fedora has a RPM for it now (from http://spot.fedorapeople.org/steam/). There is also a package (built from this one) on OpenSUSE's build service. I can confirm the package works on Fedora 17 and 18 (with the nvidia blob from nvidia, tested TF2 on a Quadro 600 and GTX 460).

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[markdavis]

>How about doing it with a Steam download that runs on _any_ modern Linux?

I totally agree. At a minimum, a Fedora rpm should be added and that would likely be useful in Fedora, Mandriva, and Mageia.

It is not just the packaging, it has to do with libraries included and which versions, but it really should not be difficult for them to use LSB for the major stuff and a slightly-older-than-bleeding-edge requirement for the necessary libraries and then offer a tar.gz. Anything really odd COULD just be included in their release or even just compiled in, static. This has been done for many years.

Want an example? I can jump right on ftp.mozilla.org and download a 32 bit or 64 bit .tar.gz of the latest Firefox and run it just fine on any distro from "just came out this morning" to one even almost three years old.

Despite what some people seem to think on Slashdot, although Ubuntu might be popular, it doesn't equal the userbase of the next several most popular Linux distros when combined.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[hduff]

ARCH already has it in AUR. So you can drop that off your list. I am also fairly confident I read something about rpms being made for fedora or instructions to do it yourself.

Maybe if installing packages for another distro is too hard for you, you should just stick to the supported one.

Installing packages for another distro is not hard for me. And I don't care to install Ubuntu.

The problem seems to be Steam's insistance on glibc_2.15. My Mageia2 system only provides glibc_2.14; I need to wait for Mageia 3 for a distro-supported glibc_2.15.

What miracle has 2.15 wrought that makes it essential for Steam? I suspect that it does nothing special and since steam is not FOSS, I can't recompile it to find out. But that would be OK if Steam would give me a way around this.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[hduff]

Because that's what they officially (I guess) support. I think valve has talked about making it more distribution agnostic in the future. http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/846939854324291029/

Other distributions that are not supported will obviously repackage it. Archlinux has it in the AUR and it works fine. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/steam/

I'm fine if they only officially support ubuntu as long as they don't do too much ubuntu specific stuff. For example I think they still have no tray icon, only the indicator stuff. That's not so nice.

Those discussions seem to involve them trying to interact with each distro's package manager rather than them supplying updated versions of the libraries, but package managers are not designed to support dependencies for proprietary software like Steam; they are designed to support software that the distro provides.

They refer to providing all their own libraries as "bloatware", but I think it's the best choice since it gives them the most control and provides the most distro-agnostic experience. Modern gaming computers are probably not pressed for disk real estate.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[hduff]

> How about doing it with a Steam download that runs on _any_ modern Linux?

Use alien to turn the deb package into a simple tarball.

Then use ldd to see what libraries you are missing.

There's no magic in this sort of thing: Lay down some files. Then lay down some more files to make sure the first set works. Perhaps throw up some advertising and a progress bar.

Chances are that "modern" Linuxen are already going to have what Steam needs since Linuxen are all ultimately the same upstream projects repackaged.

I can't run in on Mageia2 because it insists on glibc_2.15 and all Mageia provides is libc_2.14. Mageia 3 will provide libc_2.17 at least, so that won't be an issue and I've run it in the Mageia beta, so that again is not an issue. I suppose I could compile glibc_2.15 for Mageia2, but what magic does 2.15 provide that 2.14 does not that is needed by Steam? And needing complicated, user-unfriendly methods of running Steam on any modern Linux is not the way to make it a breakthrough product. This is also not about my "Linux skills". http://socuteurl.com/buzzycuddlefrog

My complaint is not that it can't be _made_ to run on other distros (it obviously can), but it shouldn't _need_ to be if they want to call it "Steam for Linux". Their internal debate is about their problem of supporting so many different packaging systems and making the distro install all the required-by-Steam versions of libraries. They resist providing their own libraries because of some assumed fear of "bloatware", but that approach would give them more control and better performance. I suspect it's more of an understandable desire to push some of the library support issues onto the distro itself. And I understand why they cannot statically compile proprietary software with FOSS libraries. They need to divorce themselves from any reliance on _any_distro if they want to call it "Steam for Linux". Because otherwise, it's not and it's not the breakthrough they claim it to be.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt an Intel GM45 could feasibly run TF2. Maybe with that config that makes everything look like papercraft assembled by Satan's ass.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[JK_the_Slacker]

Installing packages for another distro is not hard for me. And I don't care to install Ubuntu.

The problem seems to be Steam's insistance on glibc_2.15. My Mageia2 system only provides glibc_2.14; I need to wait for Mageia 3 for a distro-supported glibc_2.15.

What miracle has 2.15 wrought that makes it essential for Steam? I suspect that it does nothing special and since steam is not FOSS, I can't recompile it to find out. But that would be OK if Steam would give me a way around this.

Perhaps you should try a more modern distro, like Slackware.

But seriously, why should Valve build against a glibc that was released a year and a half ago?

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Ubuntu, it works well for my family, even my 3 yo (for his abc mouse), say what you will about it, but it does have a shot at being quite mainstream as it is more user friendly (although ati drivers blow for those of us with radon 4000 or lower series cards ( still no good reason to drop the trusty 4870x2)).
All of you who support foss should be happy about this!

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[Rogerborg]

You can "combine" as many penny-ante distros as you like, but Debian, by which I mean Mint (and I guess still Ubuntu) gives them by far the most penetration.

This is a beta. Once they've got the edges properly smoothed off on the distros that Joe User actually has, they can extend it to the tag-alongs.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't seem to have much experience installing alien packages on your distro of choice when the problem you describe is one of the easiest things to repair. If you use rpm, force the installation without checking the correct version of dependencies. The application then worked for me on openSUSE.

However, when you start the application and get error messages indicating that a check for glibc-2.15 failed, try

cd /lib ; ln libc-2.14.so libc-2.15.so

in order to fool the check. If it then works, fine, but if you get crashes or weird behaviour, then it's time to install a modern glibc package in a different prefix (e.g. /opt, read man rpm | less -p ' --prefix NEWPATH'), or compile it yourself and make the application use the fresh glibc.

Upgrading the distro is the step of last resort.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[h4rr4r]

Then they would have to update each of those libraries and be responsible for security patches to each one lest they be seen as a malware frontend.

Your silly idea is the common form on windows and is one of the things most wrong with it.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[h4rr4r]

That approach would make me uninstall it. If I wanted a bunch of libraries not in /lib never getting updated I would run windows.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[DarkXale]

Modern gaming computers are probably not pressed for disk real estate.

Well no, considering most gaming machines today are happily downgrading capacity for SSDs. And these machines very often have a HDD as well for bulk storage.

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[hduff]

Then they would have to update each of those libraries and be responsible for security patches to each one lest they be seen as a malware frontend.

Your silly idea is the common form on windows and is one of the things most wrong with it.

You are confusing packages of FOSS maintained by each distro with packages supplied by third-party commercial vebdors containing proprietary software. The rquirements for packaging and support are very different.

If Valve just wants to provide and support Steam on Ubuntu, that's fine with me. But they should be honest and call it "Steam for Ubuntu" because it's not "Steam for Linux".

Re:Remove More Barriers To Entry

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF?

Install mother fucking glibc_2.15 in fuckin' /opt and point the buttfucking steam installer to that fucking shit.

Fucking newbies!

Team?

[Das Auge]

"team is now being used by thousands of gamers running a Linux OS"

Really? Slashdot has a history of doing a lackluster job of editing, but come on. "Team"?

On topic: I'm looking forward to gaming on Linux. I don't care if it's a byproduct of Valve's development of their own console. In much the same way that I looked forward to having a motherboard with no IDE connectors, I can't wait to ditch Windows. The only reason that I keep it around is for gaming. No more wasted space having to format a large part of my drive in NTFS and the other in EXT4.

Bravo, Valve. Bravo!

Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great and all but there are less Linux games on Steam than even for OS X. And having to hope that the ~90% of Windows that games that will never be ported will work in Wine is not a good proposition.

Phew

[Anonymous Coward]

Now all I need is Office to work on Linux, Photoshop, Illustrator, my external audio interfaces, my PCI-X firewire card, ProTools, and a ton of other games and I am set.

Re:Phew

[MrWin2kMan]

And my Red Stapler, and that's all.

Re:Phew

[jedidiah]

Don't try to kid us. We all know that you're far too cheap to actually pay for a copy of Photoshop.

Re:Phew

[Anonymous Coward]

Libreoffice (does everything that has mattered in the past zillion years), GIMP (I don't care if it's too hard for you, it does everything that matters), inkscape (yeah, for this one I'll agree, it isn't really illustrator quality yet), those work (and if it doesn't, why did you buy crap?), that should work (and if it doesn't, stop buying shit), Ardour (It's BETTER than shitty Pro Tools), just buy a console and be done with it--or treat your windows PC as a console gaming station if that's the only thing left that you give a shit about.

Re:Phew

[Anonymous Coward]

Ardour (It's BETTER than shitty Pro Tools)

Are you fucking kidding me?

You are either trolling or totally clueless.

Re:Phew

[HJED]

I haven't tried illustrator, but both office and photoshop are very stable under wine, I run a kubuntu/wine/office setup as my primary computer.

Re:Phew

[HJED]

You don't even need libreoffice and gimp, office actually runs with more stability (using WINE) then libreoffice does and photoshop is quite stable under WINE. I can't afford illustrator, but I would imagine that if photoshop works in WINE that would as well.

Re:Phew

[jones_supa]

Now all I need is Office to work on Linux, Photoshop, Illustrator, my external audio interfaces, my PCI-X firewire card, ProTools, and a ton of other games and I am set.

I must note that lately Office has finally become usable under Wine. Wine is always a bit of a hack though.

For the other stuff, I think you would be screwed. You have to keep using Win/Mac.

Make the SOURCE ENGINE games available under linux

[Anonymous Coward]

For the love of god, Make the SOURCE ENGINE games available under linux.
I'd be happy to play through HL2 etc again while waiting for newer titles.

2013?

[karearea]

The year of Linux on the (gaming) Desktop?

This has been there for a while...

[Deathspawner]

That's not the homepage; it's the download page. And that Tux and message has been there for over a month, at least.

Re:Make the SOURCE ENGINE games available under li

[h4rr4r]

Clearly the engine already does since Team Fortress has been ported. I wonder what the hold up is.

DAMMIT VALVE, let me play PORTAL 2!

Oh and get cracking on HL3.

Correction: Steam for Ubuntu.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the only platform that's officially supported so far anyway, and under that I couldn't even get TF2 to to work properly so YMMV. On the one hand people want to abandon Ubuntu in droves because of the whole Amazon "spyware" fiasco, on the other hand they can't because a lot of the alternative distributions and OS's out there won't boot on a Windows 8 machine, thanks to UEFI. Canonical knows that paying their way into the system is the best way to force people to accept the changes they're making to Unity -- if it's the only thing other than Windows 8 that will boot on your system, then you're stuck with a distribution who has paid their way into Microsoft's walled garden...and in turn they can get away with things like collecting information from your Ubuntu installation to peddle to Amazon.

UEFI is Microsoft's baby no doubt, they're the ones pushing for it the hardest, but don't think it hasn't occurred to a businessman like Shuttleworth that it can work for people like him too. As previously stated, if Ubuntu is one of the only options that will run on a majority of Windows 8 PC's then they can essentially get away with forcing anything upon the user, pre-installed spyware, hiding off your searches to third party companies, ad nauseam. That's what's forced most people to abandon Windows and commercial alternatives in the first place -- you would think Canonical would be shooting themselves in the foot for adopting similar policies, but it's actually quite smart. They've realized that money is the only way their alternative OS is going to survive on the market now, Microsoft has the keys...they've also realized that they can monetize that position for their own advantage. It's only going to get worse, until people stop buying hardware that refuses to boot anything other than Windows 8 or a "properly signed" alternative.

Re:Correction: Steam for Ubuntu.

[h4rr4r]

Runs fine on ARCH, it is even in their repos.

You know you can uninstall the Amazon thing right?
System76/Dell/etc will likely still provide hardware that is not bootloader locked.

Re:Make the SOURCE ENGINE games available under li

[HaZardman27]

Better yet, open source the Source Engine (but keep content licensed, much like how you still need to buy Doom 3 to play it with the open source engine) and let the community help you do it.

Huzzah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta be a high level of confidence if Valve is putting Steam for Linux out there for the sheep herd to see, and that is good news indeed.

There are still problems of course- the only one I have had is the lack of old titles being ported yet, but I have seen a number of problems due to people using unsupported distributions. The community will solve these issues fairly rapidly, of course- this isn't Microsoft we are dealing with!

As to the question of "Why?" posted above:
there are a lot of benefits to using linux and one of the chief ones is cost.
Another popular one is that the user can maintain control of their own computer rather than letting the corporate policy of a vendor decide what you can do with your pc.
The most important ones to me:
the ability to choose how my operating system (desktop and every other method of interfacing) looks, works and functions.
When I change a setting, it STAYS changed.
If something goes wrong it is MY fault- I did it, which is very different to Windows which often would switch from the manual settings I specified to auto-magic ones which simply didn't work.

As the market share of linux has grown, the operatings systems based on the kernel have gotten better and better, surpassing Windows in most respects.
Valve's current plans only help that and should move linux forward to the point where MS and Apple copy gnu/linux all the time instead of just a lot of the time. :)

Re:Make the SOURCE ENGINE games available under li

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, That's what I mean!
Team Fortress is Fun and all, But what's the hold up on the rest.

I have Portal 2 in my wish list, But I'm not going to buy it unless it's available for Linux.

Re:Make the SOURCE ENGINE games available under li

[spire3661]

Drivers need some work still. TF2 isnt nearly as smooth on Linux as it is on Win on the same hardware.I get 'micro-stuttering' on Linux in TF2. Same map, same server and it sutters on Linux. Its totally playable, but its drawbacks kill it for a pixel junkie like me.. When that goes away, ill consider using Linux for my Valve gaming goodness (L4D2, TF2 etc).

Re:Make the SOURCE ENGINE games available under li

[h4rr4r]

I bought it for PS3 and got the free steam copy. Which I already played in wine. Now I want to install it again since I got rid of my steam wine bottle.

Useless

[Dunge]

Come play our 3 games supported!

Re:Useless

[naturaverl]

Wish I had mod points. Seriously I installed the linux client, poked around, and uninstalled it after a day. The problem for me is that more or less than 90% of the games on steam aren't available if you're running linux.

Re:Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh... There's a few more than that that're in progress...some from Valve, some from other studios and publshers...

Re:Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like Mac gaming, sure you can get a few games on mac, funny enough more games from windows run on linux under wine than get official ports to OSX.

Re:Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried Team Fortress, doesn't work - spurious error message. After ~2G download didn't feel like waiting a couple more days to try something else unless there's some way to confirm it works with my graphics setup first.

Re:Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have that many games on steam, but there are already 20 linux games in my library. Most are indie games like Aquaria, Braid, FTL, Osmos, Amnesia or Trine2. They are small games, but I enjoy them and that's the important part.

I also have "the two big games" Serious Sam 3: BFE and Team Fortress 2 Beta. With Unity3D 4, the source engine and the unreal engine 3 with linux versions we can expect at least some more big titles.

In case you missed it, if you go to the steam website it says "Join the beta". They didn't even integrate all the games yet that do have native linux versions available. It has been in public beta for just about one month I think in which they updated steam several times. For example the steam gui responsibility got greatly improved. I don't know what exactly you expect but I think the pace is ok.

Re:Useless

[jones_supa]

Wish I had mod points. Seriously I installed the linux client, poked around, and uninstalled it after a day. The problem for me is that more or less than 90% of the games on steam aren't available if you're running linux.

So what? The game collection will increase over time. They also have still work to do to polish the Steam client itself.

Re:Useless

[VGPowerlord]

I don't know about on Linux, but Team Fortress 2 Beta (appid 520) on Steam for Windows/OSX is not Team Fortress 2 (appid 440)... it's a branch that Valve occasionally uses to test new game features.

PC cases that are XBOX HUEG

[tepples]

It's common to keep two generations of console connected to one TV. As I understand it, it's far less common to keep two different PCs connected to one monitor. I wonder how much of that is because a standard PC tower takes up far more physical space than even an XBOX HUEG console.

The other solution is dual-booting. I don't know how easy that still is, whether Windows 8 gets in the way of shortening a partition. But rebooting into another operating system will interrupt your music, web browsing, and messaging session, let alone those of other household members logged into their accounts, and booting some operating systems takes a lot longer than, say, the time for a console to boot up.

Re:PC cases that are XBOX HUEG

[spire3661]

One thing people are going to have to get over is that you shouldnt use your Steambox as a full workstation PC, thats a fools game if you want anything resembling a console experience. Hardware is cheap enough now to build dedicated Steamboxes if you want a 'console' like machine. Consoles are an exercise in compromise, keep that in mind when deploying a living room entertainment PC.

Re:PC cases that are XBOX HUEG

[gbjbaanb]

VM dude. That old Windows PC that runs windows95 games just runs in a little virtual sandbox with more RMA than you could ever imagine existing back in 95. Or those old DOS games (of which there are many with excellent gameplay) run happily in either a DOS VM, or in an emulator like Dosbox.

This is why you don't see 2 PCs connected to the same monitor.

Re:PC cases that are XBOX HUEG

[cupantae]

The other solution is dual-booting. I don't know how easy that still is, whether Windows 8 gets in the way of shortening a partition.

I think if Windows 8 computers do start to be sold in huge quantities, the fact that Valve is investing in Linux means that the problems will be short-lived.
It will get done or they'll pay for it to get done.

Re:PC cases that are XBOX HUEG

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing people are going to have to get over is that you shouldnt use your Steambox as a full workstation PC, thats a fools game if you want anything resembling a console experience. Hardware is cheap enough now to build dedicated Steamboxes if you want a 'console' like machine. Consoles are an exercise in compromise, keep that in mind when deploying a living room entertainment PC.

You can SAY that all you want, but people wont do it unless you strongly encourage them. Sorry that sounds rough, but I'm not expecting it to happen anyway. People will just decide they don't like the experience (that they created for themselves) and move on.

Re:PC cases that are XBOX HUEG

[Rogerborg]

Aside, I'm pretty sure that anyone minded to try Steam for Linux isn't going to be using Windows 8.

Re:PC cases that are XBOX HUEG

[Anonymous Coward]

The other solution is dual-booting. I don't know how easy that still is

Shut up and hand your geek card to the bouncer at the door.

Re:PC cases that are XBOX HUEG

[drc003]

Really? I know several people who use Linux and Win 8 on a regular basis. They will definitely be giving Steam for Linux a go as well.

not windows mobile at the expence of its Desktop

[tuppe666]

This is the year...

...that Windows fucked gamers/steam, pushing users onto alternative platforms [and I mean Android], but providing an unpleasant Desktop experience, with a future that promises censored gaming, and alternative stores locked out. Ironically I'm counting 3 Linux console launches this year so far[one of them from steam], and Android the best known Linux is set to overtake Window in Market share this year [some figures claim it already had happened] http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/IDC-GS,0101-366874-0-2-3-1-png-.html...not Desktop enough for you...in case you were still wondering the Chromebook is STILL the best selling laptop on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-Computers/zgbs/electronics/565108/ref=pd_ts_zgc_e_565108_morl?pf_rd_p=1299888842&pf_rd_s=right-5&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=565108&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1J8F0Q3S9TFWX2J2ZRAD

Get over it the pack of four is all people talk about...and Microsoft is not one of them.

Big Picture

[tepples]

Steam is on the PC team, as opposed to the console team. Especially with Big Picture and the ability to filter for controller-friendly games, Valve seems to have taken a shot at encouraging people to set up a living-room PC instead of a major console.

Re:Big Picture

[Anonymous Coward]

Odd then that its steam & their DRM shenannigans that shoved me into console gaming.

I hadnt owned a console since sega genesis until steam came along... now i dont even look at pc gaming titles... too DRM-y

Call me a skeptic here....

[mark-t]

But I really can't see this being a successful venture.

I'm not trying to troll, just calling it as I see it.

Why would people bother with this when they can just play practically all of (if not actually all of) the same games on the windows PC that they already have?

Their Linux console certainly isn't priced any more economically than a PC, so I'm not sure I see the advantgage as far as the end-user is concerned.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[Microlith]

But I really can't see this being a successful venture.

Why not? Game developers can't be hurt by being given a way to stay independent of any one company. Currently they can play the console vendors off each other, even if the platforms are vendor controlled. On the PC, they've never had anyone but Microsoft.

Why would people bother with this when they can just play practically all of (if not actually all of) the same games on the windows PC that they already have?

Because I want a choice other than "Microsoft or no games at all." I'm not alone, apparently.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[mark-t]

You may not be alone... but do you seriously think that there are actually enough people like you to make this a successful venture?

Can you justify this belief against the existing demographics which have Linux with an almost vanishingly small percentage of home desktop users? I'm not saying they aren't out there... just suggesting that their numbers probably aren't sufficient to bring about any real commercial success in the home user mass-market

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[beelsebob]

They would bother because the only thing that's currently holding them back from using linux/Mac OS is having their games available.

And since when have they announced their pricing for the steam box? They announced that their dev kit was roughly as fast as a $1000 PC (though the specs look more like $7-800 to me). Given that it'll only be launched in about a year, that'll mean that that speed will be achievable with $5-600 consumer parts. Add into that that valve will be getting OEM prices, and it'll likely be $400-450 to them, add to that that they'll probably launch it at a loss, and you're looking at $300 for their high end version. That's an entirely reasonable price for a console in this day and age.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[beelsebob]

Oops, forgot to follow up.

Valve will then of course do exactly what Nintendo/Sony/MS do to make sure games studios get working on games for their device. This in turn will have the side effect that every game released for steambox will also be available on Linux. Given that almost all of the APIs for linux (and I'd bet heavily 100% of the ones Valve say are guaranteed to be available) are also available on Mac OS, and I'd bet that you're looking at all those games also being available for Mac OS.

That will if nothing else, significantly weaken MS's strangle hold on the gaming world.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would people bother with this when they can just play practically all of (if not actually all of) the same games on the windows PC that they already have?

Their Linux console certainly isn't priced any more economically than a PC, so I'm not sure I see the advantgage as far as the end-user is concerned.

Hardware-upgrade-hell? Some people like buying something knowing that it works for what it's intended out of the box. And no, high-end gaming rigs do not cost the same/less than the steambox as far as I know. All the premade gamer-rigs out there command ridiculous prices; yeah, I know you could build it much cheaper and better, but some people just don't want to.

Electricity-savings? That quad-SLI setup aint gonna power/cool itself.

Kids-B-gone? Now they can play their games in the living-room instead of hugging the work-pc.

Plenty of options of why having a dedicated Steam-console is a good thing.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[gbjbaanb]

depends, when Windows 8 gets more popular and people realise there's no apps available for it - because Microsoft charges 30% for a platform with few users and all the devs have jumped ship to making games for iOS.... maybe then we'll see Linux as the gaming platform for the PC.

'course they have to get good graphics drivers easily available first, and I doubt the ideology will be junked before Linux on the PC desktop goes. The steambox might save things, we'll have to see.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[mark-t]

They would bother because the only thing that's currently holding them back from using linux/Mac OS is having their games available.

Uh... no.

The average home user doesn't give a damn about OS wars.

They just want a machine that will play their games.

They already have a windows box. There's no incentive to go out and buy another box that plays all of the same games when they could just go and buy another windows PC for about the same amount of money.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[mark-t]

Do you honestly believe that Valve, singlehandedly, is capable of producing enough content on their own exclusively for their device (because if they also make it for windows, then people won't generally bother getting the console because it is traditionally exclusive content that moves consoles), that people would bother to get one?

And what incentive will other game studios have to make games for this console that is running an OS that's been around for 20 years, and not once gotten to even 2% of the end-user consumer computer use outside of the server market?

If Linux had any chance of being successful in the home, on a general purpose PC, wouldn't it have, by now?

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[beelsebob]

Do you honestly believe that Valve, singlehandedly, is capable of producing enough content on their own exclusively for their device (because if they also make it for windows, then people won't generally bother getting the console because it is traditionally exclusive content that moves consoles), that people would bother to get one?

How much unique content did Sony or MS manage to create for the PS3 or XBox 360? The answer is not very much, they don't need to, and nor do Valve –only have the content the others do, plus one or two interesting titles. Every console maker has been able to do this when they've released their new shiny box. And just like Sony could do it for the PS/PS2/PS3, Valve will be able to do it for the Steambox, because they have clout.

And what incentive will other game studios have to make games for this console that is running an OS that's been around for 20 years, and not once gotten to even 2% of the end-user consumer computer use outside of the server market?

The exact same incentive they had to make games for the PS3, which runs an OS that hadn't even existed for 1 year, and not once got to even 0.0000001% of the end user market share. That it has a major manufacturer behind it, who has a lot of clout, and can make it happen.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[mark-t]

Sony is a big name. People had confidence in it.

Microsoft was a big name. People had confidence in it.

Linux? Not so much.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[beelsebob]

Linux isn't what people are being asked to have confidence in. Valve is. Valve is a big name. People have confidence in it, especially in the games industry.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[mark-t]

I know quite a few people in the games industry actually... about 15 or 20. And other than the ones who already happen to really like Linux (and therefore might have some cause to wishfully hope that this takes off), all of them think that this venture on Valve's part is nothing less than ridiculous.

And bear in mind that this device *WILL* need exclusive content to drive its sales... so that means that the developers it gets will have to *NOT* write the same games for Windows.

So... how many other companies has Valve contracted to develop games exclusive for this device ? How many of them are large game studios?

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[andydread]

I'm not sure of the numbers but I know at least two other people like me who were avid gamers but quit playing as much when we switched to Linux and now that Steam is out on Linux we are buying and playing more games than we have played in years. I used to play UT religiously for example and purchased every version since the original Unreal all the way up to UT2004 at full price on release day. When UT3 came out I patiently waited for the Linux version that never materialized. I still play the Linux version of UT2004 from time to time but not much anymore.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[ArsonSmith]

Alone or not can they risk being tied to Microsoft where at the very least in their eyes is faltering? You seem to think there is no risk in staying with Windows for gaming. Valve seems to think there is a risk, perhaps even a large one so they are hedging their bets.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[jbmartin6]

Well, how may would it take to make it a success? It doesn't have to be more popular than Windows to be a success, it just needs to recoup the investment and then some. Apple keeps making PC OSes, even though there's virtually no chance it will overtake Windows any time soon.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[malv]

"Why would people bother with this when they can just play practically all of (if not actually all of) the same games on the windows PC that they already have?"

Conversion will happen naturally as more and more users and developers start to see the benefits of Linux: free, unencumbered by licensing issues, no Microsoft vendor lock in, and source code is open. There are also many emerging markets outside of the US that haven't been raised the Microsoft way.

What's currently missing is a solid distro. Ubuntu is ambitious and dedicated, but flaky. If they can get the distro into a more reliable state, I really don't see what would be keeping a good chunk of developers and users on Windows.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[pepty]

Also worth bearing in mind: Imagine generic Linux boxes started to look like a potential competitor in the games scene. Then imagine how much money Sony and Microsoft would throw at developers to NOT release any linux versions of games at all. Then double that number if this was happening anywhere near the release dates for the Playstation 4 or Xbox 720.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[pepty]

that'll mean that that speed will be achievable with $5-600 consumer parts. Add into that that valve will be getting OEM prices, and it'll likely be $400-450 to them, add to that that they'll probably launch it at a loss, and you're looking at $300 for their high end version. That's an entirely reasonable price for a console in this day and age.

I think they would be selling it at a loss at $300 even if they got the components for free. Valve will have to market and advertise the hell out of this if they want it to sell in large numbers, and the only way to get the other major game developers to consider working with the platform is to sell in large numbers. MS spent half a billion just to introduce the Kinect. How much do you think they will spend on the 720? Plus Valve is currently a software operation. They'll have to invest in becoming a hardware developer/manufacturer/distributer or at least pay other companies to do it for them.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[mark-t]

...: free, unencumbered by licensing issues, no Microsoft vendor lock in, and source code is open...

None of which matter to anyone but people who are already fans of Linux.

What's currently missing is a solid distro

What's missing is the market... which is created by the apps, which in urn is drawn by the user-base, and yes, I'm fully aware this is an inescapable catch 22.

Windows got around that catch-22 by initially being a DOS add-on that still ran practically all DOS games, and by offering what it contended was a superior interface, slowly but surely, more and more people would adopt it. As this happened, the necessity for application writers to write DOS games diminished, which, in turn lessened the necessity for backwards compatibility and so on until you get to where we are today.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[Anonymous Coward]

Console hardware used to be highly unique and optimized for cost and performance. That's no longer true - Orbis and Durango are just commodity PC hardware plus a few bells and whistles. So there's no technical reason for PlayStation or XBox to even exist any more, and the commodity PC makers should be able to come in with cheap hardware designs that just play games. This platform is called Steam Box. Steam Box runs Linux. So by upgrading your PC to Valve's recommended Linux you are in effect creating a Steam Box for yourself, without buying a new box. That's why this is a genius move from Valve. They are beta-testing the underlying Steam Box platform.

Maybe Steam Box-on-PC will be popular, maybe not. It doesn't matter. The potential market for Steam Box platform per se is huge - at least 200 million users.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[h4rr4r]

Consoles are not moved by exclusive content. They are moved by advertising and ease of use. If Steam can get this box in stores next to the PS4 and Xbox720 they will make a decent go of it. Exclusive content is only something fanboys even know about. Most AAA games are not ever going to be exclusive and those that are will have a very comparable alternative.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[beelsebob]

Actually, Sony would probably be relatively pleased. It's in their interest to get game devs using APIs like OpenGL and OpenAL for their engines, only Microsoft would see it as a bad thing as it would help unlock their D3D lock out.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[felipou]

I don't already have a windows PC. My girlfriend neither. Nor my colleagues. Nor my brother. Nor many of my friends. Also, most people all know (if not all) who do have a windows machine, got it OEM (no choice) when they bought their notebook, or pirated it.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[mark-t]

Name a console that didn't get its start with exclusive content.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have Windows XP, Vista, or 7, Steam is hoping you are on an upgrade path that does not involve Windows 8. Hence Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. If Ubuntu grabs traction, then developers will flock to it. If Windows 8 really gets traction, then developers will flock to it.
I sell PCs, and while I did see a surge when Windows 8 was released, it has died down to people just replacing a dead computer.
Ubuntu or Fedora are worth a look at, especially if you use a live CD.
I wish I could put Ubuntu on a few of our demo computers, I think it will sell. It has been improved over the last 2 years. I find it easier to use now then version 11.04.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[Anonymous Coward]

But that other Windows PC will come with Windows 8 and therefore will not play all of the same games.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[mark-t]

Google for info on why steambox might not succeed for a plethora of reasons about why its failure is significantly more likely than its success.

Just because it might be theoretically possible for Valve to break all the odds and become a smash hit console device doesn't mean that, at least at this juncture, it's a particularly realistic thing to be projecting as a probable outcome.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[mark-t]

Even a windows 8 pc will play significantly more of their old titles than a steambox would.

Unless the end user just turned around and just installed windows on the steambox.

But if that's what they expect most people are going to do, then what's the point of shipping it with Linux in the first place other than to give geek woodies to Linux fanboys?

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[h4rr4r]

I did not say that did not happen, just that those are not what really drive sales. The really good AAA games are going to be on all the consoles and PC.

I am not buying a 360 for all the Halo's in a frathouse.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[mark-t]

Software sells hardware. Always. Every platform ever invented that has enjoyed some measure of commercial success has always had "killer apps" which weren't available elsewhere.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[h4rr4r]

Name one for the PS3.
I can't think of a single PS3 game I own that is not available on the 360.

Linux has quite a bit of commercial server room success, yet all or nearly its applications are available on other operating systems. It is not hardware, but it is sold with hardware.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[mark-t]

How about I give you a link instead?

And I'll give you no argument that Linux has enjoyed quite a bit of commercial success in the server arena... but how on earth do you equate that with spelling probable success in the home user market?

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[h4rr4r]

I don't, I was just refuting your point.

Most of those are shovelware. None are what I would call must haves.

If you really want to look for a reason you could claim blu-ray, but even that is now a dime a dozen.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't, I was just refuting your point.

Not really, you just provided your own anecdote/opinion on what would influence your buying decision. Obviously those exclusives didn't influence you much, that's fine.

I do think you're in the minority though. Available features (exclusive content is a feature) is one of the major factors (after things like price, brand, etc) to get people to buy your console instead of a competitor's, or simply not buying a console at all

There's certainly a number of people on slashdot who bought PS3s just for OtherOS feature, and they obviously became quite pissed when that feature disappeared (well, disappeared if you update)

Though your argument is true for appealing to developers: developers certainly care for ease of use (development). Without developers, you have no games, and nothing to attract consumers.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[anerki]

What do you mean "Microsoft or no games at all"?

You Microsoft,
Playstation,
Xbox,
Nintendo,
iOS,
Mac OS X,
Gameboy,
PSP,
Android, ...

or no games at all.

Re:Call me a skeptic here....

[Anonymous Coward]

You are either intentionally trolling or are the dumbest of the dumbfucks

Desktop malware is different

[tepples]

It's not only malware that exploits defects in an Internet service's input checking, as in your example of Apache vs. IIS. It's also malware that tricks desktop users into installing it, such as surreptitious installation of a keylogger or a fake antivirus or the like. Consider what would happen if a user puts mistaken trust in a rogue PPA to see dancing bunnies.

Lack of discoverability

[tepples]

Metro can already be run in a window.

How are end users supposed to discover that something like RetroUI Pro exists? And why should users have to pay extra rather than have it built into the operating system? Perhaps the fact that Window 8 users don't know what a Window 8 user can already do is telling about the usability of Window 8.

Re:Lack of discoverability

[Anonymous Coward]

How are end users supposed to discover that something like RetroUI Pro [betanews.com] exists?

Um, I dunno, the same way anyone learns about anything? Searching Google, advertising, articles, word of mouth, forums?

And why should users have to pay extra rather than have it built into the operating system?

They don't have to. There are plenty of free alternatives available.

Perhaps the fact that Window 8 users don't know what a Window 8 user can already do is telling about the usability of Window 8.

Windows users have been clueless about the full potential of the operating system since 1.0. Same goes for common users of OSX, Linux, iOS, Android, and every other OS imaginable. Your bias is showing by trying to claim this is a problem unique to Windows 8.

Re:Lack of discoverability

[tepples]

Searching Google

How should one discover the appropriate keywords that will lead to a discovery that running Windows Store apps in a window is even possible?

advertising

I've never happened to see an advertisement for a product that allows running Windows Store apps in a window.

articles

Which don't always end up posted to the same sites that one reads. For example, an article about this product appears not to have been posted to Slashdot.

word of mouth

If everybody else in one's family is on XP, Windows 7, Mac OS X, or Xubuntu, how should one learn about Windows 8-specific utilities through word of mouth?

There are plenty of free alternatives available.

Google free run windows store app in window brought me Visual Studio Express after nine irrelevant results. I imagine that most users are likely to get discouraged by the irrelevant results.

That was 2010

[tuppe666]

The year of Linux on the (gaming) Desktop?

It was May 2010 that the Humble Bundle launched it has had 7 Cross Platform Desktop versions...4 others that include Android...and 6 Developer Specific bundles, already proving Linux as a viable gaming platform.

Steam is late to the the party. In reality the new world its "cross platform gaming" that is becoming increasing important as Windows as both a platform and a brand lose relevance.

Re:That was 2010

[Anonymous Coward]

We could go all the way to the Loki ports around 2000. However Steam has the muscle to turn Linux more into an actual, believable gaming platform. It's not that yet.

Long story short

[Kartu]

Microsoft plans to introduce a "windows app store".
This is a huge threat to Valve's business since Microsoft wouldn't care about high margins on stuff sold in it.
This move is a sort of counter attack.
Note that Valve doesn't try to make money on hardware, merely establish a non-Microsoft platform.

So what we, customers, can get from it:
1) DirectX's alternative for Unixes (yeah, once upon a time there was OpenGL, I remember)
2) Standardized gamepads usable on PCs
3) Weakened wintel domination

Libreoffice works just fine.

[tuppe666]

Now all I need is Office to work on Linux

Your the only one everyone else is moving to Libreoffice and Google Docs, The iPad proved that few really need or want office..but then its off-topic. Ironically the best selling laptop right now on Amazon is a Chromebook guess your list of requirements is out of touch with most users..

seriously though http://www.libreoffice.org/ is great.

Re:Libreoffice works just fine.

[shutdown -p now]

Your the only one everyone else is moving to Libreoffice and Google Docs, The iPad proved that few really need or want office.

The iPad would have proven that if you've seen many people using iPad exclusively and ditching their desktops/laptops. In practice, most people use iPad for entertainment, but still go to their laptop for anything serious. Heck, you couldn't even update iPad without having a PC or Mac until iOS 5.

Re:Libreoffice works just fine.

[Swarley]

I do love me some libre office in general. But I must admit that impress is straight up garbage. It does OK (and just ok) at opening ppt files. It sucks big time at building presentations. Google docs presentation builder is much better, but if you're mostly interested in presentations Office is really hard to avoid. Calc and writer put up an admirable showing for sure, but impress does not impress in the slightest.

Re:Libreoffice works just fine.

[HJED]

As a linux user, I have had seriouse compatibility and stability issues with libreoffice, but Word, Powerpoint and Excel all run briliantly in WINE - in fact I use this as my primary production system. I haven't tried outlook or acces so I don't know if they do. Onenote dosen't work though.

Re:Libreoffice works just fine.

[pepty]

Your the only one everyone else is moving to Libreoffice and Google Docs,.

No, no they're not. If your clients, boss, or coworkers are sending you Excel spreadsheets or heavily formatted Word documents for you to work on and return and you insist on using LibreOffice you will find yourself without clients, boss, or coworkers. You don't get to tell them to format their files as Office 2003 and hand them a list of formatting, drawing, template, and macro features they will have to stop using. MS owns you, or at least they own me. Heck, I tried to set up LibreOffice for my Mom but everyone else at the nonprofit she volunteers for uses MS Word/Excel, so that fell through too.

seriously though http://www.libreoffice.org/ is great.

Not if MS can help it.

Re:Libreoffice works just fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your the only one everyone else is moving to Libreoffice and Google Docs, The iPad proved that few really need or want office

You're.

No, he's not. No, only crazed Slashdotters are moving to LO.

Some people are moving to Google Docs; it's barely acceptable for low-level work (Your kid's homework); anyone not doing homework is either sucking it up and dealing with how shitty the product is just for the one useful feature - easy collaboration.

The iPad proved nothing. Nobody who needs an office suite relies solely on an iPad.

Windows is the old platform

[tuppe666]

That's great and all but there are less Linux games on Steam than even for OS X. And having to hope that the ~90% of Windows that games that will never be ported will work in Wine is not a good proposition.

Absolutely...but that was when Windows was a dominant platform. Increasingly we are seeing games exclusive to android, and not appearing on windows at all, and we are seeing the launch of by my count 4 Linux based consoles this year. Games are coming to Linux thick and fast the Humble Bundle games alone total 70+...and that is a small independent developer, nothing like the size of Steam.

Re:Windows is the old platform

[flimflammer]

When Windows was a dominant platform? You're joking, right? You aren't actually trying to suggest that mobile exclusives are a problem for Windows?

To be frank, not many PC users appreciate mobile ports when they happen anyway, given that they generally cost $1 on the mobile device, and $6-15 on PC as a straight port. Most people just don't see the value, and for good reason... Save for very few games, very few successfully make the transition to PC and do well.

The loads and loads of identical casual games might be good time wasters on phones, but that sort of casual gameplay doesn't often translate well to a PC release. The market just isn't all that interested in them. Trying to use android games to suggest that Linux is really picking up is downright silly and disingenuous to what everyone else means when we talk about gaming on Linux.

Don't expect steam for Linux to turn Linux into a gaming powerhouse. It has been around for Macs for a while now and the list of games available is extremely paltry in comparison to the Windows counterpart. Gaming on Windows isn't going anywhere, and it's certainly not going to be replaced by Linux anytime soon regardless of what you've read into the situation Valve is in.

Are you serious

[tuppe666]

Come play our 3 games supported!

A single indie developer got all these bundles working on Linux, by my count the cream of indie gaming...you seriously think steam isn't going to add to this.

Humble Indie Bundle
Humble Indie Bundle 2
Humble Indie Bundle 3
Humble Indie Bundle 4
Humble Indie Bundle V
Humble Indie Bundle 6
Humble Indie Bundle 7
Humble Frozenbyte Bundle
Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle
Humble Voxatron Debut
Humble Introversion Bundle
Humble Botanicula Debut
Humble Bundle for Android
Humble Bundle for Android 2
Humble Bundle for Android 3
Humble Bundle for Android 4

Re:Make the SOURCE ENGINE games available under li

[Anonymous Coward]

I would hope that the expanded user base brought by Steam will pressure video card makers to create better linux drivers.

EXCLUSIVE

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam for linux would have needes a boost, like Half-Life 3 exclusive... but it was a joke...or was it?

Re:EXCLUSIVE

[jones_supa]

We'll see. There is no official confirmation on HL3 or new episodes for HL2, no matter what platform.

My guess is that a lot of the current Source engine games will eventually get a Linux version.

More Police State than closed Garden

[tuppe666]

Microsoft plans to introduce a "windows app store".
This is a huge threat to Valve's business since Microsoft wouldn't care about high margins on stuff sold in it.

No...Window *has* launched a Windows app store. Its not just a huge threat to Valve with a bundled a software shop. It threatens to become Windows only shop [copying Apples closed garden]. Microsoft intends to become the *only* place to get software on the windows platform, not undercut the opposition.

We need better support from NVIDIA/AMD first

[Anonymous Coward]

We need better support for NVIDIA/ATI graphics first.

This is bound to bite us in the ass as another failure and more proof “Linux doesn't work”. I don't believe Linux on the desktop is a failure although it hasn't been adopted by the masses due to the differences in support and a lack of commitment from the current user base to purchasing free software friend hardware.

However we (the community/businesses/etc) haven't gotten it right because no company has made a serious attempt to provide proper support for end-users and end-users have not committed to demanding there hardware be free software friendly. People don't seem to understand that in order for the OS to succeed in the market place there has to be support for it at various levels. Right now that support is getting better although far from “good enough” for the mass of gamers. Where the support has seriously improved has largely been due to one little company and a handful of others. ThinkPenguin has been working on a free software friendly catalog which has made it easy to pick up hardware for Linux. The company isn't just sitting around waiting for support to improve like a lot of other “Linux” companies. They are working with various entities, distributions, and developers and pushing for the release of code. We need drivers compatible with the free software development model that distributions are based on. Otherwise Linux is too complicated for the masses.

The problem with Linux gaining steam for gaming is the lack of properly supported hardware. NVIDIA does not release specifications or code which means any free software driver is at a serious disadvantage. NVIDIA graphics cards may or may not work at any given time and certain features will never be implemented due to incompatibility with the free software model. Instead of trying to turn Linux into MS Windows we need to press NVIDIA and AMD to cooperate. They need to follow Intel in releasing the complete specifications so that completely free drivers can be developed and supported in the mainline and derivative kernels.

AMD hasn't provided the complete specifications either and isn't planning to. AMD is committed to public relations, not Linux.

If we fail to demand free drivers the ease of use which we have gained will be lost and there will be zero chance of this succeeding.

Re:We need better support from NVIDIA/AMD first

[BluPhenix316]

Where have you been? NVIDIA has been working on drivers for linux for a long time now. Their 310 series drivers work great with my 660 GTX.

Re:We need better support from NVIDIA/AMD first

[Anonymous Coward]

NVIDIA drivers require additional know-how to install and are not properly supported. When NVIDIA decides to discontinue support you'll notice. There is only one way to ensure this doesn't happen. That is to demand free drivers. It might be "good enough" for you although most users are not going to open a terminal or much about trying to install the drivers. If the hardware doesn't work out of the box its too much. Linux is not Microsoft Windows and sticking in a CD doesn't just “work”. Nor does linking to a download. There are way too many versions. Drivers need proper integration to make adding hardware easy enough for the average joe. It needs to “just work”. The fact you don't understand that suggests your not an average user.

Re:We need better support from NVIDIA/AMD first

[Osgeld]

maha! you dont want better drivers, you want source code so you can fork it 100 different ways and make it even more confusing

Re:We need better support from NVIDIA/AMD first

[Anonymous Coward]

sudo yast install nvidia or open your repo GUI and search nivdia, select it and click install.

It is much easier to install the Linux NVIDIA driver than the Windows one.

If you don't have them in your repo download it and type sudo sh name_of_file.sh.

That is pretty difficult if you are brain-dead.

More hardware runs out of the box with Linux than with Windows. Significantly more.

Re:Yawn!

[cheater512]

Err...How does Valve make more profit from Linux vs Windows?

Eh, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Myself like the other 99% of pc users in the world use windows because we want the best experince on our pc's. When I do use linux is just to load up for a goof to play with for a little while but I never take it seriously.

Everything works on windows, thats why its the world most used OS and why all 3rd party developers make everything for windows. Its easier to use for everyone from a novice to a expert, hardware takes full advantage of it, drivers are updated more often for it, programs update themselves for it more often, windows itself can afford to R&D fixes and improvements to release on a constant basis for the OS, just about every game that comes out works on it, and what you cant get to work on windows the vast majority of the time there is a workdaround for it thats let you.

Linux is just something for those super tech guys that want to feel superior to everyone else so they use a half assed product and run around preaching to everyone how awesome linux is and youre stupid if you dont use it also because the bestest most awesomest thing ever!!! They cant even call their computer a computer, its always a linux computer or a linux box because they cant stop from letting people know specifically they use linux because they enjoy people asking about it and such. Linux users are basically the exact same thing as an Apple user.

Linux is a waste as a viable OS and no one uses it for the very reasons I mentioned before. But linux users wont accept that. They act like linux is this huge thing but in reality it just seems big because linux users are very loud and obnoxious so they seem to be larger in numbers than they are.

So linux people are like apple people in that they use a inferior product compared to android but the apple people get the most attention for being the most annoying and obnoxious while the android people are quite content with their product. Same way most windows users are quite happy with their product and thus dont make a big annoyingly loud display like linux guys do.

So with that said, who really cares if steam is on linux? I dont because its stupid for me to mess with it when I love my windows 7 product that is superior to linux in every single way.

Yes, Yes and Yes.

[tuppe666]

You may not be alone... but do you seriously think that there are actually enough people like you to make this a successful venture?

...because the existing demographic(sic) has nothing to do with the future of computing. Android is set to overtake Windows this year as the dominant OS. Right now coding a Windows[Direct X] only game shuts out half of your potential audience, and Windows market share is set to decline further. The future is cross platform and steam is already there? The fact that one market is smaller than another is irrelevant when portability is not an afterthought...if it is Windows is likely to lose out not Linux.

Re:Yes, Yes and Yes.

[anerki]

...because the existing demographic(sic) has nothing to do with the future of computing. Android is set to overtake Windows this year as the dominant OS. Right now coding a Windows[Direct X] only game shuts out half of your potential audience, and Windows market share is set to decline further.

There's a flaw in your reasoning there. It's not Windows _or_ Android. People have both a smartphone and a computer you know. And yes, of course, not all people do and some don't etc, but the gamers, the target group, do.

Can't because AMD drivers

[watermark]

I would love to use Steam on Linux, but I'm cursed with an older AMD card. Works perfect on Windows, their legacy Linux drivers prevent me from playing most games on Linux.

Re:Can't because AMD drivers

[jones_supa]

What chip? Are the open source drivers any good?

3D in VM

[tepples]

As soon as the games I already own and play work on Linux I will switch in a heartbeat.

VM dude.

Since when does 3D work well in a VM?

That old Windows PC that runs windows95 games just runs in a little virtual sandbox with more RMA than you could ever imagine existing back in 95.

Provided you can still find a working lawfully made copy of Windows 95 to install in the VM.

Re:3D in VM

[drinkypoo]

Since when does 3D work well in a VM?

vmware player 4 or later, XP32 guest, Linux host 32 or 64 with virtualization hardware and nVidia graphics. Works pretty well, and if you were doing a little special-casing (and Microsoft is doing a lot now, or at least had to in order to get where they are now) it could work very well. Today I think it would be possible for vmware and Microsoft to collaborate on an emulator that would run 100% of Xbox titles, but there's no money in it and vmware is a Microsoft competitor in some ways so it's not happening.

Re:3D in VM

[jnork]

I've still got my Win98SE install disc. Go me!

Re:3D in VM

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when does 3D work well in a VM?

Xen FTW. My main system has PCI passthrough for full performance on the GPU. I run Crysis 2, Diablo 3, Torchlight 2, Just Cause, all on the highest settings in my VM with no problem. Fedora as the Dom0, and VT-x and VT-D running for the VMs, with multiple GPUs to different VMs.

Re:3D in VM

[dns_server]

In the last year or so support for 3d acceleration inside a vm has been possible.

Virtual box states that it has opengl and dirext3d 8/9 support in it's release notes.
http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#guestadd-video

I have not needed to use it so I am not sure how it performs.

Re:3D in VM

[flyingfsck]

I used to have a ME install disk...

Re:3D in VM

[Blaskowicz]

but how many vid cards do you have, and do you have a VGA or DVI switch, or monitor with dual inputs, or both.
This looks perfect but you need quite some hardware with few clue as to what vid cards are compatible. Can I have a AMD 970 mobo, nvidia card (such as geforce 210) for dom0 on the PCIe 16x@4x (and running a full linux desktop on dom0), nvidia or AMD card for the domU (GTX 6xx or radeon 7xxx)?

Re:3D in VM

[moronoxyd]

I still got two sets (CD, manual, COA) of Win 95c.
AND I've still got my Windows 3.1 installation disks.
AND I've still got my Dos 5.0 installation disks. (Alas, I don't have a 5,25" floppy drive any more, so I would run into some problems if I'd actually wanted to install Dos.)

Re:3D in VM

[jones_supa]

In VMware Workstation 9 I got desktop effects and Quake 3 Arena working OK. Host Windows 7, guest Kubuntu 12.10. However in Q3A the mouse control was screwed up for some reason, in the menus the cursor stuck in the corners and in-game it kept me watching the sky.

Re:3D in VM

[drinkypoo]

I have not needed to use it so I am not sure how it performs.

I have tried about six different sub-versions of virtualbox on several versions of Ubuntu with a variety of nVidia drivers (usually the specified ones) and I have never had it work. I use XP as the guest. It just explodes every time I try, sometimes taking virtualbox with it. I've tried with new programs and old, with or without Unity, at low resolutions and high, near and far, to and fro, hither and tither, and it always explodes.

This is purely anecdotal bullshit evidence, but for my part it doesn't work at all.

vmware's d3d support is a mixed bag but it usually works and it has shown continuous improvement. For example I run Civ IV in XP32 under Ubuntu with nVidia 240GT which is now quite dated (nice fill rate though) and there are little pulsing lighting effects which follow characters around, those were nonexistent and then they were bad and then they were too bright and now they work great, as experienced through several upgrades of vmplayer. The performance ain't what you'd like it to be, but the compatibility is sometimes better. For example Simcity 4 will run either in Wine or vmware, but the accuracy of the graphics are far better on vmware, and in Wine it has been very cruel to them by exposing their frequent and numerous regressions. I had it working pretty well and then like a fool I went and updated Wine and the graphics were so poor as to make the game unplayable. I suppose playonlinux is supposed to fix this, but I try it every year or so and it never works.

Re:3D in VM

[jnork]

Oh, I also have a Gateway Windows 3.11 install disc.

Of course I have other install discs, but he did say "lawful"...

Re:3D in VM

[toddestan]

Technically I'm not sure if you could use that copy of Win95c. If I remember right 95c was an OEM-only release which was likely tied to the hardware it was sold on, which I'm guessing is long gone. Of course, whether anyone cares is another matter.

Re:3D in VM

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I assure you, it will still work even if it's an unlawfully made copy.

Re:3D in VM

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. vmware player running XP 32 can't even run X-Wing Alliance very well. As in constant stutter.

Until Vmware can directly expose the guest OS to the video card, 3D will remain a joke

Set sail for fail

[Anonymous Coward]

So how long until Microsoft buys Valve and shuts down the Linux dept?

Kudos to Valve

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody at Valve is reading too much slashdot. Going to linux for gaming is irrational decision imho. This decision is about as good as deciding to port all games to Windows Phone only. That would be a roaring success.

My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[period3]

go to www.steampowered.com in firefox.
click 'install steam'.
click 'install steam now'
choose 'open with' from the firefox popup

Error: Cannot install 'libcurl3-gnutls:i386'.

Typical linux. Good luck to Valve - they'll need it.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[period3]

The solution turned out to be quite intuitive:

sudo dpkg -r --force-all librtmp0
sudo apt-get install librtmp0
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch

Don't I feel silly... /sarcasm

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

My god it is so simple. All you have to do is compile 'libcurl3-gnutls:i386 from source. Make sure you have all the dependencies and pass the right compiler flags and you'll have Steam running on Ubuntu in no time.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

In fairness, that's no different than 32 bit vs. 64 bit .dlls on Windows.

Except you can simply Google + apt-get and have the problem solved in a few minutes on Linux. Versus hours messing with proprietary crap on Windows.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that "typical linux"? There's exactly one google result for that exact error and it's from more than a month ago.

I currently only have access to an ubuntu 12.04 64 bit server and "sudo apt-get install libcurl3-gnutls:i386" seems to work fine. What exactly does it show for you?

(Obviously the "normal" user shouldn't have to do this but it clearly says it's still in beta and to be honest, that's a pretty obscure problem with a normally set up ubuntu)

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[andydread]

Yeah I would say that's a bit easier and faster to fix that problem on Linux than on Windows. At least you can copy paste.

On Windows fixing a similar Steam install problem

Windows Vista/7: Click Start, then type "regedit" in the Start Search Bar and press enter.
Windows XP: Click Start > Run, then type "regedit" in the Run dialog and press Enter.
Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\.
Right-click on 9C8928403D4AB094F99FBA20A329833F and select "Delete." Click Yes.
64-bit Windows: Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\
32-bit Windows: Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\
Right-click on {048298C9-A4D3-490B-9FF9-AB023A9238F3} and select "Delete." Click Yes.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[theskipper]

In your rush to vent your anonymous rage against Linux, you failed to notice one thing. The person you accused of being a "fucking nerd dickhead" for posting the solution (period3)...is the same as the person who posted the problem (period3)...

Heh.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical linux. Good luck to Valve - they'll need it

Go to steampowered.com in firefox.
Discover only Ubuntu is supported but not OpenSuSE.
Download installer for Ubuntu.
Install alien, dpkg4rpm and listed depenancies with zypper.
Cannot find libtiff4 for anything but Ubuntu.
Download Unbuntu package for libtiff4.
Convert all the .debs with alien.
Install Steam.
Start Steam.
Download and play Linux native version of WorldofGoo.

Typical Linux. Gotta love it.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

do you normally install a lot of games/programs in windows through a browser? i used to use windows and i don't remember that functionality. come to think of it i don't install programs via the browser in linux either. why don't you go play a nice board game or something.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[jezwel]

Almost all programs downloaded off the internet can be installed via the browser on Windows. When my download has finished I just click a few times on the file in the download links area bottom left of my Chrome window, and the EXE runs to setup the software.

heck I think I even installed Office that way after getting the home use program and downloading it from Microsoft.

used to be you would simply 'run' the file immediately before downloading, though that seems to have been given a bit more sensibility to let your AV scan the downloaded file first now.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Steam support 64 bit linux? I wouldn't be suprised if it didn't.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution turned out to be quite intuitive:
I googled it.

FTFY

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

Well duh. Of course you can't install libcurl3-gnutls:i386 in Windows. Try it from Linux. :P

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

You should feel silly installing 32-bit application on a 64-bit system without also grabbing 32-bit libraries to run the said 32-bit application.
With that said I think Steam should do something about this, either by making a 64-bit version or facilitating you in getting those libraries.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Sigg3.net]

Like it doesn't happen with .Net Frameworks in Windows even when you're trying to uninstall things!?

It's a PC not a console (PS3, OSX etc). More things can go wrong.

The solution in windows? Just uninstall the .net fw client profile 4 entry and run the (un)installer again.

My point being, yours is moot.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[evilandi]

Why on EARTH would you need to download stuff in a browser? Why don't you just go to your package manager and pick the file from the repository? Isn't downloading random executables and installers off the web incredibly dangerous? Perhaps that's why you have to use a virus scanner? No need for that with a Linux repository - everything is digitally signed by an authoritative source.

Oh, wait, you're on Windows. You don't have a package manager. You don't have an authoritative software repository. You just randomly download sh*t and hope for the best.

The problem with Steam is that Valve have not integrated it into the existing Linux software repositories. That means it's just as godawful to install on Linux as it is on Windows.

If Valve just packaged it up and put it on a repo, such as an Ubuntu Launchpad PPA, together with all the prerequisites/dependencies, this whole fuss would be null. And I wouldn't have wasted 3 hours of my life trying to fix a graphics card driver dependency problem.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

Hence why, even though I've been trying different versions and distros of Linux since Red Hat in 1999, I still find Linux a crappy platform for the casual user. Linux has gotten incredible with Mint and Ubuntu, but when there are still problems like you have experienced, Linux still isn't ready for prime time.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking retard if you think that installing steam on windows involves any of this bullshit.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[higuita]

Try to download it and then click on the file.

Its falling because firefox isnt running as root, so starting up the installer directly via firefox will not ask for "superuser" powers

If you save it and click it, a popup should appear asking the password...
basically, its just like in windows, you need admin rigths and can't run directly from the browser.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[mdielmann]

Almost all programs downloaded off the internet can be installed via the browser on Windows. When my download has finished I just click a few times on the file in the download links area bottom left of my Chrome window, and the EXE runs to setup the software.

heck I think I even installed Office that way after getting the home use program and downloading it from Microsoft.

used to be you would simply 'run' the file immediately before downloading, though that seems to have been given a bit more sensibility to let your AV scan the downloaded file first now.

This is my experience, too. Do you know why? Everyone in Windows runs as administrator, or at least power user. What this means is that anything you download in your browser can install on your system. Yep, even malware or viruses due to flaws in your browser. Nifty, eh? You can avoid this difficulty by running linux as root, and be just as secure as Windows.

Also, if you have any sense at all, you install packages through a package manager. If Valve has any sense at all, that will be what happens when they get out of beta (doesn't appear to be there yet).

I still use windows due to games and work. I run a VM of linux for personal stuff. If the games were native to linux, and wouldn't be hampered by the graphics performance issues of a vm, the arrangement would be reversed.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[VGPowerlord]

The problem with Steam is that Valve have not integrated it into the existing Linux software repositories.

Valve actually created their own repo, but it probably doesn't have all the dependencies.

http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[bored_engineer]

It's frustrating (and amusing), but at least you're able to find a solution. In a similar situation with Windows, I've had to resort to a VM and a second installation to make things work.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

sudo dpkg -r --force-all librtmp0
sudo apt-get install librtmp0
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch

This.

The reason I don't game on Linux. I tried circa 1995 & again in 2000, I wrote game reviews of Linux games in 2010, maybe I'll try again in 2020.

Do I really want to learn the above commands? Why would I want to do that? Sound drivers & PPPoE are just two of the items that have either plain not worked or required extensive config hacking. Playing games and taking the time to get them to work are two different hobbies, only one of which I really enjoy.

Posts about how efficient the command line is strike me as hollow. It's efficient for doing a bunch of things I don't have to do in other environments or want to do in my spare time. Please don't make me look under the hood. Sorry if this comes across as bitter, but I've wanted to love Linux so much for for sooooo long.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[evilandi]

You're right. One package. No dependencies. In particular, missing the cutting-edge graphics card drivers that the Steam program nags you to install under Linux, which then - in my experience - break themselves, or worse, break X. When it comes to closed-source graphics card drivers under Linux, I'm with Linus Torvalds.

I love Linux. I love Steam. But Steam on Linux, even for a beta, seems half-arsed. It feels like it installs the way that MS Windows programs install - i.e. badly.

If the end game of this, is better graphics card drivers under Linux, then it will all have been worth it. Hopefully Valve, as the world's largest games retailer, will have the oomph to force AMD/ATI and Nvidia to pull their finger out.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

On a bog-standard install? Excuse my scepticism.

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution turned out to be quite intuitive:

sudo dpkg -r --force-all librtmp0
sudo apt-get install librtmp0
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch

Don't I feel silly... /sarcasm

I think linux need a simpler way to install things and configure stuff without using command lines,that's the reason why I think many people choose Windows(Other than the compability problems with Linux@Steam and other games that need DirectX)

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because Windows Steam doesn't use any third party libs. /sarcasm

Re:My experience on ubuntu 12.04

[Anonymous Coward]

That is funny.

I have been using opensuse and nvidia cards since 2005, I can count the issues I have had on one hand and have 4 fingers and a thumb left over.

What sucks is the opensuse installs nouveau(sp?) by default and that POS driver can't handle the intensive task of moving the mouse across the screen without stuttering, much less run a rudimentary 3D game.

On the same machine, dual booting between linux and windows, Linux, running wine, runs Wow far better than Windows on high settings. I get about 20 FPS more and 40 ms less network latency in Linux. Linux's networking has always been superior to Windows, but in the past few year graphical performance has also surpassed it.

Of course, my opensuse install with all the graphical bells and whistles only uses 450 MB RAM while idling, which Windows couldn't do that with twice the RAM. Not too mention if I want to run a 32 bit version of Linux(which would remove all the dependency errors people get on 64 bit systems) I can access up to 64 GB of RAM compared to 4 GB for 32 bit Windows.

Performance Improves

[Anonymous Coward]

Even despite a conversion layer, performance improves.

Did you mean market share or market share

[tuppe666]

When did I mention Windows?

Did I miss something I thought your point was out of Desktop Os Linux has a relatively small [but growing] market share...my point is out of total OS's Linux has the majority market share.

The whole point is post the dominant computer gaming platform used to be on your Desktop, now its more likely to phone or tablet.

...should we really pretend that Microsoft does not exist when the whole point is its monopoly status and platform specific tools; Apis and engines.

The reality is the future [now] is cross platform, and Microsoft is simply not getting it.

Re:Did you mean market share or market share

[mark-t]

What I meant was that Windows has nothing to do with it, specifically. I mean that people already own PC's that are just going to play exactly the same games that steambox is going to.

Or do you think that devs for this platform are going to lock themselves into it? How is that any worse than being locked to a commercial OS such as Windows or MacOSX? At least those have a historically proven track record of having some commercially successful games for them.

If you can even name one popular game that owes any part of its commercial success to the fact it was ported to Linux, then I'll certainly be prepared to admit that my judgement in this matter is premature. If not... well, I'm just calling it as I see it.

Re:Push X to watch Gaben drown

[Anonymous Coward]

Repetition doesn't work; I could only get you down as far as -1.
Damn.

Re:Yawn!

[markdavis]

They don't get more profit from Linux vs. MS-Windows. But by having a platform that Microsoft can't corrupt or control, it means that Valve can remain relevant and for much longer. That has a great value to Valve.

It also means Valve can develop a console/set-top using free Linux and pay nothing to MS or any other company to do so. That has a great value to Valve.

[Real] Linux compatibility could also be a great step to an entry into Android Linux for Valve... the #1 mobile platform in the world. That has a great value to Valve.

Oh.... and as a follow-up...

[mark-t]

Understand that I would love absolutely nothing more than to be proved completely and utterly wrong I've been using Linux for 20+ years now, and it's been my only desktop OS for over half of that time.

And I get that everyone else who loves Linux might just be aching to prove me wrong... but in the end, the numbers are what's going to do it... not you trying to convince me here.

I have absolutely nothing personally invested in seeing steambox fail, but I've got quite a few friends on the video game industry, and based on their input, I really can't see this thing becoming successful. Certainly nobody else that I know other than people who already have a passion for Linux in some way seem to think that this has anything but even the slightest chance of succeeding... and it's my own assessment that such belief is only wishful thinking.

Gullible Users

[Cammi]

...and watch all the gullible users go downgrade their OS ... no thanks.

Semi-related issues on Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo is currently getting itself into a tangle on upgrades with blocked dependencies involving curl and gnutls. This isn't directly related to the Steam issue at all, but for a few weeks I've been thinking that gnutls seems to be badly factored, and is causing unnecessary widespread pain in the FLOSS arena.

Gentoo is pretty amazing in the kinds of dependency hell that it can resolve, but some things are just beyond it to handle automatically. The curl/gnutls mess presents it with a nearly insurmountable problem. Portage just curls up and dies, dumping dependency resolution into the lap of the long-suffering sysadmin.

Re:Semi-related issues on Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been thinking that gnutls seems to be badly factored

libgnutls is just trying to edge out openssl despite the fact that it is nowhere near an ABI-compatible drop in replacement for libssl. On the one hand, gnutls is out ssl'ing openssl with better TLS 1.(x>0) support, but on the other, good god it's glibc2 all over again only this time the distros aren't waiting for the whole thing to drop before shoehorning it into the distro so we get half broken dependency problems.

Re:Semi-related issues on Gentoo

[blackiner]

The nice thing about gentoo is if you are running gentoo stable (no ~ keywords) it *generally* avoids these types of problems completely, since the package maintainers wait and see that there are no problems for about a month at least first. It is of course not perfect though, I just had an issue on my gateway last running hardened stable, and the udev upgrade caused a file collision :(.

Let's think this out thoroughly

[Tarlus]

Encouraging gamers to switch to Linux will severely limit their availability of games through Steam. I know that Steam's availability of Linux games should improve over time, but for right now it is but a fraction of what's available for Windows.

Re:Let's think this out thoroughly

[Samizdata]

Agreed indeed. I use Steam on both Windows (which I only really keep around for games and a couple other apps I haven't found Linux replacements for) and Linux. My Windows Steam has somewhere over 150 games. My Linux Steam (same account) has about 15.

This is exciting!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the guy every family member calls when something's wrong with their computer.

Try as I might, I haven't moved to linux yet. Even for ME it's arcane.

The main thing that's keeping me away though, from finally just deleting windows and forcing myself to linux, is that I like games. No I love video games. If I weren't in college now (I'm old though) I'd be playing a game right now. (the games interfere with my studying, self-imposed ban)

Valve is the only company with the pull to put games on linux. They have their fingers in every pie except for whatever few holdouts may be left.

I'm excited because the harder Valve pushes for games on linux, the sooner it will happen. Even better is this combined with the recent kickstarter games, many of whom have said at certain milestones they will release on linux.

Linux just goes naturally with gamers. People who like to build their own machines want an operating system that won't hold them back and can be pushed and upgraded just like their hardware. Windows, Android, ipads... they will be for casual games... but the people who play things like bioshock, crysis, fallout... they will all end up on linux.

Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just offer them better fps -in the ad-, even 5 more lousy fps, and you will get a lot more converts.

Agreed?

I think they will need a reason to convert, and showing some statistics of fps in the ad would be cool.

Because Windows Users Are the Only Ones That Will

[Anonymous Coward]

put up with Steam DRM suckage.

Wonder if they can work with Icculus

[pecosdave]

and the other previous Loki partners and bring back a lot of already ported classics from the old Loki collection for use on Steam?

Re:Wonder if they can work with Icculus

[Anonymous Coward]

SOMEONE UPVOTE THIS! Pleeeeeeeeeeeease let this happen!

Wow, I sound whiny, don't I...

Indentured Servant

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck it. I climbed upon the NT kernel cross years ago and nailed myself to it. At this point no Linux shop would hire someone as tainted as me. As goes the fortunes of Windows, so goes my career. Hopefully I will get an end of career bounce such as the COBOL guys got with Y2K but I'm not holding my breath.

Thanks for all fun Steam games, Mr. Newell et al.

Almost

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrap up the windows-only games with WINE and you have yourselves a sale there valve (or more correctly you've cost MS a sale)

To early

[Anonymous Coward]

As a linux (non Ubuntu) steam user I say: TO EARLY, too many bugs left.

Sorry MacOs a failure

[tuppe666]

Pretending that Mac OS X was ever a viable gaming platform is a joke. It suffered from the same problems historically(sic)

one popular game that owes any part of its commercial success to the fact it was ported to Linux

I don't think you understand your own points involving it only matters that the *sales* exceeds the *cost of sale* your argument is they don't...and traditionally(sic) they didn't [platform specific tools; Apis and engines] the new world where games are often on a Linux tablet *first*, built with cross platform tools; Apis and engines those costs are massively reduced.

If your not seeing it...your not looking, ironically in an article about the largest store front of games pushing Linux as a viable platform.

Re:Sorry MacOs a failure

[mark-t]

What I'm seeing is the largest store front of games looking like it's about ready to commit commercial suicide, unless they don't lock themselves into just making Linux titles... but without exclusive content, there won't be anything to drive sales of the unit, so the money they spent there will be wasted.

And what I'm seeing is people who think otherwise confusing what they are hoping for with what is realistically the most likely outcome.

Re:Sorry MacOs a failure

[mark-t]

I wasn't so much suggesting that OSX is a viable gaming platform as much as I was suggesting that several orders of magnitude more commercially successful games have been ported even to it than have been ported to Linux. The latter numbers considerably fewer than a hundred, which does not even account for 1% of the games available on steam.

Ummm, or not

[Sycraft-fu]

I've tried the "dual boot to Linux thing." I end up never booting in to Linux. I'll encounter something I wish to do that I can't do in Linux, boot back to Windows, and stay there, since there's nothing I wish to do that I can't do in Windows but can do in Linux.

That's the problem you suggestion has, particularly with regards to gamers. I have a massive list of games that'll run on Windows, a few hundred. Of that list, maybe 10 will also run on Linux. So while Linux would work fine for web/e-mail stuff, as soon as I want to fire up a game, back to Windows it is and Windows also does the web/e-mail stuff real well.

Linux, Windows, Valve and the cake.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yarr yarr harr harr.

For me, as a gamer, only thing that really matters is having a gamingrig that works, both hardware and OS and does the job it is meant to do, run games.
Having a spent alot of money to computer there is no point to start saving on OS.

I use Linux on my worklaptop, one of them anyway and I do like it. Mint 14.
On my gaming machina the problem is not the lack of games or complexity of Linux but the hardware support.
Yes yes Linux has better hardware support than Windows, I have heard that mantra too many, too many times.
Having AMD radeon 7970 crossfire setup with 3 x 24" displays work alot better in Windows than in Linux. (and yes, I am using windows 8)
Valve can make as much games for Linux as they like but untill Linux get proper driversupport and application support from AMD, Nvidia and others, Linux gaming is but a dream.
Also problem is the fragmented Linux community. Linux might be standard but the bazillion different Linux OS distributions are not.
Having steam and handfull of games working fine on Ubuntu doesn't mean they will work just fine on some other distro.
The amount of co-operation needed from Valve, hardware manufacturers and Linux OS distro communitys and game studios is unreal.
Gamestudios want to make money, if they see a hint of risk it is game over. Same goes to hardware. Linux community might want the moon and the stars but need the support from game studios and hardware manufacturers. Valve is trying to be the middleman. Or is this just a oneman amokrun from Valve's Gabe Newell, a retribution because he did not like Windows 8?
Does Linux take the throne of gaming from MS? Might happen, might not happen. One thing is sure, it won't happen fast in anyway.

It's a typical Linux zealot response

[Sycraft-fu]

Any time they can't do something on Linux, they say it isn't something you should want to do, or something you should do with your computer.

"You want to play games? Sure Linux is GREAT for games we have Tux racers, Battle of Westnoth, Nethack, all kinds of shit! Oh you want to play a new AAA game? You shouldn't want to do that, you should only want to play free games. AAA titles are stupid."

I get the same shit when I talk about audio production and video editing, which is something I do with my system. I've asked in all seriousness of self proclaimed Linux experts if there are programs I can get to do this kind of thing and go in to the particulars of what is needed. Predictably I get an initial list of software that was just gotten from a web search, with no consideration of actual use (which I've tried and found woefully problematic and inadequate). After some more back and forth often I get told that I "Shouldn't do that on my primary desktop," I should have something dedicated for A/V production.

The reason is a way to try and pass the buck, to make it not a problem with going to Linux, but reframe it as me doing something wrong. Because of course if you take away A/V production, games, media playback, and hardware compatibility, well then Linux can do everything I need! ... since at that point we are pretty much left with web, e-mail, and remote systems administration. They just declare what you are doing as not the right thing, until you only do things Linux does well.

Re:It's a typical Linux zealot response

[IRWolfie-]

Let me summarize what you stated. You asked a "self proclaimed Linux expert". You then generalized from your little anecdote to all Linux users. That he is a "self proclaimed Linux expert" indicates that you doubt his expertise, or have for some reason called it into question.

Evidently he is someone who does not work with audio. He does not work with audio because, as you said, you believed he googled for the answer without even considering the specifics of what you said (possibly because he doesn't have a clue what you are talking about). There is no connection between being an "OS expert" to knowing about good A/V software, if they don't use it or have a need for it. Being an expert on an operating system does not imply being an expert on knowing what software runs on said operating system.

Please tell me how this would differ from the response of a self proclaimed expert of another operating system who is not familiar with A/V. You are asking someone who has no expertise in your question, and eventually he gave you a cop out answer.

I don't know about A/V production on Linux because I don't do it, but it sounds like your issue is that you asked someone who had no expertise to give you a reply. Try finding someone who does A/V production on Linux (presumably someone does or has tried to, even if it is inferior to whatever other software is out there) and ask them.

That you think hardware compatibility is an issue makes me think you are either trolling or using niche equipment, and I'm not sure what media playback issues you are referring to

Re:It's a typical Linux zealot response

[Sycraft-fu]

I've asked numerous people, and they've chosen to respond. This is online, on open forums like Slashdot. Not me tracking someone down and cornering them. So far, nobody has given me anything remotely useful in terms of A/V software. Yes, I've actually tried it. I can't actually find anyone who does it on the level I do in Linux, probably because Linux lacks the software to do it well. All the people I know who do pro A/V work do it on Windows or MacOS.

In terms of hardware compatibility, yes I do use somewhat niche hardware, though I guess that depends on your definition. All of it is stuff you can find on Amazon or Newegg.

In particular the devices that would be problematic are my Auzentech HTHD card and my NEC 2690/i1 Display Pro combo. There is apparently a generic Linux driver that kinda works for the HTHD, but only for the optical out which is of no use to me, the reason I own it is multi-channel sound over HDMI since I use a surround sound system. The hardware I plan on replacing it with, a MOTU HDX-SDI, doesn't work at all.

The NEC monitor will work, of course, but there's no way to use the i1 to calibrate its hardware lookup tables which is the reason to own such an expensive monitor. You need software that can talk to the i1 and then program the NEC, and I am not aware of any for Linux, Windows and MacOS only.

A more minor issue would be my Logitech G500. It works, but isn't programmable. There is no way to alter the mouse's onboard settings (it can have custom button mappings, DPI settings and so on). You'd have to program it in Windows, and then Linux could use the programming since it is internal.

My MCU Pro might be an issue too. It shouldn't be since it is basically just a MIDI device over USB, but there's not a lot of information in that regard out there.

In terms of media playback, Blu-ray is the big issue. More generally though I am not aware of any licensed H.264 decoders (or encoders). H.264 is an open standard, but not free, you do have to pay a license fee for it. This is not a big issue for playback I guess as one could simply choose to ignore it, but for production and distribution being legit is rather a good idea.

However this all misses my real point. It isn't that people don't know. That is fine, it is 100% ok to say "I dunno about that," or to just not respond. It is when people can't find an answer, that they like to then reframe things as "Well you shouldn't want to do that." Same shit with the games. Someone says "I want to play AAA games," and the response was "Those games suck." That's pretty stupid. That's a cop out, trying to say "You shouldn't want to play those games, you should do something else."

If I had just never gotten a response to my A/V questions, or if people had said "Dunno, can't help you man, maybe Linux can't do that," fine. However people half-assedly tried to help and/or claimed that sure, Linux would do great, and then when presented with things I needed decided that I shouldn't want those things because they couldn't find a way to provide them in Linux.

Re:It's a typical Linux zealot response

[damien_kane]

I get the same shit when I talk about audio production and video editing, which is something I do with my system. I've asked in all seriousness of self proclaimed Linux experts if there are programs I can get to do this kind of thing and go in to the particulars of what is needed. Predictably I get an initial list of software that was just gotten from a web search, with no consideration of actual use (which I've tried and found woefully problematic and inadequate). After some more back and forth often I get told that I "Shouldn't do that on my primary desktop," I should have something dedicated for A/V production.

You could always start with Ubuntu Studio
A relatively up-to-date (currently offering 12.04LTS and 12.10) fork of Ubuntu using lowlatency kernel, and with an arc of Audio, Video, and Desktop Publishing apps installed out of the gate.
For more, try Google:
"Music Production" + Linux
"Audio Engineering" + Linux
"Video Production" + Linux
Most of the apps listed can be found in package repositories for the major distributions (or at least be compiled from source, if you're so inclined)
Most of the How-Tos are fairly straightforward to even those without a strong background in A/V production.
If you're looking to play around, it's a great start, and if you actually know what you're doing, you can do a lot with it but not necessarily everything that you might be used to doing on another OS (i.e. Gimp v.Photoshop)

Re:It's a typical Linux zealot response

[TsuruchiBrian]

There are some things that can't be done in Linux as easily as in other OSes (like games), but there are also many things that really ARE things you just don't want to do. For example, lots of people ask how to defrag their hard disks in linux. Well because of the way ext filesystems work, you just don't need to defrag them.

Aantivirus software is fairly useless in linux. Linux does not have the same sorts of problems with viruses that windows does. Windows is getting a lot better though starting with vista in terms of security. Ideally when you find a security hole, the fix should be patching the problem so it can't be exploited rather than updating some kludgey antivirus software that hopefully will catch the virus before you get it.

The only reason anti virus programs even exist is because Windows used to be so incredibly full of security holes. You'd only have to leave your computer plugged into the internet for a few minutes before you'd be infected. Thats not the case for linux, and is not the case anymore for windows either.

Windows is good at some things. Linux is good at some things. Windows has much more support from hardware vendors. They have also managed to create some closed framework/APIs that became ubiquitous, which pretty much guarantees that a lot of things only work on windows. Games/DirectX being the big one.

Linux (or rather open source software) has some really good things too though. They were ahead of the game in many areas like servers, live booting, filesystems, software raid, scalability of the OS (same OS runs on mobile phones, netbooks, desktops, and servers).

In fact the success of open source has made windows a great deal more useful. Most of the software I use in Windows is open source. 7-zip, gimp, firefox, eclipse, virtualdub, avisynth, librecad, xbmc, cygwin, vlc

In fact the success of open source has made windows a great deal more useful. Most of the software I use in Windows is open source. 7-zip, gimp, firefox, eclipse, virtualdub, librecad, xbmc, cygwin, vlc

No I can't play my games or edit videos without windows, that's why I have it. I would however be much more disabled if I lost my open source software than if I lost my closed source software.

Re:It's a typical Linux zealot response

[Pherdnut]

To be fair, we'd probably be a lot more aware of Linux security holes if it had a high enough % adoption for people to want to mess with it. I'll bet it's still easier to shore up security issues for Linux but you're just not going to see the viruses on a given OS if hardly anyone is writing them.

Re:It's a typical Linux zealot response

[TsuruchiBrian]

It's not just adoption. There were 2 fundamental differences between windows and linux in terms of security models.

1. Linux has users with different privilege levels. A user surfing the web doesn't have permission from the OS to download and execute a virus that can modify system files. There could be a security hole which allows this, but a poor user decision is not sufficient.

Windows had user accounts for a very long time, but unfortunately many things didn't work (e.g. games) unless the user was at the highest privilege (administrator). This meant that if a user executed a virus you got a virus, a security hole was not necessary to infect the system. Linux and windows both had security holes, but in windows you didn't even need to exploit a security hole to infect the OS. You only had to trick the user. That has changed since windows vista.

2. Linux is open source. Many people think this a security weakness. In the short term it is. It is much easier to attack a system if you can better see all the holes easily. In the long term this visibility means that more security holes are caught by the people trying to fix them and there are less to exploit.

Windows relies on "security through obscurity". This is like burying your money in a place nobody knows about (that you know of), rather than keeping it in a vault. The vault is less safe because all the criminals know where it is, but it is still more secure than a hole in your back yard. (This is just an example, I don;t want to start a debate about banking).

Also, Linux is not actually that rare. Most servers are running linux. Most embedded devices are running linux including routers, mobile phones, DVRs, etc. It is true that the % of desktops running linux is low, viruses and hackers don't only target desktops. There are probably more instances of the linux OS running than windows if you count all computers.

Re:Compatibility - Serious Question ...

[polyp2000]

"And then when you update your Linux once and the entire thing crashes and burns, you'll go back to Windows. At least, that's what keeps happening to me when I try to switch to Linux."

I hear this comment a lot or variants of the theme - and i just dont get it - I've been using Linux since ~2000 - now back then things could be a problem and a comment like the above would have its place. But as an experienced Linux user - i find "it just works" (tm) . I dont have to screw around installing drivers or fanny
around with settings at all. Compare that with a windows box or a OSX and , if you've been using Linux as long as i have and plug say a (for example) midi interface into a windows or OSX box you be astonished to find yourself hunting for drivers etc like wtf ?. On a modern linux distro that sort of thing "Just Works" and thats the kind of experience I have with Linux. The same can be said for updates for the most part are pretty damn reliable - I have an ubuntu box thats running 12.10 and i've upgraded every time theres been a distro update over the last 3 years and it usually goes without a hiccup.

So whats the deal here? Im no Linux newbie but im not doing anything special - i mean - its been that long since i edited Xf86config i've forgotten what half of it does.

I would geniunely like to know what these Linux newbies coming over from Windows are actually doing to screw up there systems so badly - its pretty difficult do to that nowadays?

Anyone care to comment - im sure if we can get to the bottom of what is happening to these guys that we as a community can do something about it!

N.

What about Valve's own games?

[holiggan]

Any word on having the Half Life / Portal / Left 4 Dead games working on Linux? These are part of my "must have installed" games, that I go back to from time to time, so I'll need them working on Linux as well, thank you :)

Re:What about Valve's own games?

[thejynxed]

I do believe I read somewhere in the Steam forums that Valve is actively working right now to have the L4D games work on Steam for Linux.

Re:What about Valve's own games?

[trdrstv]

Any word on having the Half Life / Portal / Left 4 Dead games working on Linux? These are part of my "must have installed" games, that I go back to from time to time, so I'll need them working on Linux as well, thank you :)

They are being ported to Linux. Team Fortress 2 is already there, and they talk about getting better framerates in L4D2 specifically in their blog though it isn't released yet. I don't remember seeing a comment that they are porting all of them, but I think anything that runs the Source Engine is a safe bet.

Re:Yawn!

[h4rr4r]

Because some is more than zero?

The fear Mr.Newell has is a very real one, MS will turn their store into the only way to get software onto the windows computer. It will take time, but that is the end goal.

Re:Compatibility - Serious Question ...

[damnbunni]

I used to use Linux regularly. I stopped because I couldn't find a way to do a task (I was trying to back up a large filesystem to live CDs, and everything I could find choked on directories with a ' in the name.)

It 'just worked' in Windows 2000, so that's what I switched to.

I've tinkered with assorted free *nixes over the years. Last year I decided 'It's been a while, I'll give Linux another go.' So I downloaded a current Ubuntu release. (I don't recall which version - it was the latest stable release at the time.)

I installed it. That went okay. I booted it up. That went okay. I thought the desktop was kinda ugly, but whatever. It prompted me to install the proprietary drivers for my video card. That went okay. Then it said I should check for updates. Okay. I let it do that. It downloaded a bunch and installed them, reported no errors. It warned some of the updates wouldn't be active till after a reboot.

I rebooted.

I had no network any more. The system couldn't see my ethernet port at all.

And so I went 'Well, if running a system update breaks something that hard, I'm not going to bother.' and went back to Windows.

So at least for me, it didn't 'just work'. I'm getting old. I don't like having to screw around with my desktop just to get it to work. If I want to screw around with a computer just for the sake of screwing around with a computer, I have oddball hobbyist machines.

Re:Make the SOURCE ENGINE games available under li

[jones_supa]

It is already happening. For example the Catalyst 13.1 Linux release notes mention "[366820] Performance of Valve Linux games" as one of the improvements.

Re:Compatibility - Serious Question ...

[heathen_01]

"And then when you update your Linux once and the entire thing crashes and burns, you'll go back to Windows. At least, that's what keeps happening to me when I try to switch to Linux."

I hear this comment a lot or variants of the theme - and i just dont get it - I've been using Linux since ~2000 - now back then things could be a problem and a comment like the above would have its place. But as an experienced Linux user - i find "it just works" (tm) . I dont have to screw around installing drivers or fanny around with settings at all. Compare that with a windows box or a OSX and , if you've been using Linux as long as i have and plug say a (for example) midi interface into a windows or OSX box you be astonished to find yourself hunting for drivers etc like wtf ?. On a modern linux distro that sort of thing "Just Works" and thats the kind of experience I have with Linux. The same can be said for updates for the most part are pretty damn reliable - I have an ubuntu box thats running 12.10 and i've upgraded every time theres been a distro update over the last 3 years and it usually goes without a hiccup.

So whats the deal here? Im no Linux newbie but im not doing anything special - i mean - its been that long since i edited Xf86config i've forgotten what half of it does.

I would geniunely like to know what these Linux newbies coming over from Windows are actually doing to screw up there systems so badly - its pretty difficult do to that nowadays?

Anyone care to comment - im sure if we can get to the bottom of what is happening to these guys that we as a community can do something about it!

N.

Look, you just said your self it "usually" goes without a hiccup. Which sounds like you occasionally have something go wrong... Now when you consider that even the latest LTS release of ubuntu doesn't install cleanly due to nvidia driver problems you should not be so surprised that occasionally there are problems.

I'm at the point where I do not update my work linux machine for fear of it breaking. I will only update when I know I have the time to fix any problems that will occur.

I have steam for linux on my linux drive..

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a linux drive that's running Mint 14 at the moment. I had switched my regular desktop machine to linux for various reasons, convincing myself that I really didn't game anymore so it wouldn't be too jarring. I did however install Steam just to check it out and see what the deal was.

Unfortunately, after installing it and looking around in it, I discovered that there was really only one decent 3d game in it, which was Team Fortress 2.

Steam for Linux sounds like a novel idea, but we should really stop talking about it as if it brings the same Steam experience that it does on Windows, because it doesn't. We would also need games to be developed for Linux, Steam is merely a delivery system for games. Honestly, I hope the self fellating over Linux Steam is over soon. Linux users know that you can count the number of first rate titles available on one hand, offering a pretty interface that contains those same game options and continuing to talk about it as if Windows users can just switch to Linux and log into their Steam accounts and play everything in their library is beyond disingenuous.

A bit far fetched

[dbIII]

Frankly MSFT could shut down and block Wine from the USA

I'm not sure if they actually could without making game developers that use directx nervous about IP problems as well or would even bother. I can't really see them getting any net benefit out of it.

Re:A bit far fetched

[Samizdata]

Frankly MSFT could shut down and block Wine from the USA

I'm not sure if they actually could without making game developers that use directx nervous about IP problems as well or would even bother. I can't really see them getting any net benefit out of it.

.NET benefit?

Re:A bit far fetched

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes no sense at all.

No No No

[tuppe666]

Loki ports had a *completely* different model. Lokis business model was shocking, software was delivered later than windows; more expensive; in a poor format...and then added DRM. I'm sure many were grateful of their conversions, personally I had no time for them, and the fact that we still are not seeing many of their ports for sale not that they can be distributed digitally says it all really.

Hybrid Windows/Desktop whatsthingy :)

[tuppe666]

When Windows was a dominant platform? You're joking, right? You aren't actually trying to suggest that mobile exclusives are a problem for Windows?

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/angry-birds-space/8ece2571-91e0-4f2f-b7e5-b0b7944ced2d is that Angry Birds space for Windows 8...oh I can get it for free on Android :)http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3397519&cid=42651749#

Re:Hybrid Windows/Desktop whatsthingy :)

[VGPowerlord]

When Windows was a dominant platform? You're joking, right? You aren't actually trying to suggest that mobile exclusives are a problem for Windows?

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/angry-birds-space/8ece2571-91e0-4f2f-b7e5-b0b7944ced2d is that Angry Birds space for Windows 8...oh I can get it for free on Android :)

That wouldn't be a mobile exclusive then, would it? Which means it would be covered by the very next paragraph:

To be frank, not many PC users appreciate mobile ports when they happen anyway, given that they generally cost $1 on the mobile device, and $6-15 on PC as a straight port. Most people just don't see the value, and for good reason... Save for very few games, very few successfully make the transition to PC and do well.

What he didn't say is those "$1 on the mobile device" games sometimes have a free version burdened with obtrusive ads, which is the free version you're referring to.

Microsoft and Wine

[thejynxed]

So, let's say Valve goes full-steam ahead on this project and starts actually selling these consoles, and presumably implements Wine to get DirectX games to run. What is going to prevent Microsoft from suing the shit out of them under the DMCA for using Wine (which at best, is in an extremely gray area legally when used on US computers)?

The way the Wine devs develop and implement their code is not "clean", and they pretty much admitted they violate the DMCA in their own posts.

FreeDOS

[tepples]

Alas, I don't have a 5,25" floppy drive any more, so I would run into some problems if I'd actually wanted to install Dos.

MS-DOS is simple enough that FreeDOS should be compatible with most applications.

I don't own a Windows 8 PC, you insensitive clod

[tepples]

You appear to claim that everybody who wants to keep his geek card current must pay Microsoft for a copy of each new Windows operating system as it comes out in order to gain first-hand experience with how it interacts (or fails to) with other competing operating systems installed on the same drive. Where in the rules for a geek card is that listed?

I look forward to...

[Anonymous Coward]

... boycotting them on linux as well.

Re:Make the SOURCE ENGINE games available under li

[VGPowerlord]

For the love of god, Make the SOURCE ENGINE games available under linux.
I'd be happy to play through HL2 etc again while waiting for newer titles.

The Source engine is constantly evolving. Valve's own games fall across 8 different versions. There used to be more, but HL2 and its episodes were updated to a newer engine when ported to OSX in 2010.

The engines are:

• HL2, HL2:Ep1, HL2:Ep2, HL2: Lost Coast, Portal: Orange Box. Updated in 2010.
• HL2:DM, Day of Defeat: Source, TF2: Source MP, sometimes referred to as Source 2009. Updated last week.
• CS:S: Source MP branch, currently 4+ months behind Source MP.
• L4D: L4D Engine. Updated in 2010.
• Alien Swarm: L4D branch (as far as I can tell). Updated in 2010. Only recent engine with full source code available.
• L4D2: L4D2 Engine. Updated last week.
• Portal 2: Portal 2 Engine. Updated a few months ago.
• CSGO: CSGO Engine. Updated last week, major update expected tomorrow.

Thousands!!!

[Ravaldy]

"Steam is now being used by thousands". That's too funny. So this makes the news because they reached a whoping 1000 users. If it was more than 10 000 they would have said: "Steam is now being used by tens of thousands users".

ROFL

GOG, Humble Bundle, PSN DRM

[tepples]

now i dont even look at pc gaming titles... too DRM-y

Are the games on GOG.com and the Humble Indie Bundles likewise "too DRM-y"? And how are, say, PSN games less "DRM-y" than Steam games?

Re:GOG, Humble Bundle, PSN DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

GOG.com = remember all those kickass games from the 90's & 00's?? well now you can pay for them all over again!

And PSN is less DRM-y than steam because im not required to use it.

GO Team Steam GO

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been a long time Linux user and a gamer for longer, and I also HATE windows. Now there are some games that play awesome, even better on Linux. The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion comes to mind, and Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO). Wine is getting MUCH better at being a windows emulator, and therefore a better gaming platform. If Mickeysoft didn't hold such a monopoly on the requirements for games, such as DirectX and if there was more openness in the whole gaming industry, there would be more and more games available for ALL OS platforms.
I also heard that Mickeysoft is going to sell off the entertainment division (Xbox gaming...etc.). That would be the best thing for the over-all gaming industry. Get it out the hands of a Dictator and give it back to the people.
Now I have used Steam on my Fedora 16, 17,18 box but have not been able to really play anything with it ...YET. I also don't buy games, so I am limited to what I can get my hands on.
With all this said.... GO TEAM STEAM GO

Here's where I'm stuck

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what I get when I launch steam.

ILocalize::AddFile() failed to load file "public/steambootstrapper_english.txt".
X Error of failed request: BadName (named color or font does not exist)
    Major opcode of failed request: 45 (X_OpenFont)
    Serial number of failed request: 12
    Current serial number in output stream: 13

I've seen some threads regarding installing different fonts but I already have those packages. I haven't been able to sort it out. Does anyone else have this problem? Has anyone figured out how to fix it?

commercial suicide

[tuppe666]

commit commercial suicide

Sorry I'm not sure you really understand what is going on. Microsoft is simply taking their current business model away :), your analogy murdering them. Locking themselves into it in the past was stupid...now a desperate struggle to survive. Its the exact opposite of commercial suicide.

Steam has a strategy of cross platform gaming [desktop] and first and third party consoles running their store. Seems pretty wise to me.

MacOs still a failure

[tuppe666]

OSX is a viable gaming platform

No still got the same end of the shit stick as Linux when it came to gaming. I don't think magnitude means what you think it does ;)

In fact going forward it seems unlikely that steam will be allowed to sell software in Apples police state.

Obtrusive ads

[tuppe666]

That wouldn't be a mobile exclusive then, would it?

To be fair I wouldn't know which of the 700,000 games/apps I think Windows cracked 2000 in November which should post? Its not really fair with Windows having such a small store, as its self styled ecosystem is a failure.

Its off topic but is the advertising obtrusive in Angry Birds...or subtle, clearly half a million that rated the game thought otherwise with 9:1 ratio rating it five stars :) of course you can always pay a little to be be add free if you do.

Not all games are released on discs

[tepples]

And PSN is less DRM-y than steam because im not required to use it.

You are if you want a game that isn't released on a disc, such as smaller-budget, smaller-scope games that might be in a Humble Bundle if they were PC games.

What's the point?

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

For decades Apple tried to tell PC user's their machines sucked and Apple was better, and it only got Apple maybe at most, 10% of the market, a distant second place. In fact once Apple stopped the whole stupid switch campaigns and started to focus on iPhones and crap, people started buying Macs more.

Valve telling Window's users they should switch to Linux is retarded, period. It means people have to switch an OS just to play a game that works identically to the game played on Windows. Oh sure, maybe in some situations the games run a little faster, but really Valve is asking people to switch and OS, including adapting everything else they try to do with that OS, just to use Linux Steam? What a poor poor marketing strategy. Its like Honda asking Toyota owners to replace their Toyota engines with Honda engines so they can basically get the same crap performance but with all the extra hassle of actually having to switch engines, just because.

Instead Valve should really be focused 100% on their Steam Box. I mean if this thing is for real, costs less then $400, and actually offers great game performance I could easily see myself buying one, and I really don't care what OS it runs on. But I'm not about to switch OS'es just because Valve has a new product for Linux they are trying to promote. If decades of people telling Windows users that Windows sucks and Linux is better hasn't moved the market towards Linux, having a game platform isn't going to make people switch, just because.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

The more people that use Linux, even part-time is more apps that will get ported over.

The majority of the big Windows apps can already run in Linux via Wine. That means it really isn't a huge effort to port things like Photoshop over and run natively. Of course that is ignoring the fact that for a huge chunk of photoshop users it is massive overkill and Gimp will do everything they need and then some.

There are more Android devices than Windows PC's.

Linux absolutely rules every single market except desktops and the desktop market is shrinking, but despite that both OS X and Linx are growing marketshare. It is Windows that is shrinking in usage.

All embedded devices that have an OS(smartphones, tablets, routers,switches, the mars rovers, appliances,etc): Linux owns this general market, if it isn't Linux, it likely is Unix(IOS). Windows has less than 1% of the embedded market.
Server: Linux by far
"Cloud": Take a guess, if you guessed Windows you are wrong.
Supercomputers and clusters: Linux with well over 90%. Windows actually has 0.5% of the market which is shocking that someone would want to gimp all that hardware.

OpenGL doesn't forbid Multi-threading like DX10-

[Anonymous Coward]

Open GL is multi-threading suitable now, and has been for more than 40 years.

DX10 and earlier forbid threads that didn't create the object graph to access elements in that object graph and therefore were FORBIDDING multithreading.

OpenGL allows threads access to the scene from any thread on the process. It's up to you to make your code thread-safe.

But you don't know much about game programming and 3D, do you.

Re:Compatibility - Serious Question ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can tell you that between moving from opensuse 11.3 to 11.4 to 12.1 to 12.2 I had exactly 0 issues.

In fact the only issue I had was that a mysql update fubared Amarok, and a quick rollback fixed that.

That is what? At least 3 years.

Usually == 99.999%

switching windows or from windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Being forced from XP to Vista to 7 to 8 makes it easier to consider switthing to another OS.