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Valve Officially Launches Steam For Linux
sl4shd0rk writes "Valve has finally released Steam for Linux. Although some of the 57 games listed on the Linux Steam site are previously released from the Humble Bundles, there are others which should provide adequate entertainment for anyone bored with the HB games. Among the games listed, many at deep discounts of 50%-75% off, are HalfLife, CounterStrke Source and Serious Sam 3. Hopefully Valve will keep the ports coming as rumor has it that Left 4 Dead had been ported at least for developers."
I spend enough time screwing around in the Creation Kit and tes5edit getting Skyrim exactly how I like it, I really don't feel like dealing with WINE configuration. Why add another point of failure to an already complex system?
True story: I once had to deal with Dioblo II in WINE repeatedly corrupting my MBR. No, really. I could hardly believe it myself until I saw other reports of the exact same thing on the WINE bug tracker.
Not quite so awesome: it seems that you have to re-purchase the Steam games you already own on Windows.
Even less awesome: the state of graphics drivers under Linux. For the ATI system I tried Steam on, there are several proprietary drivers, several open-source drivers, zero indication from Steam as to what is the best one to use.... and experimentation says that *none* of them work right in games. The Steam client really needs to help the user out - detect the graphics that are present, phone home to a driver database machine, and let the user know if they have the optimal setup.
Wrong, I'm decently linux savvy, but I don't know about these linux games beside a few (such as World of Goo and Minecraft). Having gone linux-only for two or three years, I've been out of gaming so I don't actively try to find those rare linux games which might work or not work at all.
There were the Humble Bundle games, which I heard of only on Slashdot, I tried to buy such bundle once, giving $1 and got a set of PDF books out of it. It turns out the bundles are "time limited", that is they're sold for a short period then become permanently unavailable. This is amazing, and so I never played any Humble Bundle game at all. What's more, there were reports of games that are incompatible, anyway. Linux is so made that software breaks after some time, or won't work if you do'nt have library-foo 1.2.15.