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."

Comments

Goodbye Windows

[OhANameWhatName]

It was horrible knowing you.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[MrEricSir]

You might want to wait on that. At this time, there's only ~100 titles available for Linux, and many of them have aleady been out for a year or so.

Maybe one day Linux will be a platform hardcore gamers will use, but Steam for Linux is just a baby step in that direction. Remember, they've had Steam for OS X for a while now, and there's still only a tiny trickle of games for that platform.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

no, its apples to penguins.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Chris Burke]

Apples to penguins results in an unhappy penguin. Fish to penguins on the other hand leads to fat and happy penguins.

Wait, I think I'm misunderstanding.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I think you might be onto something. OpenBSD

Re:Goodbye Windows

[jones_supa]

You might want to wait on that. At this time, there's only ~100 titles available for Linux, and many of them have aleady been out for a year or so.

Maybe one day Linux will be a platform hardcore gamers will use, but Steam for Linux is just a baby step in that direction. Remember, they've had Steam for OS X for a while now, and there's still only a tiny trickle of games for that platform.

What's the problem? The availability of games for Linux just exploded into new numbers, and more are coming all the time. You don't have to wait for every game under the sun to be ported, and that's not the point anyway. Make the switch and enjoy. 2013 is the Year of Linux Gaming.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[zwede]

At this time, there's only ~100 titles available for Linux

And a couple of weeks ago there were only 40. If they keep going at this rate things are looking promising!

Re:Goodbye Windows

[cwebster]

Skyrim (all DLC plus mods) works in wine currently. PlayOnLinux will even do all the work in setting up the wine environment for it to run in.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[zwede]

No, I think a large number of games are in the process of being ported and 60 of them were completed in the last couple of weeks. More will be finished in the next couple of weeks, etc.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[jones_supa]

Never heard that line before ... not hating on Linux, but seriously, don't hold your breath.

A little bit of celebration would not be that out of place, though.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[jones_supa]

Many know this site already, but here is a nice overview of the Linux titles: steamlinux.xpaw.ru. Of course there's the Valve's official list too.

Re:Goodbye Windows

[arielCo]

Obligatory: xkcd: Extrapolating

Re:Goodbye Windows

[slimjim8094]

Wait, what? I've never heard that the OS X version of Steam was a 3rd party port. In fact, I'm almost certain it wasn't since I was in the Mac Beta and on the email list with the developers (who all have valvesoftware.com email addresses)

Citation, please?

Re:Goodbye Windows

[VortexCortex]

No, I think a large number of games are in the process of being ported and 60 of them were completed in the last couple of weeks. More will be finished in the next couple of weeks, etc.

I think some old games were already ported and as they are vetted as working with Linux Steam they are being announced.

Linux Steam is the best chance Linux gaming is ever going to have, but I wouldn't hold my breath for a huge batch of games.

Vale is not the only game developer. They may be the first major one embracing Linux (read: ensuring their future against MS's craziness), but they are not the only one, nor are they necessarily our "best chance" consumers and game developers have -- The "best chance" is available to everyone already, and cross platform gaming is a force that can not easily be held back any longer. The writing is on the wall for Windows-only PC gaming now, as it was for console exclusive games in the past, and Arcade cabinet exclusive games before that.

As a developer you'd be a damned fool (or need a very expensive reason) to not select or build an engine that's got the (o) Cross Platform bullet point. It costs next to nothing to gain Mac and Linux in addition to Windows if you simply start with a cross platform tool chain. Porting old games can be a pain, but for any new games it's a no-brainer: "Use #1 that's windows only, or pick #2 that's x-platform and will bring in more revenue". Since this has become a selling point engines will compete over: It won't be long before every new major game engine is cross platform -- Valve is just a bit ahead of the curve here (unless you consider Ogre3D and other free x-plat engines).

It's not only that old game engines (and thus the games they support) are being ported to cross platform toolchains, but also new engines are adopting this development model (hell, even application dev is going this way). Microsoft knows this is coming, that's why they want to do some re-engineering of their development model: Their App Store programs are in C# which is a VM language -- I bet they make some changes to the language / API so that new code for their platform is artificially harder to make compatible with Mono, while older C# programs (being byte-code already) can be easily supported going forward; Might even have something to do with XNA getting the can. You see, right now I can easily use OpenGL with C/C++ to make games that run on Mac/Win/Linux ("git pull && make" and I'm done "porting" changes between platforms) -- Microsoft hates that.

If you're doing engine development (like I am), you write an abstraction layer for the native platform interfaces anyway, especially if the game will be on PC + consoles (or even just more than one console). That initial cost to support all the major PC platforms (creating an SDL/freeglut replacement) took me one week of evenings, and now every game I make will be cross platform with no additionally dev cost -- Had I not needed a better multi-threaded event system than these provided it would have taken only a few hours to support all the major PC platforms. Existing engines like Cube(2) and Ogre3D make cross platform development dead simple (if you're using polygonal graphics). Everything is done in shaders nowdays anyway, so even the DirectX vs OpenGL "battle" is a moot point -- whatever shader platform is cross platform -- Why throw away free additional money for the same efforts? With the advent of engine scripting and meta programming languages that compile down into Java / C# / C++, C / ObjC, etc, the cross platform future of games is even stronger. For lighter weight mobile games I can already compile a single source tree into platform specific code for Android, iOS, Win, Mac, Linux, Xbox, PS3, Wii, and DS.

Anyone who doubts the future of gaming on Linux will be bright need look no further than the console market. Publishers like money, it cost more to make separate games for each platform, and

Re:No 64-bit?

[Dusanyu]

you have to install 64 bit libraries in Mint or Foobuntu use the comand sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk ia32-libs-sdl

Re:Kerosene (Jet fuel) warning

[kestasjk]

Yeah.. wake me up when they have ported it to the OpenBSD pkgsrc system as part of the official set of packages and maybe I'll think about potentially buying a game. (As long as it contains no DRM and is also part of the OpenBSD pkgsrc system as part of the official set of packages, audited by portaudit, of course.)

The Valentines Bundle 2.0

[tuppe666]

Just for information really with Serious Sam 3: BFE is available cheaper :) here

http://www.indieroyale.com/

Downloading serious sam now

[zwede]

I'm running 64-bit Gentoo and noticed Steam in the portage tree so I installed it. Works fine. Tried the free TF2 and it worked perfectly. Just bought SS3 for $8 and it's downloading. Valve is great!

Re:Kerosene (Jet fuel) warning

[zwede]

Your distro can't handle deb? Why not? My Gentoo box just has a thin wrapper around the deb to do the install and make it act like any other Gentoo package. I never see a deb package at all.

Re:No 64-bit?

[zwede]

Or switch to a smarter distro? My 64-bit distro fixed it automatically and steam runs fine.

Will this run from a Ubuntu on a USB stick

[tuppe666]

Ok I wasn't sure I decided if how I felt about steam on Linux...more I suspect that the too negative header to this discussion, when down the side I spotted "Try Linux - Grab Ubuntu Desktop; Ubuntu is our favorite version of Linux. Interested in giving it a whirl? You can install and run Ubuntu from a Live CD or USB stick, or install it to run alongside Windows."

Is that "holy shit I can carry all my steam games around on my USB stick" take it around to my friends...or even work, play a few rounds of team fortress, without any changes to the machine...because if that is true, that is bigger news to me than Steam on Linux, this is Quake Arena/Doom again, only with a raft of cheap choices. I can finally play people I know. [and share an experience with], and socialise with, rather than anonymous strangers on-line [I would rather play off-line than that].

Re:Will this run from a Ubuntu on a USB stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it can run on a USB stick. Step by step:
1) Install Ubuntu or some other distro on the stick (use http://www.linuxliveusb.com/ if you're on Windows). Remember to allow it to change the data on the stick so you can install games on it later! If you don't know what you're doing you might want the 32-bit version of Ubuntu, otherwise you'll have to install the lib32 stuff.
2) Boot into your stick
3) Install graphic drivers, etc (you'll probably want the closed-source packages). If using Ubuntu it'll automatically ask you if you want the proprietary stuff
4) Install Steam
5) Login, install games
6) Have fun with your new portable GNU/Linux OS
7) Buy a USB stick with more memory

Re:No 64-bit?

[zwede]

Which distro might that be?

Gentoo.

Re:Linux != Ubuntu

[zwede]

As far as I can see they've only released for Ubuntu.

Not true. Valve only _supports_ ubuntu. Other distros are welcome to add steam to their package managers. For instance, Gentoo has steam in their repo. It's a thin wrapper package. When you install it, it makes sure all dependencies are met and then downloads steam from valve's server and installs it. All this is automagic as far as the user is concerned.

Wine and bugs

[fyngyrz]

This may help to spur on WINE development even more.

At one point, I was responsible for a good sized Windows application. Something along the lines of Photoshop. Tested it under Wine, and Wine choked in a few obvious ways. As we thought it'd be nice if it worked under linux, if indirectly, I reported the issues to them. They blithely informed me that if we wanted the bugs fixed, we'd have to pay. Needless to say, we shelved the whole idea.

Is that still the service model?

Re:Wine and bugs

[maztuhblastah]

"They" who?

The WINE project?

No. That's never been the model, actually, since there's no business model. It's an open source project. That said, like any free software project, it's easier to motivate people to fix the bugs that you care about if you show up with patches or donations -- but neither is necessary.

Now if you're referring to Codeweavers, then yes, actually, that is part of their business model.

Re:Awesome!

[i.r.id10t]

Alien can go from any of 'em to any of 'em....

Quoth the man page:

  alien [--to-deb] [--to-rpm] [--to-tgz] [--to-slp] [options] file [...]

Re:Awesome!

[Kremmy]

Bullshit. Every game I have on Steam in Linux was purchased on the Windows side.