Gamer Rewrites Valve's Steam Installer For Debian

An anonymous reader writes "Gaming on Linux is growing fast right now, and most of that is thanks to Steam. Initially, Steam committed only to the most popular desktop distribution, Ubuntu, but more recently has opened the door to others. So what do you do when you want to game in Linux and you're using something a little less popular — at least, on the desktop? If you're a programmer called GhostSquad57, you rewrite the installer for Debian. GhostSquad57 uploaded his efforts to Github yesterday, and has since reached out to the Linux community."

Comments

big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as Ubuntu is debian for those scared of terms.

Re:big deal

[Minwee]

Try mixing Debian and Ubuntu repositories some time and see how big of a deal that is.

Re:big deal

[phorm]

And Mint is for people who want more packages but dislike the direction that Canonical has been taking with Gnome3 etc...

(it also works with the stock Steam installer)

Re:big deal

[Narcocide]

Well, actually they do. Debian, Mozilla and Apache are the ones run by shadowy not-for-profit legal foundations (aka "charities"), but Canonical, on the other hand is a a for-profit corporation is actually selling your demographic info to advertisers just like Facebook and Apple.

Ubuntu is NOT the most popular Linux OS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really. It's not. It hasn't been in a year or more, so can we stop this "Ubuntu it the big best Linux" crap already?

Ubuntu started to tank shortly after Shuttleworth sold his soul to the devil. The most popular distros are now Mint (by far), and probably also Mageia by now.

I personally don't see why Valve doesn't just aim for Debian support. If that works, Ubuntu, Mint and many more should be minimal effort.

Re:Ubuntu is NOT the most popular Linux OS.

[SJHillman]

It depends on how you determine popularity. Because Linux distros typically don't phone home at any point during installation or operation, it's impossible to know how many installs of a given distro are out there. Mint may have the most pageviews or the most downloads in the last X months, but it doesn't mean it's the most widely installed.

If a company with 1000 seats downloads Ubuntu once and uses that single download to install it on all 1000 PCs, while the business next door has all ten of its users download Mint to install on their own desktops then Mint appears to be ten times as popular as Ubuntu.

I'm not saying this is the case, just that it's almost impossible to figure out the most popular Linux distro. It's also important to point out that Mint is to Ubuntu what Ubuntu is to Debian... if Debian stopped, Ubuntu would die and if Ubuntu stopped then Mint would die.

Re:Ubuntu is NOT the most popular Linux OS.

[crazyjj]

Hate to break it to you, but most downloads on Steam are going to ask you to pay for them too.

Wow Slashdot!

[bennyp]

Check out this headline: Linux guy edits script to better suit his setup. Let's get this to the front page NOW!

Re:Wow Slashdot!

[RocketRabbit]

But how else can "anonymous reader" engage Dice Holdings' genius marketing team to promote thepowerbase.com's awesome news aggregator?

I think you are missing the point of these slashdot stories. They are pure SEO spam, designed to uprank whatever shitty site is giving us a synopsis of what is happening at another site.

It's really too bad the internet took off and was noticed by business and advertising types. We need a modern day digital Jesus to upset the money changers' tables.

Whoop-dee-do for Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

# layman -a gamerlay
# layman -S
# emerge steam-meta

Done. Been working since the middle of the beta for Gentoo users, and that distro doesn't even use .deb files natively. So... um... congrats, Debian? Nice to see you're still old and slow to react? I guess?