Torvalds: SteamOS Will 'Really Help' Linux On the Desktop

nk497 writes "Linus Torvalds has welcomed the arrival of Valve's Linux-based platform, SteamOS, and said it could boost Linux on desktops. The Linux creator praised Valve's 'vision' and suggested its momentum would force other manufacturers to take Linux seriously — especially if game developers start to ditch Windows. Should SteamOS gain traction among gamers and developers, that could force more hardware manufacturers to extend driver support beyond Windows. That's a sore point for Torvalds, who slammed Nvidia last year for failing to support open-source driver development for its graphics chips. Now that SteamOS is on the way, Nvidia has opened up to the Linux community, something Torvalds predicts is a sign of things to come. 'I'm not just saying it'll help us get traction with the graphics guys,' he said. 'It'll also force different distributors to realize if this is how Steam is going, they need to do the same thing because they can't afford to be different in this respect. They want people to play games on their platform too.'"

Comments

Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't help GNU/Linux on the desktop. It will only lure people into using non-free programs distributed through Steam.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[MightyMartian]

It certainly will help Linux on the desktop if more optimized graphics drivers are made available. That's the whole point of this article.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

The gamers are still exposed to much more open source software than they would when playing the games on Windows. This, in turn, creates more interest to the open source ecosystem which then creates more commercial incentive to improve it.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[blahplusplus]

"This doesn't help GNU/Linux on the desktop. It will only lure people into using non-free programs distributed through Steam."

The problem with stallman is that he doesn't grasp that anything requiring years of education and basically amounts to a time commitment of a full time job needs to get paid for. The reason many free programs suck is because no sane programmer in their right mind can produce and maintain a project of non-trivial size that doesn't have a sizable community of tinkerers and paid experts from which to draw from like linux has.

GNU/Linux would be helped if they would allow some commercialization IMHO without any ability to make revenue, who can afford to maintain/update applications which more often then not require a serious amount of time and hard work?

The problem becomes as problems become non-trivial (aka beyond the realm of part-timers both amateur and pro) you simply can't maintain a project of any reasonable size and complexity for any given length of time because people have lives, get old, get sick, die, etc. That is why there needs to be some kind of income coming in to maintain any project beyond the trivial.

While I agree with many of stallman's principles, his allergies to commercialization show how naive he is. If he was serious he'd be rallying the open source community to invest in GOG.COM and get them to make an app that competes with steam that allows users to own their own games for instance. People like stallman don't get that the world doesn't work on hardcore morality, it works on time, energy, effort and what is required to maintain it.

A better idea would be instead of going against the grain of the world, intelligently build cultures that promote at least some of your ideals. The whole gaming world is going F2P/MMO/Walled garden. I'm sure Nintendo, Sony and MS are chomping at the bit to make every game 'online only' eventually after the smashing success of diablo 3 in terms of sales (the march of gaming morons continues).

A better idea would be to fund and protect those people who are at least selling products to have a compelling reason to use software you own. Steam won because it added a huge tonne of features sits like GOG.COM lack (Friends list, etc). It has all you gaming in one place, you can see when you friends are online, what game they are playing, can message them, etc.

The moral crusaders never got the message that they need to act more rationally and intelligently if they want any of their values to survive the onslaught of greed.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me, who the fuck cares what Stallman thinks?

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[CastrTroy]

Drivers are probably about the biggest problem that Linux has right now. It's the main reason I'm not using it on my laptop. Last I tried, about 6 months ago (2 year old laptop), I could not get accelerated graphics working on the desktop. It still looked good enough, even without accelerated graphics but I suspect this also had the other disadvantage of greatly lowering my battery life, by running everything in software. Battery life was about half of what it was on windows. Also, because there was no accelerated graphics, I couldn't play any games. Well, that and Netflix. I don't understand why I can run Netflix on Android, but I can't run it on Linux. Personally, I don't even want to run in a browser. I'd actually rather run it as a separate application. And they can make it closed source for all I care.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

"...who can afford to maintain/update applications which more often then not require a serious amount of time and hard work...

more often THAN not... I don't know why this bothers me so fuckin' much, but GODDAMMIT get it right!!!!!!!

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the idea of prizes to motivate would-be free software programmers.

Nowadays, there are dozens of million-dollar prizes scattered about for scientists and hobbyists. Why not offer $250,000 for a decent Linux alternative to Photoshop, for example? GIMP is so far behind, yet so entrenched, that I'm sure people will be shrugging their shoulders 20 years from now and saying "GIMP is the best we have".

Ongoing maintenance could be covered by donations to pay for a few salaried programmers.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's RMS on the subject http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Lendrick]

The FSF was mixed about Steam for GNU/Linux. Since most of the issues remain the same with SteamOS, I'm guessing that their opinion on it will be similar.

For obvious reasons, they're never going to endorse anything that's partly proprietary, but it it moves people away from dependence on completely proprietary systems, in there view it's possible that there might be some benefit. The FSF isn't so hardline that they refuse to acknowledge the distinction between software that's mostly free versus software that's completely proprietary.

From the article I linked:

However, if you're going to use these games, you're better off using them on GNU/Linux rather than on Microsoft Windows. At least you avoid the harm to your freedom that Windows would do.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[DuckDodgers]

The counter-argument to your point about The reason many free programs suck is because no sane programmer in their right mind can produce and maintain a project of non-trivial size that doesn't have a sizable community of tinkerers and paid experts from which to draw from like linux has. is that many people - in fact, most of humanity - can't afford the technologically superior or more user-friendly proprietary alternatives.

The GIMP doesn't match up in features or usability to Adobe Photoshop. But if you don't have the money for Photoshop, GIMP is much better than nothing. Developing software for Windows on Visual Studio beats using Mingw - but that only makes sense if you're a professional developer planning to make a living by writing software for Windows. If you're trying to teach yourself software development, or you're a kid, or you just don't have $500 or $800 or whatever the hell it costs, then Mingw is the only thing that lets you even try. Most of our planet, most of humanity, are poor people. The successful IT professional can buy any proprietary program he or she needs - but we are not the typical human being. If they're going to reach our level, they have to do it through extremely cheap tools.

In the realm of encryption, it is increasingly difficult to trust proprietary products. With the Linux kernel, or Truecrypt, or any of the OpenPGP implementations, you can read the code yourself or hope that someone else trustworthy and skilled enough to detect backdoors has read it. With proprietary security products, how do you know?

But maybe most important of all, the competition against open source products continually forces the proprietary vendors to compete on features and price. If Linux didn't exist, maybe a copy of Windows 7 would be $600 instead of $200 and a cohttp://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/10/23/184236/torvalds-steamos-will-really-help-linux-on-the-desktop#py of Windows 2012 Server Standard Edition would be $8000 instead of $800 and Solaris or AIX would be $100,000 per core instead of whatever it is now. They keep the prices where they are for fear that people will decide an inferior free alternative and the extra work it involves is more cost-effective than their closed alternative.

Even if you only ever use proprietary software, you benefit tremendously from the existence of free software and its moral crusaders.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Samantha Wright]

RedHat's done pretty well for itself selling little more than support contracts, as have many other server distro vendors. A sticker price isn't the only way to make money from providing software. And given that Ubuntu embraced advertising a long time ago, it's a bit of a strawman (or at least quaintly archaic) to argue with the GNU Foundation's core principles.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[twocows]

The problem with stallman is that he doesn't grasp that anything requiring years of education and basically amounts to a time commitment of a full time job needs to get paid for.

I hear this myth perpetuated a lot and it's not really true. Stallman has said on several occasions he believes developers can and should be compensated for their work and he believes this is perfectly feasible within a free software ecosystem. The problem is that many traditional methods of monetization don't hold up in a free software world and it would require people to rethink how they plan to monetize. That said, I don't think a lot of large scale development (especially from big devs who have been doing things with the normal model for years) can switch over without a lot of effort (and effort means money), especially when the end result may very likely lead to less income. Businesses don't work that way.

Stallman (and the FSF in general) also believes that any proprietary software is immoral and it should be shunned and not used ever. I agree that this is the right ideal, but I think the long road to it may require some sacrifices along the way. If SteamOS leads to a significant trend away from current ingrained non-free systems (like Windows), that in turn makes devs (like Nvidia's) play nicer with free software devs and creates a positive feedback loop. I believe that's a good thing, even if the fact that SteamOS is closed is not. I think the correct course of action is to urge Valve to try and free the software or to develop a fully free alternative rather than simply urging people not to use it at all, and I think this applies to other parts of a mixed-freedom environment. For instance, the FSF encourages the use of what it deems fully free GNU/Linux distributions, which are often just forks of popular distributions with any non-free software removed. I don't like this approach; I think a better one would be to make it transparent what parts are non-free and simply make it a top priority to free or rewrite these portions.

Stallman and the FSF are very interesting and make a lot of good points (if you read the literature they put out, it really does make a lot of sense), but it's always best to think for yourself and not blindly adhere to any ideology. What Stallman thinks and says is often interesting and insightful, but it shouldn't be the only metric you use to make a decision. I don't disagree with the FSF very often, but in this case, I do think SteamOS is good for the long-term prospects of GNU/Linux and free software primarily because of the politics involved.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people; he's the public face of the Free Software Foundation and the man who made the initial GNU system that represents the most significant portion of any GNU/Linux system. Whether you agree with him or not, a lot of people pay attention to what he says.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're trying to teach yourself software development, or you're a kid, or you just don't have $500 or $800 or whatever the hell it costs, then Mingw is the only thing that lets you even try. .

Visual Studio Express is free.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[interval1066]

Your right, but a surprising number of the games I enjoy run on Linux just fine, infact I have an older I really like that actually runs better on Wine. Just sayin'.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Belial6]

This isn't a problem. We need Stallman, and his extreme view on the subject. If he went pragmatic, the pragmatic view would be considered the extreme. The center would shift farther towards lock down and rent seeking. It is Torvalds that plays the part you would place Stallman in. We need both types.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[tftp]

It will only lure people into using non-free programs distributed through Steam.

It will also allow you to run free programs. I can't imagine that the SteamOS will only run signed executables. So as soon as you finish your clone of GTA V, with even a larger and more detailed world, you should be able to share it for free with everyone. I will definitely download it and say my thanks to you for a lifetime of labor that you spent for my entertainment.

I know that there is a free flight simulator out there that comes with extensive maps, so this is possible. However as soon as the labor that goes into the software becomes nontrivial I see nothing wrong in sending the developers some money, so that they can eat, live, and work on another game. RMS has his vision, and perhaps the formulas that define the software ought to be free... but games require an inordinate amount of handcrafted graphics. Nobody says that maps should be free too - they are not science, they are art.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[blahplusplus]

"Even if you only ever use proprietary software, you benefit tremendously from the existence of free software and its moral crusaders."

There's nothing wrong with being a moral crusader. But if you want you values to proliferate, you have to offer something better then the alternatives. Let's be honest, Free software movement hasn't been a success for the average gamer. Steam is totally closed platform and so are all the big console players.

I have no problem with free software advocates principles. The problem they are not seeing is that projects people want are hugely non-trivial. To create something like steam requires resources no person like stallman and company has. While they give good speeches, without funds and some self-sustaining income base those values are being driven out by the corporate world because the naive moralists refuse to see the writing on the wall. There is nothing wrong with being a moralist, but there is something wrong with being naive about what it takes to get people to use your software.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't actually read my post, did you...

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[vurian]

250k would pay for about fifty man-months of development. For Gimp, the problem is that they basically decided that money isnt going to help, when they messed up when Mark Shuttleworth promised them a stiffish bounty for getting high bit depth images working. But I agree, and if you can help me setup a way to get 250k, that would definitely accelerate Krita's development in a very significant way. We've already got quite a bit of experience with sponsored, full-time development.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

My state has a blanket Microsoft student license that covers all high schools, colleges, and universities. Get VS Acad for $80 or whatever, which is like the pro version. MSDN at my work is $400 per seat every two years, but that includes access to all versions of Windows, and some nice devel support with an SLA that states a 24 hour turn around on questions from an MS dev, which I've gotten to chat with a senior .net arch/dev.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Blaskowicz]

I could not get accelerated graphics working on the desktop. It still looked good enough, even without accelerated graphics but I suspect this also had the other disadvantage of greatly lowering my battery life, by running everything in software.

This is something I don't understand much. If you're running a desktop without compositing and without animations when minimizing windows (e.g. Xfce, Mate, LXDE) then aren't you *saving* power? The GPU can stay in a 2D only, low powered state (hopefully).
If you're piping the whole desktop through OpenGL for no benefit you'd be likely to waste power, since not only you draw the application contents (which had to be drawed already), but you pipe all the bitmaps through the OpenGL subsystem and GPU. If the GPU driver is inefficient, you will waste a lot of CPU cycles and the GPU power management may be bad or non existent, so maybe it'll run at full voltage/clocks even for that miserable desktop drawing task.

Android and Windows Vista/7/8 get away by not using Xorg and exclusively using proprietary drivers.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed the places where FOSS software has been successful is where it provided a better product.

Linux -- did not scale as well as proprietary UNIX, but was way more user-friendly & had a superior packaging system
Apache HTTPD -- way better than the expensive Netscape web server
MySQL -- superior when you consider the alternatives were BDB or MS-Access
Postgres -- certainly better than MS-SQL and Sybase if not Oracle
Scripting languages -- Umm, VBS and AppleScript

On the desktop however, this superiority has been elusive. It's mostly just a bunch of half-assed knock-offs of better proprietary software. All of which might be "good enough" for some, but are rarely claimed to be better, even by it's supporters.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason many free programs suck is because no sane programmer in their right mind can produce and maintain a project

You lost me right there.

To be more concrete: at $DAYJOB I'm using a mix of free and non-free. Suckiness factor is way higher on non-free side. *Cough* Confluence *cough* Jira.

All those nice things bought by people who don't have to use them.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

So is every other version. You can download the legit and clean trial of Visual Studio Ultimate from Microsoft and Google for an activation key. Does not phone home and you can install all the updates. Always works.

This was done quite intentionally by Microsoft just for the kid's trying to teach themselves software development. Especially the ones that want to fuck with the optimizing compiler, profiler, etc. that the Express edition doesn't have.

Re: Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Stallman had 30 years to pioneer computing and the best he could do is give us emacs and gcc.

Fuck him.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

If Linux didn't exist, maybe a copy of Windows 7 would be $600 instead of $200
 
Exactly, if we could get free music from thin air there is no way anyone would have ever have been able to put it on a slab of vynal and sell it.
 
Oh, wait....
 
Er, if you could just get water from the tap for a cent or two a gallon no one would pay a dollar or more for a 20 ounce bottle of it.
 
Oh, wait...
 
Anywho... if you could just go to a building and read books for free and even take them home for a while no one would bother buying them for their own home.
 
Oh wait...

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[jones_supa]

While in that article RMS mostly opposes non-free software, he also mentions a bright side in a sidenote: "It might encourage GNU/Linux users to install these games, and it might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux."

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

The GIMP doesn't match up in features or usability to Adobe Photoshop. But if you don't have the money for Photoshop, GIMP is much better than nothing.

That's a false argument. If you don't have the money for photoshop there are other cheaper alternatives that you can afford, and those are far superior to GIMP (I own Sketch and Pixelmator, in addition to having GIMP and Inkscape installed for occasional use, they're free so why not have them installed).

Developing software for Windows on Visual Studio beats using Mingw - but that only makes sense if you're a professional developer planning to make a living by writing software for Windows. If you're trying to teach yourself software development, or you're a kid, or you just don't have $500 or $800 or whatever the hell it costs, then Mingw is the only thing that lets you even try. Most of our planet, most of humanity, are poor people. The successful IT professional can buy any proprietary program he or she needs - but we are not the typical human being. If they're going to reach our level, they have to do it through extremely cheap tools.

Now there I agree with you. In fact I _hate_ visual studio with a passion and would rather flip burgers than work at a company where I was required to use it. But software development tools are one of the niches where open source does work, because there is a huge community of developers and corporations who are willing to dedicate time and money to it.

I'm an open source developer, I spend 10+ hours every week writing open code. But I'm not working on projects like GIMP, I'm working on projects that other developers are interested in and willing patches to.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're trying to teach yourself software development, or you're a kid, or you just don't have $500 or $800 or whatever the hell it costs, then Mingw is the only thing that lets you even try. .

Visual Studio Express is free.

And worth he price.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Kjella]

I hear this myth perpetuated a lot and it's not really true. Stallman has said on several occasions he believes developers can and should be compensated for their work and he believes this is perfectly feasible within a free software ecosystem. The problem is that many traditional methods of monetization don't hold up in a free software world and it would require people to rethink how they plan to monetize.

The trouble is that most of these ideas are crap for application development like service and support, though they're okay for platform/distro/device development like Android / Tivo / RHEL / Ubuntu and so on. Particularly those where you have a huge number of users who each contribute very little, like say a million people paying $1 on the app store. That's a pretty good income for a small development house of say ten people, less Apple's cut it's $70k/head before expenses and taxes. I wager that if you made it open source and asked for donations you'd raise less than $1000, that's more like $100 each in beer money instead. Sure you can raise more money in the Humble Bundle for charity, but that's not money to pay your bills and you can also question how much people's total charity budget goes up as a result.

Basically it's this: Before the work is done, it's a wild guess what you'll actually get and everybody is in a game of chicken about who will fund it. After all, it's going to be open sourced so if it gets funded but you didn't fund it you get to have your cake and eat it too. Nobody wants to carry the burden and even when trying to share the burden through Kickstarter it's still easy to be a cynic and freeload if you see the goals are met anyway. After the work is done, well the work is already done. Nobody loses out by not giving you anything, so they don't. It's very different from closed source where you put down $2000 in work thinking you can sell it back to 100 people for $20 each, you take the risk and people buy a known quantity with reviews or go without.

Maybe a "delayed" open source licence would do the trick, like any time you compile a binary you get a one-year BSD license but after that year is up you must provide the complete corresponding source code for that binary with a GPL-compatible license. That way you get a good exclusivity period for people who want the new features right now and you don't have to wait life+70/95 years for it to go out of copyright - and you still wouldn't have the source, just the binary. The hook needs a little more bait than that everyone can copy everything you do, instantly.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[ausekilis]

It will only lure people into using non-free programs distributed through Steam.

It will also allow you to run free programs.

This point exactly. So with steamOS (and the right hardware) I can play Left 4 Dead 2 at a blazing 300 fps. Well, what happens when I just paid my rent and don't have the $50 to blow on Arkham Origins? Maybe I'll start looking at what I can get for free. That's when your normal (i.e. non linux nerd) folks will start to notice Tremulous or any of the other Id Tech derived games. They may even dig deeper and find some reborn classics like FreeDOOM. I doubt seriously that any of the free offerings will cause some uprising in gamers, but in the search of free through the SteamOS "software center", they'll be sure to stumble on all sorts of things they didn't realize had free/open alternatives. Maybe word will spread that LibreOffice will save that $90 for a student (read: Limited) version of Office or $400 for the full thing.
Gamers are a picky and often very vocal group. Once some catch on to something, they can start an avalanche.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only free for non-commercial uses, unless the EULA has changed in the last 5 years...but I doubt it. That said, it is a useful tool for learning.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[msobkow]

How is this a "problem"?

The core system gets accelerated graphics from more vendors. The core system gets tweaked for better real-time responsiveness. The core system gets more eyes debugging it for stability. The core system has another vendor contributing fixes and patches.

Only to a fanatical raving lunatic is this a "problem."

Oh, yeah. We're talking about Stallman. You don't get any more fanatical than that, though I don't consider the man a lunatic by any stretch of the imagination.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

$250K for more than 4 years of work? Are you looney? Most developers make at least $120K every year. And that is simply the net salary. It doesn't cover all the other benefits/overhead that is paid by the company on top of that.

In terms of contracting, software development typically costs at least $70/hour. Assuming standard 40-hour weeks, that means that one would blow through $250K in 1.7 years.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[oreiasecaman]

+1 Pragmatism

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a pragmatic argument. Not going to work on zealots and fanatics.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Blakey Rat]

Paint.NET may not have as many features as GIMP, but it's equally free and not even close to as painful to use.

Visual Studio has had a no-strings-attached free version since, what, 2003? Retire the obsolete FUD please.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Blakey Rat]

I hear this myth perpetuated a lot and it's not really true. Stallman has said on several occasions he believes developers can and should be compensated for their work and he believes this is perfectly feasible within a free software ecosystem.

Right; he says that.

But doesn't the fact that so very few people have managed to make it work mean that it's unworkable? What's his evidence that it works? Where are these successful entrepreneurs following "The Stallman Method"?" It's been decades; surely there should be thousands by now, right?

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[behrooz0az]

No, I think the *good enough* part he is refering to is LLVMpipe, which is a total battery eater.
And 2d desktops don't work that way in my town.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[serviscope_minor]

Last I tried, about 6 months ago (2 year old laptop), I could not get accelerated graphics working on the desktop.

How? Or more specifically what hardware do you have? There's only Intel, Nvidia and AMD now, and all have drivers between passable and excellent. Unless you had one of those hateful intel ones with the PowerVR core.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear! Hear!

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[ottothecow]

That's basically my main hope...that SteamOS brings linux netflix.

I still run linux on a netbook, but I switched my HTPC to windows. XBMC runs about the same, but netflix works perfectly.

Of course, now my complaint is that both the Netflix and the Amazon Prime streaming videos are still crippled on my HTPC. You cannot watch HD video content from amazon on the PC. You can watch it in HD on a roku or on some crappy blu-ray player that has the plugin, but you can't watch HD on a full power HTPC. Netflix will let you play the videos in HD, but they still won't give you 5.1 sound unless you use a roku. If it is a silverlight limitation, why not just release a client? The majority of people don't have 5.1 setups and won't care, and those that do probably won't mind installing a separate player app.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Our current methods of distribution for open source software work against the developers getting paid, but this doesn't mean that distribution methods cannot change to a method which assist developers to get paid.

Example:
I love Cory Doctorow's books, and he releases them for free on his Craphound website. But I'd prefer to buy the books on Amazon and not have to piddle about loading the book onto my kindle from my laptop. Similarly I can get pretty much any music I want from thepiratebay, but I prefer to purchase from the AppStore on my phone so that the songs are immediately downloaded and ready to play w/o having to fool about.

This is far from perfect, but open source developers can do a similar method of selling the binary on some AppStore while offering the source-code/makefiles on github.

PS I have an open source project that I dont get a cent for. I'm not sure I'd want to get paid, as getting paid would make me beholden to the payers feature requests; which I dont really have time for unless I quit my job.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[gdshaw]

GNU/Linux would be helped if they would allow some commercialization IMHO without any ability to make revenue, who can afford to maintain/update applications which more often then not require a serious amount of time and hard work?

GNU/Linux already allows proprietary userspace programs. To avoid any doubt on this point, the licence file for the kernel explicitly states that a program does not become a derived work merely by using normal system calls. Neither GCC nor Glibc prevent proprietary programs from being compiled and executed.

Kernel drivers are supposed to be GPL, but manufacturers are already making money on the hardware, and even on fully-closed platforms would not usually make any extra money from the drivers. In most cases I can see no good reason why the driver needs to be protected with a propietary licence, but even if it did then there are ways of achieving that which have historically been tolerated and (in some cases at least) are arguably legal.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[unixisc]

The point is that he's either not thought to it properly, or he has, but doesn't care about the consequences. I tend to believe it's the latter - he thinks that software developers should take a hit, except for himself.

Essentially, he insists that people to whom software is distributed - whether sold or gifted - should have the 'right' to 'help their neighbor' by giving away the software, if asked. That provision alone guarantees that any price tag put on the software is meaningless, since it's only the software developer's users who'd then be paying for it, while everyone else who gets it from those users and below would get it for much less. In short, it dilutes the market for the software developer, and limits what they can recoup in development & operating expenses.

I've argued here that a shared source model, as opposed to an open source model, is a better idea. Under this, a user/customer gets the source code when they buy/receive software, and they have the rights to modify it, study it, install it on any number of their own boxes. Only right they don't have is redistribute it. This is a win-win scenario for both the software developer and customer. Customer gets all the advantages of open source - getting the source code, keeping it as long as their systems last, porting it to any great new systems they might buy in future, spread it over additional iron that they buy. Vendor avoids the one major disadvantage - of their customer redistributing it and thereby reducing their potential customer base.

Not a model that Stallman or the 'libre' crowd support, but that's the only one that protects the interests of both parties involved in the software business

Re: Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[GreyWolf3000]

Actually, emacs and gcc are pretty triumphant pieces of computer programming.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[sirlark]

There are hundreds of thousands of developers world wide following the "Stallman method" as you call it. We call ourselves contract programmers, or "solutions architects" if were hawking our wares bizniz types. We get paid for our time and skill, not per copy of the code. The client gets to (0) run the software for whatever purpose they chose; (1) inspect the code to verify it works the way they want and modify it to suit their needs (practically, they hire another guy to do code review, QA, modifications etc) (2) distribute copies to all their staff without onerous licensing agreements, and if they really want to give a copy of the software to others; they're a business so they won't, but they are free to do so, and finally (3) distribute modified copies of the code. The majority of software written in the world (measured by lines of code) supposedly falls into this category of development. Off-the shelf, or in the modern world, off the internet software accounts for a surprisingly small percentage of software in the real world; most developers don't work for micro-gapple sized companies.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[sirlark]

Well put!

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

How about you go and learn something? There's no such thing as 2D only. Well, there is but even then it's sort of accelerated. Basically, there's text mode which BIOS based systems have to support, not sure about (U)EFI. Second is graphics mode which is you are virtually always using, including Linux super slow tty, I believe. If you had a phsyical terminal, text mode would be legitimely accelerated, not sure if GPUs would care enough to make it perform just as well as a terminal could. Then there are overlays, which are 2D but let you do accelerated graphics in them, the most common overlay for Linux is Xv and the concept itself is considered dated but even modern day VDPAU API has support for overlays for god knows what reason although it's extremely unlikely it's a real overlay and not emulated by GPU. And lastly there is OpenGL where basically you draw to your personal buffer and then there's one "bigguy" that composits these buffers into final buffer to show on screen.

Now, about GPUs. I don't know that much about them but I can assure you that just because you are running plain Xorg without OpenGL does not mean the GPU can not work, I mean, where do you think the video buffer is, or what's talking to the display? Oh, sure, /sarcasm follows/ the hardware has magical mode where it shuts down everything if it detects VGA mode which, frankly, I'm kinda suprised modern hardware even supports. But even then, even if the GPU, which might be missing huge chunk of it's firmware in case of AMD, might have enough logic left (questionable) to reclock itself, then it's still using one of the clickings that it could have used with OpenGL accelrated desktop as well. And to actually know the difference someone would have to measure the actual power draw of the whole PC with and without compositing and likely also with and without the proper drivers since the anti-composition crowd is also liable for not using the full blobs and only then can conclusions be drawn for that particular hardware and software. Also, not using GPU means using your CPU for those same works since something has to do the calculations to render image to show on scree, surprise, surprise.

Re: Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

But steamOs will be opensource, so its not too bad.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what the most amazing part is?

People these days just can't do stuff unless it says "Microsoft Office", "Adobe Photoshop" or "Visual Studio" on the box. Never mind that in the past people got way more complex stuff done with other applications, or older, way less complicated, complex and feature packed versions of those same applications. If you don't have the latest and the greatest of the most expensive stuff you just can't get stuff done. Or so they believe, and we all know how facts fare when they contradict the articles of faith.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

No taxes were paid to Microsoft in the making of this agreement? No special concessions such as the state agreeing to stay with Windows for official computing functions?

AKA You really think that Microsoft is doing this out of the good of their heart?

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Blaskowicz]

Thanks, where I might be wrong is hoping the GPU is on "2D clock" frequency if it has a crap driver, unlikely yes. But maybe it boots at slow clock (no point of high clock when your life starts in VGA or VESA mode) then lack of reclocking would mean it stays slow.
Overlay, xv? that's a nice feature thanks. It used to use a fixed fonction scaler I think, at least in S3 Virge, ATI Rage Pro, and took YUV as input. It's what made our PCs smooth at full screen video till flash video tried to ruin it, requiring a 1GHz and faster CPU to play low quality vids. Did they remove the old scaler, while adding new fixed function stuff? (h264 etc.). That would feel stupid to me.

Anyway I prefer to use binary blob (or usable open source) AND a non composited desktop because knowing the desktop can run on any PC (and some non PC even) is more worth to me that knowing the graphical back end is so flexible that my windows could be rotated (yeah, right. Why not have them fly like planes with a dopplerized buzzing sound, as well)

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[sayfawa]

Yeah and just as some say GIMP doesn't compare to Photoshop, Paint.NET doesn't compare to GIMP, which is a lot more than a photo editor. For instance, I draw with the GIMP on a Wacom tablet. Paint.NET, which doesn't have pressure sensitivity, is useless for me.

As for painful to use, well, that's just like, your opinion, man. Me and the GIMP get along just fine.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

PS I have an open source project that I dont get a cent for. I'm not sure I'd want to get paid, as getting paid would make me beholden to the payers feature requests; which I dont really have time for unless I quit my job

I can definitely relate to this. One of my hobbies is game modding, and I often get asked, 'why don't you try to get into the games industry'?

My reply is, "if it were a job I would have to create things that other people want, instead of things that I want".

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[sayfawa]

A person makes the argument that if it weren't for open-source software, proprietary products would likely cost more. You point out that a limited version of Visual Studio is free. How is that a counter-argument? If it weren't for open-source compilers and IDEs (which have existed since before 2003), do you think Visual Studio would still have a free version?

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[stooo]

>> Visual Studio Express is free.

not exactly.
it comes with the cost of being tied to an aeging-soon-to-be-obsoleted platform.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to miss the point.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Urza9814]

Most developers make at least $120K every year. And that is simply the net salary.

No, they don't. Perhaps you're thinking of the *top 10%* of software developers.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Urza9814]

Er, if you could just get water from the tap for a cent or two a gallon no one would pay a dollar or more for a 20 ounce bottle of it.

Learn to read.
Their argument was that if there's a drought and your tap dries up, stores may decide that the $1 bottle of water now costs $5. Supply and demand.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[itsphilip]

That's fine he always gets worked up about stuff like this and that's a good thing. He raises awareness by being fringe and, as a corollary, making a spectacle of himself. And whether or not he's happy about this, it's good that the platform becomes more well-developed and accessible to consumers. I'm actually cautiously optimistic about Ubuntu of all things... Imagine with Mir, better toolkits and some of the other improvements it becomes as polished as OS X AND is open-source. Far more trustworthy OS IMO in a day in age when we can't trust much of anything. Open source is really the only development model that is fully trustworthy, GPL or otherwise.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed the places where FOSS software has been successful is where it provided a better product.

But never in the consumer space, it has only ever succeeded as tools for geeks, stuff people never have to see. This is why the free software message fails to gain traction with the broader community, everything people see that is free software is rubbish, the only good stuff is what geeks build for themselves (which is basically the idea of free software anyway).

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[liwee]

Paint.NET may not have as many features as GIMP, but it's equally free and not even close to as painful to use.

Visual Studio has had a no-strings-attached free version since, what, 2003? Retire the obsolete FUD please.

I am sure traditional airlines lowered their fares out of good will. It was just a coincidence that low cost carrier appeared at the same time.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[exomondo]

RedHat's done pretty well for itself selling little more than support contracts, as have many other server distro vendors.

That's all well and good but you won't sell support contracts to regular consumers and we all know people hate ads, which if it's free software can be stripped out anyway, diluting the value of that proposition. Even Google has stepped up to the 'switch' part of their Android Bait-and-Switch, dropping the free and open applications in favor of much improved but closed and proprietary ones, just look at music, calendar, search, etc... in order to continue gaining (or increasing) advertising revenue from Android.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Paint.NET may not have as many features as GIMP, but it's equally free and not even close to as painful to use.

I can't seem to find the source code for the current version of Paint.Net

So no, it is not "equally" as free as GIMP.

Visual Studio is gimped version of proprietary IDE. Likely only made available to get people hooked on the platform, else they'd have to turn to open source compilers. It's competition driven by OSS/FSF.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

But doesn't the fact that so very few people have managed to make it work mean that it's unworkable?

Let me rephrase your statement as a logical statement.

But doesn't the fact that so very few people have managed to find black sheep mean that all sheep are white?

I trust my point is clear.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Curious, what was our stumbling block with hardware acceleration? I've not had problems with nVidia for a long time, across various distros (Arch, Ubuntu, Debain, Fedora), with the last few generations of cards I've bought (back to the 6000 series at least).

ATI was tricky when I last bought one of their cards, but that was way back before AMD bought them and started opening up a bit. I've stuck with Intel or nVidia mainly. Though the last ATI card I tried to get working (on a laptop my mother bought) did not take much twiddling.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[aiadot]

I don't care. As long as the basics, i.e., OS, drivers and APIs as well as the marketplaces/repositories are open, thus giving the power to the users to write any app for anything, I'm okay with that. If the apps are closed, I really don't mind. TBH, I have little faith in the success of steamOS. Unless Valve makes HL3 and following games steamOS exclusives, there will be very little reason to choose steamOS over anything else. But if it is successful I hope that will make other gaming companies and accessories maker to adopt open/standard APIs and drivers for the PC(I'm looking at you Nvidia, OcculusVR and Sony).

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[murdocj]

Visual Studio Express is free (zero-cost).

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[murdocj]

You mean the platform that owns 90% of the desktop market? Wow, yeah, that's a problem.

Re: Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Except gcc only became useful after it was forked away from the GNU crap. A situation that bureaucracy desperately needs again. Emacs is only great if you are willing to rewrite your plugins after every release.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[smash]

Good. Stallman is living in fantasy land. Some software is never going to be done properly by a bunch of nerds in their spare time. Games are one of these products.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[exomondo]

Visual Studio is gimped version of proprietary IDE. Likely only made available to get people hooked on the platform, else they'd have to turn to open source compilers. It's competition driven by OSS/FSF.

Nope, because you can use open source compilers with visual studio if you want. Just use a call to 'make' in your build command commandline and have that use gcc or whatever.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[wagnerrp]

Overlay, xv? that's a nice feature thanks. It used to use a fixed fonction scaler I think, at least in S3 Virge, ATI Rage Pro, and took YUV as input. It's what made our PCs smooth at full screen video till flash video tried to ruin it, requiring a 1GHz and faster CPU to play low quality vids. Did they remove the old scaler, while adding new fixed function stuff? (h264 etc.). That would feel stupid to me.

Xv is still around.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm certainly not making $120K/yr, but between salary, benefits, facilities, equipment, travel, overhead, my company bills customers nearly $140/hr for my time doing custom modifications, on-site installation, and support. I would blow through $250K in well under a year, and that's assuming my average work week was only 40 hours.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[wagnerrp]

Decades? Plural? Linux has barely even existed for plural decades.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

who cares? why are so many people so confused with the idea that "free software" doesn't mean "no cost software"?

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[smash]

Well i know you've probably got a healthy disrespect for adobe, but to compete with photoshop in any reasonable time-frame, you're going to need that top 10% of programmers to work on the project. Assuming photoshop stays still. An infinite number of muppets is not going to cut it.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[smash]

Well if you're writing free software, this would be non-commercial use, right?

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Their argument was that if there's a drought and your tap dries up, stores may decide that the $1 bottle of water now costs $5. Supply and demand.

So if the less-than-2% of linux desktop users find themselves unable to use desktop linux the price of windows will go up?

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Err some steam games are free. Including TF2 which is very popular.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

He's a lot closer than vurian. If you filter out the people doing "software development" that really have no clue what they are doing, the average is closer to $100-$110k/year. Just start by dropping 1 year experience from glassdoor.com, and you'll quickly see that. Or drop the companies that have 1 guy who does some excel macros and uses the title "software development", or the QA testers that lump themselves in that group.

If you look at glassdoor, take the 10 largest companies on that list, very few are truly paying an average of less that $100k per developer. For example, Multivision (of of the top 10), only hires recent grads. All 173 of their employees have 1 year experience.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Paint.NET may not have as many features as GIMP, but it's equally free and not even close to as painful to use.

Millions disagree.

Visual Studio has had a no-strings-attached free version

Which is useless for most practical purposes because GUI development is crippled. It's little more than demoware.

Retire the obsolete FUD please.

Grow up please.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

There's not just the ridiculously expensive Photoshop and Gimp.
You can get a copy of Photoshop Elements for less than $100 - and it has pretty much every feature anybody except for the professional graphical designers would need. Corel Paintshop Pro is another cost effective alternative.
And Gimp is clearly inferior to both of these products.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. You see, without new developers, the whole Windows ecosystem would loose market position. Why should anybody pay for learning .NET, when they can learn Java for free ? It's in their own interest to allow people to learn.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to draw forgeta about Gimp and try Krita.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Bert64]

Windows succeeded because it was cheaper, and were it not for the lock-in and heavy marketing linux would have supplanted windows by now for the same reason.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Bert64]

I tend to agree that software should be free, but on the importance scale i'd much rather have the core os and applications which i require for communication and editing/storage of my own data were free...

Games are far less important in this instance, they might be fun for a little light entertainment but you don't need them and they aren't holding any of your important data captive by being closed source. I would be perfectly happy with a free os, free application software and non-free games.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[narcc]

Well, it will be soon-- that platform is very ill -- it'll be stone dead in a moment. Can you hang around a couple of minutes? It won't be long.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I live in a different part of the world, one where salaries are not expressed in dollars. I am a software developer with twenty years of experience and I make half what you mention in euros a year. That's a very good salary in my place of the world... I have my own company and I have never paid any developer 120$ a year. And, of course, contracting fees are completely irrelevant here.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Bert64]

One of the key interests of software vendors is hiding the sourcecode from the users... They will usually have many reasons for this, but none of them really benefit the users.

To hide poorly written code, to hide code which infringes upon others' copyrights, to keep the customer beholden to the vendor etc...

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Lennie]

I don't agree, I think we need all kinds of people in the community.

Stallman is very good at pointing out what might be a bad idea.

I think it keeps people aware of possible problems. So people keep their options open and be vigilant.

He also makes licenses that can be used to protect rights. He prefers end-users rights above developer rights. And the developers choose the licenses.

I do see more use of Apache, MIT, BSD licenses at the moment.

We'll have to see if that was a good idea.

Big business is using open source software in a big way now and nasty things can still happen.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[soccerisgod]

I'm here, doing well enough for myself, thank you very much. Been doing this for ten years.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[vurian]

In the USA. Which is not the whole world... And it's probably not true in the whole of USA either.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[AC-x]

Maybe a "delayed" open source licence would do the trick, like any time you compile a binary you get a one-year BSD license but after that year is up you must provide the complete corresponding source code for that binary with a GPL-compatible license. That way you get a good exclusivity period for people who want the new features right now and you don't have to wait life+70/95 years for it to go out of copyright - and you still wouldn't have the source, just the binary. The hook needs a little more bait than that everyone can copy everything you do, instantly.

For games this doesn't seem necessary as you could just do what ID does with the Doom/Quake sources: The game engine is open source while the game assets are copyrighted and sold separately.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[higuita]

exactly!

FSF and Stallman will say for sure that Steam have DRM, have closed source client and games, but by using gnu/linux will open the games and wor to a new platform, improving the linux hardware and software support. SteamOS, if really open as they say, will enable people to edit and change it... and maybe replace the closed parts with time.

And remember, Stallman one said that if the game engine is free software, the game content (story and music, maps, models, etc) can be closed (specially the story, where Stallman agree that is unique and personal work), as one can replace then and write another story.

It Valve someday replaces the client with a FLOSS version and removes the DRM, the FSF and Stallman would for sure totally accept then. If the games are also FLOSS, they would even recommended it!

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[fatphil]

> At least you avoid the harm to your freedom that Windows would do.

Some people desire the freedom to be able to exchange programs and recommendations about programs with the 90% of the computer-using world.

Using linux, which I've done for 2 decades (almost to the day - woh!), harms that freedom. Fortunately, I rarely, if ever, want anything that the 90% has, or have anything that the 90% wants.

The harms to the freedom that Windows carries with it are basically freedoms that most of the 90% don't even care about. If they outlawed private ownership of ex-Soviet army tanks within the perimeters of the metropolitan area, that would be a freedom that I wouldn't care about either. Sue me. Just because it's a "freedom" doesn't mean it's actually worth something to everybody.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

The counter argument was directed at this statement:

If you're trying to teach yourself software development, or you're a kid, or you just don't have $500 or $800 or whatever the hell it costs, then Mingw is the only thing that lets you even try.

Visual Studio express is perfectly fine for the scenarios in question.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

You just proved his point -- would Paint.NET or a free version of visual studio exist if there weren't free alternatives? You didn't address anything in his point with your response.

Reminder of the gist of the parent post because you seem to have trouble with reading comprehension: 'Even if you only ever use proprietary software, you benefit tremendously from the existence of free software and its moral crusaders.'

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[unixisc]

The main reasons would be redistribution, as well as using that software to build a competing product. Design a license that precludes these 2, and most vendors would be pretty happy w/ a shared source arrangement

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[interval1066]

Android and Windows Vista/7/8 get away by not using Xorg and exclusively using proprietary drivers.

Obvious Man states the obvious. But they aren't "getting away" by simply writing code to their own specs.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Lendrick]

Wow.

In all honesty, I don't care that much. I find "GNU/Linux" kind of awkward, but I used it here since we're specifically referring to the FSF. Generally I just call it Linux.

It's amazing that adding GNU in front of Linux can invoke such frothing-at-the-mouth nerd rage.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Lendrick]

The harms to the freedom that Windows carries with it are basically freedoms that most of the 90% don't even care about.

...until they're taken away, at least. A couple of examples:

Windows has in the past been known to have activation bugs, where legitimate copies of windows will stop working because the activation failed in some way. Users don't think about this stuff when things are working, but when Windows' DRM goes haywire, suddenly the right to use your software for any purpose is a Big Deal (although they may not think about it in those precise words).

Also, earlier versions of windows were known to convert your (DRM-free) .mp3 files into DRMed .wma files, preventing you from moving them to a different machine more than once or twice. A couple upgrades and your music files are now useless. Users care about their freedoms then, too.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Mdk754]

So you're saying open-source software isn't the reason that VS has a free version, but Java is?

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Patch86]

Right; he says that.

But doesn't the fact that so very few people have managed to make it work mean that it's unworkable? What's his evidence that it works? Where are these successful entrepreneurs following "The Stallman Method"?" It's been decades; surely there should be thousands by now, right?

Very few of any tech companies manage to make any business model work- that's not just a Free Software issue.

Take operating systems. There are three big ones. There's proprietary Windows. There's proprietary-with-open-bits Mac/iOS. Then there's fully GPL Linux/Android. All three of which are backed by profit making companies. How many other companies have failed? There aren't dozens of successful proprietary OS's and a few tiny open hold outs- there's only two proprietary ones, and then a few small open ones.

Similarly, take office suites. There's Microsoft in the proprietary category. Then there's Open & Libre Office (which is backed by profit-makers like Sun/Oracle, IBM). And pretty much bugger all else. Not 100's of proprietary ones and a cheap open ripoff- just the two big players, plus an assortment of (mostly open source) others.

Put simply, making money in tech is hard...

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[squiggleslash]

The vast majority of developers, including those who work on free software, are compensated for their work using a model that's unrelated to software sales.

Yes, it sucks to be Microsoft or EA in a post-Stallmanized world, but most programmers don't work for software houses, and copies of the software they make isn't sold.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[aestrivex]

Stallman has no opposition to commercialization. You can write GPL software and sell it. You just need to include the source and allow the person you sold it to, to redistribute it. In a fantasy world where *all* software was licensed this way, there are a lot of people would happily pay for software. Because if developers don't get paid, indeed, very little software would get written. The reason that almost all open source software is not sold for a price is because of pragmatic considerations and the conventions and consumer expectations of the current business model.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Shirley Marquez]

Not entirely true. Gamers will install SteamOS or buy a Steam Machine to play games, but they may also use it for their other computing needs. And if Valve delivers an easy to install OS with good graphics performance, some people might install it even if they're not planning to use it for gaming at all. For that to work well, Valve will either need to offer a good selection of free software on Steam or include an alternative method of installing software. Reports are it's based on Debian, so unless they omit all the necessary tools you should be able to use apt-get to turn your Steam Machine into a fully capable Linux system.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[AbominousSalad]

More users with Linux boxen of any flavor, means the margin of geeky tinkerers will rise accordingly (perhaps higher than before, since gamers tend to be notoriously savvy). Add to that the urge toward fame and you have a recipe for new blood in the open source world.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[fatphil]

To be honest, I've gone past being bothered to explain by example why I don't do MS Windows; I've forgotten some of the things that I don't like. I'm not even aware of many that would cause to to hit rant-mode instantly (such as the automatic DRM-wrapping of media files - shocking) because I've not used it for so long.

You've kept my don't-know-about-MS-Windows-don't-wanna-know-about-MS-Windows kneejerk reflex nicely wound up with those examples, thank you.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[david_thornley]

I've had a pretty successful career, and have never been paid six digits (closest was a contract gig at $45/hour). Salaries seem to be lower in Minnesota than on the coasts.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news Apple will be bankrupt very shortly and Android is almost dead.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[JThundley]

You don't know what Stallman is about, do you? He doesn't care about "getting work done" or even open source, his objective is freedom and always has been. His goal wasn't to build popular software, it was always to make software that respects the user's freedom. If big companies want to build on his ideas, that's great. The second they stop respecting the user's freedom is the second they are no longer helping the community.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Bert64]

People can already redistribute binaries, and do so widely, even making modifications to the binaries to bypass copy protection schemes etc...
And there are already shared source licenses which preclude both redistribution and reuse of the code in a competing product. There were a few vendors which would give you the source under such terms, but most of today's vendors would never even consider doing this.

Re: Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

* Whoosh *

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[DuckDodgers]

It's only free because of GCC and LLVM. If those two products didn't exist, there would be no Visual Studio Express.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[DuckDodgers]

Would Visual Studio Express exist if there was no GCC and no LLVM? Of course not.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[DuckDodgers]

As I responded elsewhere - Visual Studio Express only exists because of GCC and LLVM. If there were no open source competitors to Microsoft's IDE/compiler combo, there would be no free version.

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[DuckDodgers]

You're not listening to my argument. Those products exist, and are cheap, because of the GIMP. If there was no open source alternative to Photoshop or Paintshop, the prices would be much higher.

Re: Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[GreyWolf3000]

Sadly, my impression in the average slashdotter has degenerated so much over the last decade that it didn't even occur to me that the OP wasn't being sarcastic.

Not happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry not happening. Desktop Linux != SteamOS.

At best it will force the hand of Intel, nVidia and AMD to make it so their drivers work on Linux, but everyone else, unlikely.

Nobody is going to ditch Windows for Steam OS and then only play games on it. There is already 3 expensive toys that do this. No nobody is going to buy steam OS and then use Open Office on it... unless Steam somehow starts being the "app store" as well, and cloud-saving extended to it.

Re:Not happening

[FictionPimp]

I only have windows to play games on....So if your telling me my next PC can play all the games I want and not require me to play for a operating system I'm all excited!

Re:Not happening

[i kan reed]

No, it doesn't count as a linux desktop, but it makes certain that linux will be a target platform for PC developers. It pleases me, becaues games were pretty much all that keep me on windows.

Re:Not happening

[g0bshiTe]

Why mod Troll?

AC is dead on on this one. If you have an Xbox a PS3 and a desktop (Windows) why on earth would you want to run Linux on your Desktop just so you can game?

And to the mod that scored Troll on this, he's dead on for drivers as well. What always steered me clear of ditching Windows for good was the lack of driver support for Linux, Wine always ran my games worse than on Windows.

Re:Not happening

[NickFortune]

Nobody is going to ditch Windows for Steam OS and then only play games on it

Well, the folks who only play games on Windows might. Or they might dual boot, and use Steam on Linux. And a lot of people cite the absence of Triple-A games on Linux as being the big thing stopping them from migrating.

Certainly, it isn't going to hurt anything :)

unless Steam somehow starts being the "app store" as well, and cloud-saving extended to it.

Seems to me that Steam is already an "app store". Distributing non game software through it shouldn't be a problem, really.

Re:Not happening

[crashcy]

Steam already does sell non-game software: Steam Software

Re:Not happening

[Saethan]

nobody is going to buy steam OS

Well, considering Steam OS itself will be free...

Re:Not happening

[icebike]

At best it will force the hand of Intel, nVidia and AMD to make it so their drivers work on Linux, but everyone else, unlikely.

Well Intel and AMD are much better community players than is nVidia.

With the focus of Windows slowly shifting to tablets, and web based versions of their Cash Cow Office, and with Ubuntu's minimalist desktop or KDE's robust one covering just about anyone's needs for home computing, and small business computing.

IBM and Intel seem to have a different opinion of OpenOffice and OfficeLibre than you do.

The last thing holding home users to windows is TurboTax Quickbooks.

Re:Not happening

[fast turtle]

and that's why he was marked troll. Simply put, the problem that Linux has is a lack of open source support from Nvidia and other companies in regards to drivers. If the Steambox is what finally got Nvidia off the fucking fence about opening any of their information (at least in regards to the Nouveua project) it's a win for us. Hell look at the quality of the Nouveua driver - it certainly works almost as well as the god damn binary blob crap from Nvidia while not puking each and every time you update the system.

Anthing that Valve does to get the hardware working in Linux is a win for the community as that's what'll finally get some of the hardware vendors off their asses. As to your comment about the XBOne and PS4 - they'll run Linux but Valve isn't pushing Linux other then as an OS. They're going to offer an IDE and set of API's that leverage STEAM's DRM to the max while running that on Windows, Linux and what ever other OS they feel like. The advantage to them is that if ARM takes off like it could, they'll already have invested the time/effort to ensure they're STEAM application runs on that hardware instead of being dependent on Microsoft to continue selling games. In that case, it's simply CYA (covering yon ass) in case MS goes under or what pisses off their OEM computer makes badly enough that no one sells Windows based systems anymore. Could it happen? Maybe if Balmer gets out of the fucking way. Corporations wouldn't have an issue as MS would be like Apple then - providing the entire eco-system from desktops through Servers. What IBM tried to do.

Re:Not happening

[Nos.]

Because the Troll is missing the entire point of the story.

If Intel, Nvidia and AMD start releasing they're top tier drivers for Linux, it makes Linux as a desktop more viable for more people. That's what Torvalds is saying.

Not everyone is going to go and replace their Windows desktop with a Linux right away, but when it's time to buy their next PC, and they can get one for $100 cheaper (same specs) that will play their games, run their office suite, etc. That's where Linux can take a bigger bite out of the home desktop market.

Re:Not happening

[Samantha Wright]

The driver improvements are actually what Linus is talking about if you RTFA. That's how desktop Linux will benefit.

As for why SteamOS: about a year ago (I think) Valve demonstrated that you could get superior performance on Linux because the code was open. It's a lot easier to do optimizations on a platform when you have comprehensive documentation on how it works—and where the bugs are. Valve's devs were also greatly elated to discover that they could actually fix said bugs instead of just working around them, like they had to do on Windows.

Re:Not happening

[CanHasDIY]

Why mod Troll?

AC is dead on on this one. If you have an Xbox a PS3 and a desktop (Windows) why on earth would you want to run Linux on your Desktop just so you can game?

You wouldn't.

HOWEVER, if you didn't want to have to pay almost $200 for a proprietary OS that's so locked down and filled with trash it makes the Georgia State prison system look like an all-inclusive Hawaiian resort, then the fact that gaming on Linux is finally getting some respect would be a very good thing for you.

Re:Not happening

[mythosaz]

Simply put, the problem that Linux has is a lack of open source support from Nvidia and other companies in regards to drivers

While it's true that drivers are a problem, you won't get Linux on the desktop until AAA titles are released simultaneously on Linux.

When CoD:Ghosts comes out on Windows and consoles in a month, you'll know what kept Linux off the desktop.

The OP isn't trolling, despite the moderation. Nobody likes his truth.

Re:Not happening

[Anonymous Coward]

it makes certain that linux will be a target platform for PC developers

Entirely wishful thinking from the Linux Fanboy crowd.

SteamBox has FAIL written all over it. It's too expensive for the console crowd and doesn't have the AAA game support. It's not interesting to PC gamers who obviously already have a PC. Who exactly is going to buy this thing?

When it comes down to it, not even Linux fanboys will buy a SteamBox either -- the hardware will be too expensive and limited for them.

Once the hype dies down and the lousy sales figures come in, game developers will go right back to ignoring.Linux.

Re:Not happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, maybe not. Who cares? Let it play out. If you think it's going to fail, don't bother with it. Maybe you'll be right, and you can celebrate your rightness with another post on a /. story about it. If you're wrong, I think you'll probably agree that's also a victory of sorts.

Re:Not happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply put, the problem that Linux has is a lack of open source support from Nvidia and other companies in regards to drivers.

Now you're the one who's trolling. Drivers are ONE of the problems with Linux.

As to your comment about the XBOne and PS4 - they'll run Linux but Valve isn't pushing Linux other then as an OS.

Read this carefully: PEOPLE DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT RUNNING LINUX ON GAME SYSTEMS. You do, and so do a lot of other zealots, but guess what? You're in the minority.

Re:Not happening

[t4ng*]

Not trying to flamebait here, and I admit I stopped following Linux kernel development about 10 years ago. It seemed to me, at least in the past, that a major roadblock to Linux being useful for audio, video, or real-time applications was that kernel-mode execution was non-interruptable. I remember there were some forks that made Linux more of a real-time OS, but I never heard of any of that being incorporated into any of the major distributions. When I asked a Linux apologist about this he acted like I was crazy and said, "Of course you can't interrupt the kernel, it's in kernel mode!" Funny, because Windows has been doing it since Windows NT.

Is this still the case with Linux? If it is, how can an application guarantee that audio and video won't experience hiccups? Just by throwing lots of CPUs and processor power at the problem? Better drivers would not solve this problem.

Re:Not happening

[Tarlus]

Don't forget that they have also gotten Steam running on more traditional distros (well, Ubuntu) as well. SteamOS could help them to iron out the kinks, generate greater driver availability get more game binaries made for Linux. With all of that worked out, you could start playing these games smoothly on your distro of choice.

Re:Not happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Half the people in this thread are already running the victory lap over some half-assed product announcement -- they are the ones who should "let it play out".

Re:Not happening

[Anonymous Coward]

The 100 bucks is a misnomer however, and completely not true in most cases. MS still gets money from every PC sale even if you get Linux. Everyone pretends that those deals don't exist any longer, but they do. It may not be open and in your face like before the Monopoly trials, but to get Windows licensing so cheap vendors are still making deals and MS is still making money on PCs even with no Windows OS.

Re:Not happening

[Anonymous Coward]

This is flame bait because you could have spent a few minutes investigating to see how Linux operates and how Windows had to move back toward a true protected Kernel. NT4 -> Vista constantly crashed because the Graphics (and other drivers) were direct drivers without restrictions. What made Windows 7 more stable was moving the graphics _out_ of the Kernel and making it a Kernel controlled module that loads _after_ the Kernel.

How the drivers are loaded and operate has nothing to do with "real time" OS. The term is however tossed around in various ways to make various vendors look and/or feel good.

What does that mean? The X86 based processors are ALL interrupt driven. There is no true real time OS for hardware that is interrupt based, and it took a retooling of the definition to make it work for Windows. Numerous RISC based processors and *NIX are real time processors until the processor becomes overloaded. Then, magically, it has to act in a scheduled mode because the CPU is full. Really, it's not magic. That was sarcasm.

Re:Not happening

[Grishnakh]

The console crowd doesn't get to take advantage of PC hardware the way PC games do. Have you ever seen an Xbox hooked up to two or three monitors?

This is an alternative for PC gamers who might like to dump Windows and use an OS better suited for their games, coming from a company that already makes a lot of popular games. The people who will buy this thing are people who use PCs and are fans of Valve games.

The Linux fanboys don't need to buy the SteamBox; they'll just use their existing custom PC and run Steam on that, like they're already doing. This will merely help improve support for Steam on the Linux platform by getting the gfx card makers to better support Linux.

Re:Not happening

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when buying the first Google Android Phone 1 week after launch reading that it would not work.

And look where they are now

Understand that Linux opens so many benefits to all sectors of the industry that you will be surprised.

It will be the glue that ties everything

Sony runs Linux , VMWare runs Linux , Cisco runs linux

Linux is about HARDWARE , where Microsoft is about developers

What drives development? Developers or metal ?

Quote : "I think good standards are people doing things, saying 'this is how we do it' and being successful enough to drive the market."

There are a lot of people wanting to go in here , and it's not just about PC gamers

Re:Not happening

[Grishnakh]

You might want to go read about it some more; what you're talking about is preemption. The kernel has been preemptible for years now. Here's an article about it from 2002: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5600

Re:Not happening

[t4ng*]

Yes I already knew that Windows had moved graphics drivers out of kernel mode, and the loss in graphics performance because of it. That isn't what I was getting at. Windows is always interruptable and always preemptible no matter what ring it is executing in, no matter what ring drivers execute in. Is that true of Linux or not?

Re:Not happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Android had a viable revenue model from day 1 due to carrier subsidies. It got its first major marketing push from Verizon and Sprint, not the hardware companies.

SteamBox has no viable revenue model. It's competing against subsidized, highly integrated hardware by offering a typical hacked-together pc clone with a game controller. It will be more expensive, bigger, and louder assuming competitive graphics.

It's not about the hardware, it's about selling the hardware. Valve still needs to figure that out.

Re:Not happening

[t4ng*]

Never mind. Kernel preemption was added in 2.6. Good for them.

Re:Not happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam already runs on just about every major distro. It was already working on other distros besides Ubuntu when the beta was out.

Re:Not happening

[SimplexBang]

I doubt Google ever made a profit from their hardware ,

but they paved the way for others to step in.

Valve is it's own carrier in this respect.

And it will find producers and marketing to sell something other than a hacked-together pc clone

Re:Not happening

[Paco103]

Games are the only thing keeping me from moving. And (as pointed out earlier), NetFlix, but that's less of a problem. Everything else on my linux install is fine. I have used OpenOffice and now Libre nearly exclusively since 2003 (I say nearly because work still requires Office and file formats still don't perfectly interchange, but there's nothing I need out of Office or any other windows apps that aren't available to me in Linux, with the exception of high end gaming support).

Re:Not happening

[spire3661]

Just to put it out there, i have seen 3 xbox360s hooked up playing a single game across 3 monitors. Here is another example. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RhdCsvsvA0 Im firmly PC master race all the way, but yes i have seen xboxes force multiply like PCs can, albeit in a very limited way.

Re:Not happening

[stooo]

No.
Good for us all :)

Re:Not happening

[exomondo]

Simply put, the problem that Linux has is a lack of open source support from Nvidia and other companies in regards to drivers.

Really? The problem is just that people wanted to use open source nvidia drivers instead of their closed source ones?

Re:Not happening

[t4ng*]

Yes, this article is similar to others I saw back in those days, it is talking about experimental preemptable kernels. But it did not make it into any official kernel release until 2004. Still, it's there now, so good on the kernel developers for taking care of that. Question answered, thanks guys. (Except for the comedian that modded my OP as flamebait)

Re:Not happening

[Anonymous Coward]

I get audio and video hiccups all the time in Windows.

Linux? Not so much

Re:Not happening

[Anonymous Coward]

My question about the SteamBox is what wood will they make it from?

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

That Linux runs on smartphones and tablets, as well TVs and many other appliances, does not a damn thing for its desktop adoption. Neither will Steam's little toy. What will get Linux on desktops is if software shops man the fuck up and port something like Photoshop, or any big-name video game, for that matter. Come on, Linus...if you're gonna say something amusing, then at least belittle one of your developers -- and with a racial slur this time.

-- Ethanol-fueled

Re: Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, what? Of course Linux on smartphones doesn't boost its desktop adoption, but we are talking about Linux *on desktops*.

Re: Bullshit

[xvan]

His point is people won't see the steambox as a desktop.

Re: Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, a Linux that will be installed by only people who already have another flavor of Linux installed, as somebody above pointed out.

-- Ethanol-fueled

Re:Bullshit

[atlasdropperofworlds]

I'd just be happy to see some decent development suites on the Linux side. Given that eclipse is one of the biggest, and it's still terrible in terms of stability and speed, I'm convinced that 99% (1% is the Linux kernel) that "high quality open source" is really just an oxymoron.

Re: Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

His point is pointless. Also that's an obvious troll. The key is the signature.

You people never learn.

Re:Bullshit

[vurian]

Qt and Qt Creator is more than "decent". It's excellent. Especially when compared to Visual Studio -- and yes, I use both, professionally.

Re:Bullshit

[spire3661]

What you pointed out is that Linux appliances are on the rise. A Steam Machine really shouldnt be a general purpose workstation. It CAN be, but it introduces insane amounts of complexity.

Re: Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Steambox != SteamOS

Re:Bullshit

[david_thornley]

Decent development suite? I use xterms with vim, gcc, gdb, and gprof. Hey, at least it isn't as ugly as Visual Studio 2012 or 2013.

Re:Bullshit

[atlasdropperofworlds]

I prefer the new VS aesthetic to the old one. The only issues I have with VS are that for new developers some of the configuration options are buried a bit too deeply. However, it's that much harder setting up emacs (or vim) to even approach what VS does, and still in the end the toolset is less robust. I've been waiting for gdb to stop it's random segfaulting for almost 20 years now...

Really huge

[faragon]

I hope this mean not only first class graphics API porting (e.g. OpenGL), but also production-grade computing API (e.g. OpenCL) without vendor-specific crap (try to rebuild OpenCL stuff with the AMD """""SDK""""").

Re:Really huge

[Anonymous Coward]

try to rebuild OpenCL stuff with the AMD """""SDK"""""

Martian finger quotes?

Re:Really huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Naw, it's probably slashdot's unicode processing system.

Re:Really huge

[Anonymous Coward]

try to rebuild OpenCL stuff with the AMD

Try to run it on an Intel GPU, the Linux drivers only support CPU devices and the open source OpenCL driver aborts with 90% of methods not implemented. In the end OpenCL is just as vendor locked in as CUDA and CUDA at least has better support (tools, documentation).

I don't think so

[mark-t]

I would be extremely surprised if anything but an infinitesimal minority of people who buy this are not favourably biased towards Linux already, and may similarly be already running it on a desktop anyways.

Re:I don't think so

[forkazoo]

Yeah, exactly like how Tivo buyers were all open source advocates, and Apple TV buyers are primarily interested in the fact that the kernel has posix API's. Though, there may be a small group of SteamBox buyers who buy it mainly because of playing games, and don't really care about what OS it runs.

Re:I don't think so

[mark-t]

Or... we could wait and see.

If I'm wrong, all I said was that I'd be surprised.

Re:I don't think so

[dstyle5]

Whats to buy? Its going to be free to download and install, like Steam is today. Yeah there will be SteamOS devices built by Valve or most likely other companies, but since its free alot of people will probably try it. My use case will be installing it on my older pc for a living room based gaming PC.

As for people adopting it, when the SteamOS and the hardware are released you know Valve is going to have a big carrot dangling to get people to try it out, something related to a game with a 3 in the title methinks.

Re:I don't think so

[CanHasDIY]

Yeah, exactly like how Tivo buyers were all open source advocates, and Apple TV buyers are primarily interested in the fact that the kernel has posix API's. Though, there may be a small group of SteamBox buyers who buy it mainly because of playing games, and don't really care about what OS it runs.

Don't forget those of us who like to occasionally play PC games on the big TV in the living room, but don't want to have to deal with unhooking the tower, dragging it downstairs, then hooking it all back up again.

Re:I don't think so

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you missed the point a bit. If Valve is pushing game developers to build on Linux systems and SteamOS is really just Linux, then any improvements they make to Steam/Linux will apply to anyone running a Linux desktop. Suddenly that makes Linux a valid desktop platform for gamers, thus wider adoption of Linux on desktop systems.

I personally stopped using Windows completely about 5-6 years ago and my PC Gaming life suffered for it. Lately Steam has had a Linux section which I've enjoyed as I have access to classic games I played on Windows (Half-Life and all its mods).

I've been waiting for the day a video game producer sees that Linux is a better gaming platform than Windows, lighter weight, more easily customizable, no hassles for end users (I know plenty of Ubuntu users who are computer illiterate and manage better than computer illiterate Windows users since all the maintenance you do is "Yes, update" and you're done). I'm very happy that Valve was the one to start this move in the right direction and I can't wait for the corporate world to finally figure it out... some day...

Re:I don't think so

[Anonymous Coward]

I say "I've been waiting for the day" because back in the days of Quake 3 PC Gamer did a test where they ran an emulator in Linux vs. native Windows (it MAY have been native on both) and Linux rocked considering it's disadvantages (back then graphics driver support was almost nil). It's only been a matter of time since then, IMHO.

Re:I don't think so

[SimplexBang]

"something related to a game with a 3 in the title methinks."

  Uhhm , Portal 3 ? Left for Dead 3 ? Help me out here Gordon ....

(Its Free Man !!!)

Re:I don't think so

[spire3661]

You mean like we all did with consoles when we were kids......

Re:I don't think so

[CanHasDIY]

Wouldn't know about that: when I was a kid, we had all of one TV, and didn't even have a Nintendo until the mid-90's.

Re:I don't think so

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have more than one tv, you have too many tvs. But that's a whole other argument.

Re:I don't think so

[brantondaveperson]

any improvements they make to Steam/Linux will apply to anyone running a Linux desktop

I'm not so sure that this is true. It's more likely that a steambox will contain a relatively custom hardware combination, and much of the 'improvements' will circulate around better drivers for those specific bits of silicon. The thing's got to be cheap, and chucking a PC graphics card in there won't make it cheap.

Also, the statement that Linux is a better gaming platform that Windows isn't especially supportable. Obviously, from a margins perspective, a free OS inside your gaming console is a win. But on the desktop there's no evidence that it's better in any particular way. For instance, 'more easily customizable' doesn't equal 'less hassle for end users'. It equals more hassle for end users, and therefore more hassle for gaming companies. The combinations of hardware, driver architecture, and what-have-you is a much worse state for developers than under Windows, and much much worse than under OSX. I'd be very interested to see what Steam's numbers are for their sales on Linux vs. Windows vs. OSX, and I'd expect those numbers to be pretty low.

I'd suggest that the whole reason that Valve ported their Steam platform to Linux was to move in the direction of a console. And of course, once it becomes a console, the fact that it's Linux is mostly irrelevant from a users point of view - tech-heads who want to install other bits & bobs on their machines notwithstanding.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[sinij]

Drivers isn't the main reason behind low rates of adoption. Valve's move won't do anything for getting non-SteamOS Linux flavors on desktops since there still huge "RTFM noob" problem that is in my opinion main obstacle to general adoption of Linux.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[jedidiah]

If Valve can help resolve whatever problems you think still require documentation, then that will yield a positive result for distributions that aren't SteamOS.

If there isn't any need to consult the M, then there won't be any motivation to tell people to RTFM.

Although if Microsoft was dependent on people installing Windows on their own they would have been dead a long time ago.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[icebike]

I'm guessing you haven't tried a Fresh install of any version of Linux lately.
Its no harder than windows. There is actually less tinkering required than with windows.
Especially for those distributions that have aimed their packaging at the new users.

The obstacle is that it was difficult to buy a pre-configured Linux machine. Nobody installs windows these days either. They buy it pre-installed.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone keeps talking about the "main obstacle" or some magic bullet. It's not just one thing people.

There is a market for a server which does one thing really well, but the desktop has to do everything well. It must be the entire package. Getting one more piece of the package is a step in the right direction, but at the same time that's all it is.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[Gavagai80]

Perhaps drivers have little to do with low rates of adoption, but they -- specifically graphics drivers -- are 99% of my frustrations as a linux user (it's not just when there is no driver or getting the proprietary driver installed, it's little random bugs like the whole OS freezing on maximizing a konsole window that happen to be due to graphics driver bugs). I couldn't care less whether it draws more people to desktop linux as long as it makes my life easier.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[heathen_01]

Sure I have. Installer crashed. Doesn't like my nvidia card. The windows 7 install was fine.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit on this; no major Linux distro installs nvidia drivers by default, they're always an optional extra once the OS is fully installed.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Linux beats Windows.

Order of easiest OS installs I did the last 2 years:
- Debian (about 6 times pressing [enter], and once a down button or something, takes about 20 minutes between second to last [enter] and the [enter] to reboot)
- Ubuntu (needed a few more down buttons and [enter], so, a couple of more minutes before the download+install happens)
- Windows pre-install on a Dell system (takes about 10 minutes, reboot, 15 more minutes, reboot, 10 more minutes, reboot, 20 more minutes, etc.)
- MS-DOS 4 on a modern PC using magnets
- Windows pre-install on a HP business system

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[umafuckit]

I'm guessing you haven't tried a Fresh install of any version of Linux lately. Its no harder than windows. There is actually less tinkering required than with windows. Especially for those distributions that have aimed their packaging at the new users.

Yes, the install is easy in most cases but what about the post-install experience? I like Linux and just got my SO back onto it following a Win7 fuck-up, but if I wasn't around she likely wouldn't have a system that functions as she needs it to. She's Chinese and wants Chinese input in Kubuntu. There is no obvious setting that adds pinyin as there is in, say, OS X. I had to install the ibus stuff then figure out by trial and error what the config was called as it's not part of the KDE settings (as far as I could see, but then again the KDE settings are an untuitive cluster fuck so perhaps it's there somewhere). All seemed good and I was happy to give her working pinyin after only 5 minutes of tinkering. It could well have taken her half a day to get where I did on her own. A little while later she logs out and logs back in to KDE: no Chinese input. Ah, the ibus stuff needs to be told to start on login. So I stick a one-line script in .kde/Autostart and that fixes that problem. Again, would she have figured that out quickly on her own? I really doubt it. A little while later a new problem: no Chinese input in Firefox. Huh? Oh, I see: must install ibus-gtk. No way she'd have figured that out. The next day she asked me what this "dolphin thing" is and why it keeps crashing. I don't know why it keeps crashing but I'm placed in the position of explaining why the "file manager" is called "dolphin." So it's awesome that Linux is easy to install but a new user either needs to be motivated by geekery or they need a support person for certain basic tasks.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[icebike]

Had you let her do the original install in Chinese, you would not be in this mess.
Seems YOU are the problem here.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[Anonymous Coward]

So a language change should be an overly complex procedure and it's the users fault for wanting to change language after installing?

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[icebike]

Its far from normal. Its a corner case.

Changing language in Windows is not perfectly straightforward either. There are a lot of fiddly things that need changing after the fact.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[umafuckit]

Had you let her do the original install in Chinese, you would not be in this mess. Seems YOU are the problem here.

She wants to switch input languages on the fly not have a Chinese OS.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[umafuckit]

Its far from normal. Its a corner case.

Changing language in Windows is not perfectly straightforward either. There are a lot of fiddly things that need changing after the fact.

I know what you mean--not everyone needs it--but honestly, switching keyboard input (not OS language) shouldn't be considered a corner case. Tens of millions of people need to do it. It's piss-easy in OS X and it's piss-easy in Windows (at least for pinyin, which is all I've seen). In fact, I too sometimes need it to switch between Greek and English. A while ago I wasted hours and hours trying to get this to work in XFCE (turned out it wasn't even supported on the older version I had). I know Linux is *way* better than it used to be in terms of usability for beginners, but there are still issues that need solving. Perhaps some of these are merely in the presentation, such as naming software in a sane way or better laying out the desktop config settings.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[keith_nt4]

Not that i know where heathen was coming from specifically or anything but technically he didn't mention an open/closed/any form of specific driver, just that the installer didn't like his card for some reason. Could have an X thing or some unrelated issue that just made it seem as though the card was the culprit. And for the record, regardless of real reason, installer crashing is a valid reason for abandoning an install of something imho...

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[Blaskowicz]

They do use the nouveau by default, which is pretty good for an open source driver but maybe not very usable on latest gen hardware. Funnily nvidia recommends you to use the VESA driver, then install the proprietary driver if you want something better than that. That's what they officially support. But the distro knows better, it takes all such decisions for you. That shit was probably fixable, if you know about the CLI.. and experience about configuring Xorg.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[Blaskowicz]

ROFL, then what, you learn Chinese to be able to fix the computer?

Languages issues is also a pain, where you install a modern distro in French and half the software still is in English, notably Firefox. So I have to do apt-cache search firefox, followed by apt-get install firefox-locale-fr. Then there's libreoffice, which language it was in I don't remember. Installing the translation is more complicated, which of the eight packages do I really need?
I install inkscape and scribus : one is in French and the other one in English.

On my own PC I install the whole OS in English to escape such problems (this can be better anyway as all man pages and command line error messages are in English then, stuff is easier to find or reference, no mixed languages, no bad or varying translations)

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[Blaskowicz]

I tried Xubuntu 13.10 a few days ago : it comes with Abiword and Gnumeric (to me, that's diminished software you install on a computer with 128MB RAM). The "System" entry on the start menu has two entries I think, one of them is "Gigolo". This means a male whore in my language. Is that a program I can use to order paid-for gay sex?, or do the male prostitutes accept women customers only.

I thought they would have that little "Gigolo" thing fixed by now. Imagine you install and demo this to a vital business client, to your grandma, a battered women shelter, an influent, old and very pious catholic italian family or as a solution for all of a country's school libraries. On the login screen you can click on "login", "reboot", "shutdown", "change user" etc., "get your dick sucked", "get your pussy lick", "click this to get fucked in the ass".
There's a problem LOL. Xubuntu is ruined. They risk even endangering Xfce's reputation. In fact, I'll forget about every official Ubuntu derivate from now (I tried Lubuntu 13.10, it's still ugly and still comes with games that look like they were rejected from Windows 3.1). It's a shame as I won't try Kubuntu then, which was maybe interesting - I'm too ignorant about KDE.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's what you get for not daring to try anything not ending in *buntu. *buntu is not "Linux".

There are considerably more polished and well thought out distributions out there. May I suggest giving opensuse a try? VirtualBox is free...

FWIW, I'm not chinese, but I certainly don't seem to have any issues even though I'm not using the us-en layout, and switching on the fly seems to work pretty well too. Not sure why it would be so hard to find either. System Settings -> Input Devices -> Keyboard -> Layouts -> Configure layouts -> Add. Methinks either you didn't look very hard, or something is broken with your installation. Which would be a Kubuntu problem, not a "Linux" one, btw. Ofc, there is the possibility that I could be misunderstanding something, but since this is slashdot, I'm going to pretend I'm dead sure that everything is your own fault. ;)

TL;DR: You can't condemn "Linux" or KDE after trying the possibly worst distribution out there. (Yep, the KDE bug tracker is full of bugs which can't be reproduced anywhere else.)

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[Anonymous Coward]

since there still huge "RTFM noob" problem

I've never run into that. When asking Linux questions, people tend to be very friendly.

On the other hand, when asking Windows questions, the standard response is "you're not supposed to do that". While that may be correct, it does not help me getting "that" done, and it sure doesn't convince me that Windows is user friendly. Sure, Windows may be easy as long as you stick to mspaint and calc, but that is rather useless.

Several google searches later, the answer to my question is usually that you need to use Microsofts favorite bastion of user friendliness, which can be found by clicking start, run and then typing "regedit".

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[Anonymous Coward]

It shouldn't be consiered a corner case, and nobody is saying that Linux is perfect (in this regard or otherwise). People are, however, saying that it's not that easy in Windows either, and while I would normally consider that a crappy argument, in a Windows-vs-Linux discussion, it is a valid one.

However: Being just as good (bad) as Windows, is not good enough. We should be better. And while Linux is better in a lot of cases, there are other cases that need improving.

Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops

[brantondaveperson]

Seems YOU are the problem here.

And they say Linux advocates are rude...

;-)

Morally bankrupt jerk

[Anonymous Coward]

Torvalds is ESR with half a brain. If all he cares about is driver support why doesn't he just install Cygwin on a Windows 8 tablet and be done with it.

Re:Morally bankrupt jerk

[icebike]

Half a brain?
ESR is a pontificating whack job, who's only contribution to opensource was an open mouth and a single program so horribly written it was virtually unmaintainable.

Re:Morally bankrupt jerk

[CanHasDIY]

Torvalds is ESR with half a brain. If all he cares about is driver support why doesn't he just install Cygwin on a Windows 8 tablet and be done with it.

Um... because that's not all he cares about?

hah

[BreakBad]

Gaming driving the serious train.....wooooowooooo.

Yeah, OK. Sure Linus.

[laxr5rs]

THIS will be the thing that will really help Linux on the Desktop as desktops slowly disappear. It's always something, and it so far hasn't happened.

Re:Yeah, OK. Sure Linus.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he means cloud-computing. Maybe most cloud servers (are they called cloud servers?) are going to run Linux...

Re:Yeah, OK. Sure Linus.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, desktops are disappearing slowly. In favor of phones and tablets.

The latest figures are that almost 80% of smartphones are now shipping with Android. Linux. You are a tool, sir.

Re:Yeah, OK. Sure Linus.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand basic consumer economics. There is an increase in mobile computing because it works better for several very popular use cases. That doesn't mean desktops are going to go away. Desktops have their own use cases and core gaming is one of the more significant of these. That's something that's not going to end up trending to mobile anytime soon for several reasons, including but not limited to less screen real-estate, poorer input apparatus, and significantly less computational power. If Valve can move a non-trivial amount of that market segment to GNU/Linux, that is indeed a big thing for GNU/Linux on the desktop.

Pretty log in screens

[Anonymous Coward]

Another reason Linux hasn't done well on desktop, according to Torvalds, is because developers focus on useless UX features.
"Linux is doing wonderfully well in so many different areas, but I still am somewhat disappointed about the fact that Linux desktop is this morass of in-fighting and people who do bad things," he said.

"I do hope the desktop people will try to work together, and work more on the technology than trying to make the login screen look really nice," he added.

This exactly.

I Just pulled gnome 3.8.x from Debian Sid the other day. There are a ton of regressions and removed features (nautilus no longer remembers view settings on a per folder basis). Apparently the devs (Bastien) is really proud of the 'screen curtain' though, essentially a screen you have to dismiss before you can enter your password on the lock screen.

Sigh. I remember back in the day when I could proudly show off both useful and eye-candy features of my linux desktops to mac and windows users. That is no longer the case.

Re:Pretty log in screens

[jones_supa]

Still, let's not completely forget the pretty login screens either. They especially give a nice and professional experience to new users.

For example, when you restart a Windows computer, you get this smooth transition to a screen showing "Restarting" with the spinning pearls animation. In Linux, on restart you might get the distro logo screen, which is nice, but it might not work 100% smooth: the animation might not be playing, or the screen is going black and coming back...maybe you even see some lines of console text in a framebuffer.

Not crucial things, but not impossible to get right either. Wayland will probably help too. In my perfect vision of Linux, it would be nice if these kind of purely aesthetic things would feel good from begin to end. Of course, in some terms Ubuntu is ahead of Windows 8 already, as the graphics of its colorful desktop look quite pro, instead of the harsh puke of colors in Win8.

Re:Pretty log in screens

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I steer clear of GNOME as much as I conveniently can. de Icaza might as well be a Microsoft plant, going by how awful GNOME is becoming.

Re:Pretty log in screens

[Grishnakh]

I like to bash Miguel de Icaza as much as the next guy, but he hasn't been involved with GNOME for many years now, so you can't blame the current state of GNOME on him. He left the project long before GNOME 3 was envisioned, more like back during the GNOME 1.x days or perhaps early early 2.x days IIRC.

The sad fact is, GNOME is largely under the control of Red Hat, as they employ several of the most prominent GNOME developers including Jon McCann. So if you want to blame someone for attempting to ruin desktop Linux with the abomination that is GNOME3, blame Red Hat.

Re:Pretty log in screens

[Blaskowicz]

Restarting Linux? Only a fool would do that. What about my uptime!

More likely

[Anonymous Coward]

It will expose and highlight the multitude of faults that have kept most people from using Linux on the desktop, and give a lot more people a lasting negative impression.

Not so sure about SteamOS

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not so sure SteamOS is going to be such a good thing for Linux.

Yeah, you'll get AAA games on Linux (probably), but if they start tying everything to proprietary APIs and specific environments (say, Ubuntu/Unity/Mir, or worse, some entirely proprietary stack built from the ground up on top of the kernel), that's a loss for Linux. Your freedom is gone and it's Windows all over again.

Corporations don't care about Linux and free software. We already have Google tightening its grip on the "open" Android. SteamOS will probably be more of the same: a corporation using the argument of "Open-Source" to lock users into their closed-source solution.

Re:Not so sure about SteamOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Even after steam OS rolls out, you won't be obligated to use it to play on Linux, the Linux Steam client will still exist and it was shown to be able to install on various distro, not just Ubuntu.

Re:Not so sure about SteamOS

[Anonymous Coward]

SteamOS is a good thing for Valve, primarily.

It's a good thing for Linux, because maybe more people will write apps for Linux, outside of the steam walled garden. It will expose more people to Linux then before. This is a long term thing.

It's not necessarily a good thing for Open Source.

Re:Not so sure about SteamOS

[intermodal]

With SteamOS, there's no reason to marry these things to Ubuntu. And the great thing about open source is, if you want to run these proprietary things on Gentoo or Fedora or Arch, well, where there's a will, there's a way.

Re:Not so sure about SteamOS

[Anonymous Coward]

One difference is that Android is pretty much its own operating system, the only commonality being that it uses the same kernel, Linux. SteamOS is built on the entire GNU/Linux operating system.

Re:Not so sure about SteamOS

[mbkennel]

| It's a good thing for Linux, because maybe more people will write apps for Linux, outside of the steam walled garden. It will expose more people to Linux then before. This is a long term thing.

How well did that work with Android? How much carryover from Android to generic Linux?

Re:Not so sure about SteamOS

[Anonymous Coward]

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~unity-team/unity8/trunk/view/head:/main.cpp
Unity is GPL

MIR is similarly GPL
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mir-team/mir/trusty/view/head:/COPYING.GPL

I believe that Ubuntu itself is also GPL licenced (at least thats what I have to click when I install it).

What do you mean by "proprietary APIs ... (say, Ubuntu/Unity/Mir)" ? none of those projects are at all proprietary.

Re:Not so sure about SteamOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Most games either have crippling bugs or don't run at all on other distributions. It's shocking that having the correct dependencies actually matters...

Re:Not so sure about SteamOS

[intermodal]

Be that as it may, it wouldn't be hard to build a way for other OS styles to install those dependencies. Hell, people have been doing it with WINE for years.

Re:Not so sure about SteamOS

[bingoUV]

It's a help for sure. Previously, most phones needed a Windows client to be able to sync, copy data, manage, upgrade firmware etc. Possibly because Android is close to linux, it has become possible to completely manage most Android phones from a GNU/Linux desktop/laptop machine. Even rooting works using a linux computer for most phones.

And the debian / ubuntu chroot on Android rocks!

Reading Comprehension Failure?

[fast turtle]

Linus specifically stated (RTFS idiots) that this may have been what pushed Nvidia to finally begin supporting the Nouveua project (open source) and that helps Linux on the Desktop as we gain more traction for stable drivers - be them video, audio or networking.

ditch windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

especially if game developers start to ditch Windows

not. gonna. happen. sorry linus.

Re:ditch windows?

[ZackSchil]

Why not? Increasingly games are using standard APIs and getting multi-platform releases. They're not tied to an OS anymore. A Windows license is a huge, unnecessary expense for PC gamers. Gamers worship hardware and entertainment software, not operating systems. They're going to go with whatever has support for the hardware they have and the games they want to play. With Valve pushing Linux and GPU makers joining them, all the pieces are in place to dethrone Windows or at the very least drum up some competition.

Re:ditch windows?

[atlasdropperofworlds]

One part of it is the gamers, but the other part of it is tools. The tools on windows are better. The only safety you have in the FOSS tools world is a potential to solve a tool bug yourself, which is not something people do on a practical level - it's hard to justify the time and cost to do so to an employer. This is actually a non-trivial hurdle: Why would companies build AAA titles for a platform with minimal adoption, all the while using a hodge-podge of tools with massive variation in quality to build it? Game devs are on windows because they generally don't have to fight the toolset to get things done. It's bad when you can say Emacs or Vim (with all the necessary plugins) is about the best "IDE" you can get on Linux. Anyone who thinks Eclipse is fantastic, I don't want to hear it - I've just had my workspace file corrupted - again - because Eclipse had an "error" while I modified some project settings. Fucking pile of garbage.

Re:ditch windows?

[DuckDodgers]

As much as I want to see this happen, I still can't imagine it. Even with Valve throwing it's weight behind Linux, it's the same chicken-and-egg problem that stopped Linux desktop from taking over the world for the last fifteen years:
1. Every time a person is looking to buy a Steam OS box, he's going to ask himself whether there's a game he really wants on the horizon that is currently Windows-only. The answer is always yes, so he won't buy.
2. Every time a company looks to port a game to Steam OS, they're going to check the market penetration of Steam OS to see if the port is worth the engineering effort. The answer is sometimes yes, but sometimes no - and that's all it takes to keep a handful of games most buyers want off the Steam OS list.

End of story. I think the real "Linux on the Desktop" will be Android on x86_64. Touch screen laptops and monitors are becoming more common and cheaper, and in turn Android is getting more and more desktop user interface features and an ever-growing selection of applications. I think if Linux will ever own a significant portion of the desktop, that will be the route - not through the gamers, but through casual users. My kids already know how to use Android better than they know how to use Windows 7. If, five years from now, I give them a choice between a Windows laptop or the ASUS Transformer Prime or Android equivalent of the day, I think they'd opt for Android.

Re:ditch windows?

[Nikker]

What this will do is encourage people to make their own HTPC. With Steam's new game pad and hopefully AAA game titles throwing something like XBMC along side it would make a pretty decent living room PC for a lot less than paying the Windows license. The drivers could be added to desktop distributions making those who already use Linux on the desktop happier and those sitting on the fence more likely to make the jump. Game developers already don't care about Windows but the PC game market is profitable and if Valve makes porting from console to SteamOS simple (which shouldn't be that bad since next gen consoles are x86 based) then more titles will show up on SteamOS before Windows. It's basically a role your own console. You can cheap out and put together an AMD APU setup with a couple GB RAM for a bit over $100 and play most games a mid to low res. When you consider that Xbox360 maxes out at 1080i/720p you could easily get that on AMDs next chips. Or you can just carry over all your Steam library and buy a card like the Radeon 7850 going for
TL;DR It will be better than you think.

Re:ditch windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Game devs are on windows because they generally don't have to fight the toolset to get things done.

Have you ever tried to write software for Windows?

Visual Studio works great so long as you only use the native Windows APIs. Start trying to add third-party libraries like Boost, ICU or anything and it immediately becomes ridiculous. Projects that won't build on a different computer due to hard-coded paths, not including paths in the project files and all other sorts of wonderful "did anyone actually think about how you are supposed to organize third-party dependencies?" design-fail BS.

Developing on Linux is really easy by comparison, you just run "<package-manager> something" then do "cmake && make" or whatever. Microsoft has never managed to produce a decent toolkit despite 15 years to do so. All they would need to do is have a C:\Program Files\SDKs folder and a registry key that stores a list of the kits with associated information then in VS you would right click the project and "Add External Dependency" and tick the installed kits you wanted to use. Take the project to a different PC and be instantly informed about what kits you need to install to build and have it all Just Work with auto-configured include paths and such... but no, that would be too sensible when you can just Windows Installer stuff all over the file system with inconsistent registration and manual VS include/lib directory configuration.

Re:ditch windows?

[higuita]

hey, Rome2 Total War will show up in SteamOS... so i'm happy.
For others, is battlefield4 (that they said they want to port it)
Some like Football manager... it's already released
there are already some very good games in linux, with even more to come, but what you are not seeing is another thing:

Some engines are already ported, others are being ported (like cryengine ), opening other games to be able to run in linux just by pressing a checkbox.
Several game companies are looking at the tools used internally and are migrating to a more compatible solution, to help any possible migration.
Developers have now a more open mind when building a game, they don't want to be the one that is blocking any possible port.

this is the biggest change steam made, they manage to put linux in the radar for many key persons, specially after many game companies lost the android race by not even acknowledge it soon enough or important enough.

Re:ditch windows?

[DuckDodgers]

But what if your killer game is Starcraft 2? Or Halo? Bioshock? League of Legends?

You can get them to work on Linux, but it's not supported and if you're not already an IT geek (which is 98% of the population) it's not a possibility you'll seriously consider. So that giant portion of the population has an incentive not to buy a SteamBox... which means Blizzard, Microsoft, etc... have fewer incentives to port the games to Steam OS... the same momentum that put us where we are today continues indefinitely.

Re: Old African word meaning can't configure Debia

[Anonymous Coward]

steam works pefect in GNOME shell in archlinux. unity is not a requeriment.

Year of Linux on the Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this will help lower the integer $n$ in the sentence: "$n$ will be the year of Linux on the desktop"

Captcha:tracked

It had to be said...

[nani popoki]

If Linux is gathering Steam then it can't just be vaporware.

Re:It had to be said...

[Anonymous Coward]

If Linux is gathering Steam then it can't just be vaporware.

That's just hot air! Linux won't rise to the top! Now I'm boiling mad! Don't you understand slashdot is a melting pot!?

Re:It had to be said...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would not be so sure, the major version number of the Linux kernel is 3 and we all know that Valve has a rather annoying problem with that number.

Re: Old African word meaning can't configure Debia

[Anonymous Coward]

http://nooooooooooooooo.com/

O Sherlock, where art thou?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus: I like to say obvious fucking things!

I want to know what benefit it offers

[Anonymous Coward]

For someone who doesn't struggle with or strongly dislike Windows, I have a hard time seeing what would make SteamOS and Linux attractive.

Valve already includes Big Picture mode with the Steam desktop client and by sticking with Windows, I have access to all of the PC games library, which is much larger than just the Steam catalog.

one little issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam O.S. is really a thin client for windows and steam... that's why you can stream from windows P.C's

Taking Linux seriously

[sl4shd0rk]

Taking the platform "seriously" really hasn't anything to do with it. The game industry has always been a chicken-or-the-egg problem with Linux: Games spur adoption, but adoption is abysmal without the games. I'm not quite sure how Steam figures they will work around this inherent problem.

Re:Taking Linux seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

Investment??

After all, Valve / Steam knows where Microsoft-partners inevitably ends up.

Captcha: maiden

Re:Taking Linux seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

Producing a game for the Windows platform is far and away from being a Microsoft partner. But hey, never mind the strawman. I'm surprised that you're not modded +5 right now like the rest of the anti-MS/pro Linux comments on here even if they have no real meat to them.
 
Slashdot is a cheerleaders game. A simple bash (with no facutal backing) is all anyone needs to get modded Informative. Just another den of fanboys.

Re:Taking Linux seriously

[gman003]

Slowly.

Valve plays an incredibly long game compared to most tech companies (hell, most companies, period). They started Steam because they could see where constantly-increasing bandwidth was leading. They missed on some of the particulars, but by getting the main point correct early on, they were able to gather the momentum to overcome minor obstacles before anyone else could seize initiative. So not only did they avoid being tied down to another company's proprietary platform, but they managed to become the de facto digital distribution system while still being a relatively minor player.

SteamOS is a defensive move. They're concerned that Microsoft may lose its Windows dominance, or might try to move it to an Apple-like locked store (they sort of have, with RT). So they ported Steam and their own games to both OS X and Linux.

That was enough to spur an initial kick of OS X games following after them. It's not nearly universal now, but it's respectable, and growing.

Linux didn't get the same kick, mainly because they don't have as much market share. So Valve is giving it more support, and perhaps more importantly, lending it a more prestigious (among gamers) brand name.

Will it be a success? Perhaps. At the very least, it's enough a threat to Microsoft that they're not going to try to take over the digital distribution market, because if they do, Valve will just drop Steam on Windows and enough publishers will follow them to wherever they lead that Microsoft will ultimately have lost. So in one sense, it's a deterrent. But it could become a legitimate gaming platform in its own right, particularly if they get enough console-like games for Steam Machines to go up against the PS4/Xb1 in the coming generation.

Re:Taking Linux seriously

[Belial6]

They plan on breaking this by taking the risk out of user adoption. In the past, if you wanted to buy a game, you bought the Windows version. If there was a Linux version, you would buy the Windows version anyway because even if you were running Linux that day, you didn't know when you would need to move back to Windows for a specific app. With Steam's model, you buy the game. Not the game on platform x. So, if you already bought a bunch of games that have Linux versions, you are going to be able to play them on the SteamBox day one. If you get a SteamBox, and it fails, you can play all the Linux games you bought on you Windows PC. In fact, you can play Linux games on your TV via Linux, on your laptop via Linux, and on your desktop via Windows. All with a single purchase.

Valve is taking the risk out of buying Linux games.

Re:Taking Linux seriously

[umafuckit]

The game industry has always been a chicken-or-the-egg problem with Linux: Games spur adoption, but adoption is abysmal without the games. I'm not quite sure how Steam figures they will work around this inherent problem.

By making a console, of course. They're not pitching this to developers as "let's bring AAA games to Linux". They're pitching it as "we're bringing our viable and proven content delivery system to the living room and lowering the cost of entry by ditching Windows. Oh, and we're minimising the financial risk by spreading it out: giving away the open-source OS to hardware manufacturers and letting them take care of the dirty details." Sounds more tempting that way, doesn't it?

Re:Taking Linux seriously

[Razalhague]

Valve controls a big part of PC game sales through Steam. They can use that by providing incentives (like taking a slightly smaller cut of the sales) to devs who support linux. Maybe different levels of incentives for those who support linux, those who treat linux equally with windows (same release dates, features, patch dates), those who favour linux, and maybe eventually for linux-exclusives.

Valve is a pretty patient corporation. They're not expecting linux to dethrone windows overnight.

Sandbagging....

[Anonymous Coward]

I really thought back in 2006 that Windows was doomed simply because at the time people were playing with something I can only imagine was squashed for political reasons.

Back when Para-virts and Xen was all the rage, Nvidia had produced a modified driver that would allow a virtual guest to *directly* use the video card. This basically meant full 3D acceleration *inside* a para-virt VM.

So you could have a linux box run windows inside a VM as a guest, and play all your favorite games. This special driver was discussed but never released. Then suddenly it just vanished. Never heard about any further efforts.

Considering this very feature would have snagged me away from Windows as my workstation, I can only imagine it was squashed to fulfill an agenda. I mean come on, start windows in a window just to play games without losing all the performance.

Re:Sandbagging....

[Blaskowicz]

You can do it, it's called VGA passthrough using an IOMMU, need two graphics cards, the right CPU (any AMD, any Intel where it isn't disabled on purpose by Intel) and the right motherboard (compatible chipset, mobo vendor serious about supporting their BIOS like Asrock and Gigabyte)

You have to use a bare metal hypervisor too (Xen or VMWare ESXi), and at worst you'll fail to have the other graphics card in the linux VM (which would require you to use second display or KVM or a monitor's second input, anyway) so you can be forced, or choose to have the Windows desktop as your primary/only desktop and accessing your linux VM by ssh-ing into it (or VNC, xrdp, whatever). That sucks a bit but on the plus side you can reboot your Windows while leaving your linux alone.

Netflix

[Anonymous Coward]

I 100% agree that drivers are a big problem for Linux. However, Just yesterday I followed some simple directions and now have NETFLIX working on Mint 15. Look at this Youtube video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfte5su5DIA

Re:Netflix

[Anonymous Coward]

Your opinion has been noted and published on the website.

Re: Netflix

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, great, but.... you have run silverlight based app via Wine, so it is kind of wierdly possible.. SteamOS can bring native Linux Netflix, at least there's hope.

Re: Netflix

[iroll]

I spent a few hours trying to get that to work on Debian, and I couldn't. I'm a rank amateur, but usually I can get stuff working, given enough time and Google. Part of the problem was that I wasn't starting from scratch; I tried using the Netflix app that some guy rolled together with WineSkin, targetting Ubuntu. Still...

And his point stands: if they can get Netflix working on Android, there's really no good reason they couldn't put something together for Linux in general.

Re: Netflix

[Anonymous Coward]

There is netflix for linux.....it just matters who is willing to pay the licensing fee.... the WDTV Live+ is a linux device and supports netflix...western digital was willing to pay the licensing fee....your major distros however probably arent willing to bear that cost.....

Re: Netflix

[Anonymous Coward]

Android has a DRM (digital restriction management) subsystem. The linux standard based does not.

Wishful Thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Weren't we saying the same thing about Linux on the PS3? Sorry, but this is not the magic bullet.

Re: Old African word meaning can't configure Debia

[neuro88]

steam works pefect in GNOME shell in archlinux. unity is not a requeriment.

To add to this, I don't think SteamOS will use unity period. I suspect they'll use a custom window manager or perhaps full screen mode for steam os will be the window manager. I personally run steam in KDE without issues.

Hope

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to play games. I do not want to use windows. Make it happen people.

Willian Wallace: FREEDOM!

Re:Ditch Windows? LOL!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at all the Linux users who say the only reason they have Windows is for gaming. How much of the gamer market would ditch Windows in the blink of an eye if they could play the same games on Linux?

captcha: rebate

Yahooo DRM!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh but it's the good kind of DRM, who needs to own software when they can rent it from Valve! Thanks Linus!

Re:Ditch Windows? LOL!!!

[Zimluura]

M$, with every iteration of xbox, has been subconsciously trying to diminish the viability of windows as a gaming platform, this is mostly due to the 10 dollar royalty they get for each xbox game, compared to no royalty for each windows game. Games are the last reason for many technically minded people to retain a windows machine. Dev's won't take linux over windows yet, but in three months...if it's easy to port from ps4 to linux...then gamedevs may start to view windows as "not a worthwhile endeavor". Though allot of how that will turn out depends on the ps4 vs xbone face-off that's going to happen soon.

Re:Ditch Windows? LOL!!!

[geminidomino]

Look at all the Linux users...

As a Linux user, I have to say, you're seriously overestimating the market there.

How much of the gamer market would ditch Windows in the blink of an eye if they could play the same games on Linux

Even if every member of the intersection of "Gamer" and "Linux user" switched, devs would have to be shirt-soaking drooling stupid to "ditch Windows" for that tiny slice of the pie.

Re:Ditch Windows? LOL!!!

[neminem]

Not very many, because Linux really doesn't have a single good desktop distro. Linux is great for servers, but it sucks balls compared to Win7. Then again, Win8 sucks balls compared to Win7, too... if MS keeps crapping up their UI, maybe eventually people will start using Linux more, cause why not, if you GUI is gonna suck either way, it might as well be free.

Depends on SteamOS being general purpose

[umafuckit]

I reckon the degree to which SteamOS "converts" Windows people to Linux will depend on whether SteamOS allows for general-purpose computing. Take the scenario that boxes running SteamOS are just games consoles. People will be able to use them for games but not much else, in which case they'll still keep their Windows PC or partition for writing letters to the bank, or what have you. In this scenario, Linux would benefit from driver improvements but won't see much increase in user base. On the other hand, if SteamOS allows you quit Big Picture and enter a fully functional and feature-complete desktop then people may start to switch from Windows. Why boot into Windows if you can write your bank letter on Steam OS whilst taking a break from HL3? With an increased user base and a ready to go "app store" in the form of Steam, we might see more productivity software (e.g. Photoshop) appear for Linux. If Steam allows people to make money writing Linux software then that's got to be a positive thing. I know the die-hard free software guys shudder at the thought, but let's face it: the reason Linux is struggling on the desktop is because few developers think they can make money on the platform.

Re:Depends on SteamOS being general purpose

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'd rather drop dead than try to run LibreOffice on my Steambox while it is connected to my 70" Toshiba TV.

Re:Depends on SteamOS being general purpose

[umafuckit]

That's obviously not what I meant. A lot of games are going to be keyboard and mouse and a lot of people will be running it on a monitor, since screen resolution on "HD" TVs isn't as HD as a monitor. For those people, dropping back into a regular OS and typing away will be a very viable option. It's even an option on a TV for some tasks. e.g. Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, etc, bittorrent, whatever you want, without worrying about whether there's an app for it and if it'll be any good.

Re:Depends on SteamOS being general purpose

[Arker]

In your first scenario, I am not even sure we would benefit in the driverspace. Good drivers in the tree would be wonderful, but in that case why not simply work on their client, why do they need a branded 'OS?'

If they are going to be shipping a TiVO with blobs I will not call that any sort of benefit.

"I know the die-hard free software guys shudder at the thought, but let's face it: the reason Linux is struggling on the desktop is because few developers think they can make money on the platform."

Free Software and making money have no intrinsic disagreement. To the contrary, the ability to use the code commercially is one of the pillars of the Free Software definition.

But you are right, there is a market disfunction specifically in the computers and internet field. The bulk of the customers dont have the vaguest trace of a clue what they are doing. They are thus exceptionally vulnerable to marketing, and we really have a crazy market on all kinds of levels, OS choices almost being the least of it.

Marketing displaces then supercedes engineering, in the natural cycle of things. Not sure how to fix that. Presumably once us old fogies die off a higher percentage of the oncoming generation will figure this stuff out, if only out of self-preservation, and the companies will eventually be forced to shape up or die in response (though that presumes they face competition of course.)

Re:Depends on SteamOS being general purpose

[umafuckit]

In your first scenario, I am not even sure we would benefit in the driverspace. Good drivers in the tree would be wonderful, but in that case why not simply work on their client, why do they need a branded 'OS?'

Because they need to package it in order to market it to the masses. It's got to look slick, integrated, and cool. Sure, under the hood it's basically just going to be a specialised Linux distro with everything set up for gaming, but what's the other option? Give their users Ubuntu with Steam pre-installed? That sounds rather half-baked. Regardless of the packaging, if it's Linux under the hood and then it'll be needing Linux drivers. Hasn't NVIDIA already responded positively?

Re:Depends on SteamOS being general purpose

[Arker]

"Because they need to package it in order to market it to the masses."

The marketing problem I mentioned already.

"Sure, under the hood it's basically just going to be a specialised Linux distro"

And the danger, if they are going to that length already, it will make perfect sense for them to try to engineer some lock-in in the process.

" but what's the other option? Give their users Ubuntu with Steam pre-installed? That sounds rather half-baked."

Why not just release the app so that people that want it can install it on the system they are already using? And Ubuntu? See that's another problem here, if they choose a base system it will probably be something atrocious like Ubuntu - why would they wish such pain on their customers?

"Hasn't NVIDIA already responded positively? "

Nvidia has a long history and a few mumbled words from them about change are not going to impress. When nouveau supports all the features on their cards properly then there will have been progress.

Re:Depends on SteamOS being general purpose

[umafuckit]

Why not just release the app so that people that want it can install it on the system they are already using?

You mean like this? https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux#Native_Steam_on_Linux If they're doing that, then it seems unlikely that they're planning to implement some unspecified "lock-in." Why would they? The software is already protected via Steam, and that's what matters to publishers.

Re:Ditch Windows? LOL!!!

[Belial6]

They are not ditching Windows. They are making Linux a viable option. This is the first step on making Linux an equivalent platform. This is the next step on making Linux the preferred platform. THEN they can consider ditching Windows. Valve believes that Windows is currently the leading PC gaming platform. They also don't think it is a viable long term platform. Given those to assumptions, you neither ditch Windows today, nor do you just wait for your platform to collapse. You do just what Valve is doing, and build an alternative platform that is ready to take over when Windows fails. The best part for Valve is that if Windows stays as the dominant platform, they lose very little.

bill gates was wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

i remember an interview with him where he was asked about why unix-likes didn't gain more traction in the OS space and gates wondered about that as well. and he concluded that now it was too late.

but OSX proved him wrong once.

and now, it seems like valve may bring linux kicking and screaming into the mainstream as well.

so cool.

Re:bill gates was wrong

[mlw4428]

OSX doesn't really have that much market share. It's lost market share in the mobile space and I suspect that average consumers won't keep buying over-priced junk (brushed aluminium and proprietary connectors people don't use are not features).

Agreed.

[Burz]

And I'll go as far as to say Linus is a "Desktop Idiot". Like the kernel devs at any Microsoft or Apple, he hasn't a clue what it really takes to make a decent desktop platform. The rest of the folks at the Linux Foundation seem to struggle with the question in a manner that is both half-hearted and hamfisted.

The first rule for them should be not to shove piles of 'packages' bereft of vertical integration (and unifying design) at consumers... Do not throw the products of server-room culture at them and expect that to be more than good enough. Second, do not automatically defer to "upstream" when something needs to be fixed... take responsibility. Third, don't wait 8 years to offer a coherent SDK to app developers (yes... we know it took 8 years because it never occurred to LF for a long time, but from that we can conclude they're out of their depth). Fourth, do not expect a putsch to coat the above 'mis-givings' with candy-inspired graphics to solve the underlying problems.

Finally (because this is as far as I'll go right now), don't look to DRM schemes as a way to advance Linux within personal computing.

What to do:

* Feature-stability for both app developers (APIs) and consumers (GUI); Holistic design vertically integrating both, because your #1 job is to bring software authors and users together on the same predictable platform.
* Make consumers feel like the GUI provides ultimate control over their hardware, even if that's not what they want to do most of the time.
* Enable consumers to get software directly from whomever they want.
* Run a hardware certification program with a logo that vendors can license.

Re:Agreed.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'll go as far as to say Linus is a "Desktop Idiot".

You confuse "Linux for the Desktop" and "Desktops for Morons". A predictable result of your condition.

Harsh? Only if you believe it's not moronic to target "Desktop" as the sole purpose of Linux.

Re:Agreed.

[Burz]

You confuse "Linux for the Desktop" and "Desktops for Morons". A predictable result of your condition.

Harsh? Only if you believe it's not moronic to target "Desktop" as the sole purpose of Linux.

What a stupid response. Its a logical fallacy to suggest that I meant 'Linux' must be devoted solely to the Desktop.

Google had the right idea: Make necessary changes to the software stack, drilling all the way down into the kernel to make necessary changes. Then if the kernel folks refuse to see the value of the changes, threaten to fork the codebase. It worked for Android, and the sysadmins and tinkerers were no worse off.

But it *did* take a threat to get there.

but it will

[dutchwhizzman]

When people have a nice steambox already there and running, they will want to run other apps on it too. Check facebook, read webmail, play youtube, soundcloud, stuff like that. That's a web browser that will most certainly be running a lot on those steamboxes. Next thing you know it, they'll be running XBMC for media too. Once they have all that, why have a PC for only office stuff, if you can run it on the steambox? Even if you have a PC for desktop use, you already know how to use linux, it's cheaper (free) than Windows and practically all your apps run on it anyway.

This is how home users will learn about linux on the desktop and use it without much thinking about it. Once it's commonplace in the home, BYOD and other business uses will follow. They will do that anyway, since only supporting windows won't ever work with the plethora of web clients and mobile devices people use these days, regardless of the client will be Linux on the desktop.

Linux

[Smiddi]

Almost every gamer I know couldnt care less what o/s they are using as long as their games and "game related" programs run properly (Teamspeak, etc). They use Windows cause there is no other viable option now. With SteamOS all this would change. They would most likely prefer to run Linux and spend the money saved on more games. Bring it on!!

This could bring the age of bootable game distros

[Anonymous Coward]

IF SteamOS starts to take off, we could see the rise of games that fit onto USB sticks.

Concerned of dual booting? Don't want to partition? No problem: burn this ISO, reboot and go play! Yeah, the portion of users where this might work is likely small, but it's there and has the ability to garner mindshare and people.

ESR ??

[stooo]

ESR ??

Ethylène Sous Réserve ?
Essen Schmitt's Ration ?
Electrically Stupid Replication ?
Enhanced Syrian Relics ?

Re:ESR ??

[Anonymous Coward]

UID>2,000,000??

Re:Ditch Windows? LOL!!!

[Blaskowicz]

Not a single good desktop distro.. Yeah I agree. I still long for a damn start menu where it's easy to create shortcuts, folders and move stuff around like we could in frigging Windows 98 and XP. And have it be *fast*. And have a special, sluggish menu editing interface as an option, not an obligation. And really, creating shortcuts was easier in Windows 95. Why can't I just right-click or drag any binary, folder, script whatever to add it to the start menu, no instead I first have to go in one of three special interfaces where I can create a "launcher", then create it, with no hope of being able to sensibly browse the available icons unless I was lucky to use the right piece of software.

Re: Old African word meaning can't configure Debia

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam does its own window management. It works just as well on Fvwm, as long as you tell Fvwm to not try putting window borders on the Steam windows.

(And Steam may try to tell Fvwm to not do that already, but I have Fvwm set up to ignore such requests, unless explicitly told differently by me. I'm the one giving the orders, not some random program).

Nouveau

[phorm]

Yeah, I've had plenty of issues with the "nouveau" driver not playing nice with various nVidia cards. Using the binary driver works fine, but when you're booting a liveCD and/or doing an install, you may be stuck with the sometimes-flakey nouveau driver.

The problem is that your LiveCD is also trying to both be a usable environment (with all the acceleration etc) as well as an installation environment accessible via the desktop icon.

To be noob-friendly, a better way might be to have the "installation mode" accessible via the boot menu, and have it go directly to the installer in a basic X with something like just VESA video, as most non-power-users aren't going to know to add "nouveau.modeset=0" into the boot params.

Screw linux on the desktop

[LostMyBeaver]

Honestly, linux on set tops and stuff is great. But Linux on the desktop is a pipedream I stopped believing long ago. If I need Linux on the desktop, I have an SSH client.

As for games on PC, that's worthwhile. I like games and I want more games on the PC and would love it if Nintendo would give up on hardware and go the Sega way. I haven't found any Playstation games worthy of investing in a BIG BULKY PLAYSTATION for. I mean that beast is a burden to the eyes. Who honestly needs better graphics when it comes at a visual cost like that?

XBox is ok, I have one and even bought a game for it.

I have a Steam account. I have about 100 games I bought through steam. I have all my apps on Windows and have SSH into my Linux box. I don't see the point of games on Linux... but ok. I guess someone wants them.

Now making a game console which runs Linux is nifty. Hope it works out... but I don't see this as a Linux box, I see this as just another console. Who cares what the OS is? The games on it are what matters.

You want Linux on the desktop? Get a Chrome OS device. Done. Lots of games, lots of support.

Do you really need another Linux desktop? Why not get one to work first?

Not Windows.

[DrYak]

Watch again Gabe Newell's presentations about Steam on Linux.
The whole point of Steam of Linux is to avoid the loss of freedom that Windows is taking a path.

They don't want to move to a proprietary stack, and thus replace Microsoft with Canonical (if they depend on Ubuntu's specific quirks) or with Nvidia (if they depend on a precise graphical stack thighly controlled by them). They need a not tighly controlled platform on which to develop.

That means at least several independent companies collaborating, which means an open standard, which in the FLOSS means we'll always end up with at least 2 different implementation of said standard.

There is really no reason to still use Windows...

[apexwm]

There is no reason users should stick with Windows, other than exactly what the article states... hardware support and software support. GNU/Linux is an excellent and extremely stable platform (the Linux kernel runs most datacenters -- VMware, KVM, etc... all run on the Linux kernel ... and if it's good enough there you can bet it's good enough to run a gaming PC with ease). I have used GNU/Linux on all of my desktops, and Wine has picked up some of the slack for software where vendors refuse to write native GNU/Linux versions. But, migrating software to run on GNU/Linux natively is a huge win. Let's hope this stays on course.

Is it true?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is 2014 the year of linux on the desktop?