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Steam On Linux Now Has Over a Thousand Games Available
An anonymous reader writes: This week the Steam Linux client has crossed the threshold of having more than 1,000 native Linux games available while Steam in total has just under 5,000 games. This news comes while the reported Steam Linux market-share is just about 1.0%, but Valve continues brewing big plans for Linux gaming. Is 2015 the year of the Linux gaming system?
...the bug that prevents me from having accelerated graphics in Linux, I'd be among that 1%. Until then? Reboot... reboot.... reboot... reboot...
"Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." -- Primer
GOG.com will get there with almost 1000 games and also a lot of games for the Linux platform! ;-)
It started with Civilization 5 last summer. It got me to install Steam. I ended up buying about eight games since. I'd probably buy a lot more games, if more of them supported Linux. We have money too, ya know.
I'm not going to argue that every one of those games is fantastic, there is certainly a lot of questionable quality in there, but the problem isn't nearly so bad as you make it out to be.
Steam lists 1001 games that run on Linux and have enough user ratings to give it a score, and 791 of them have good user ratings (defined by 70% or more of user reviews being positive for the title). 168 have mixed reviews (40%-70%). 42 have bad reviews (0%-40%.
I recently got it working on Gentoo with the usual fiddling around. A portage overlay makes this pretty painless and there is a decent guide. http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/St... It's just a matter of building appropriate compatibility libs somewhat akin to supporting 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system. I was impressed enough that I did a little re-partitioning to allocate a couple hundred gig sandbox for Steam to live in. Some of those games are big!
What's cool is that, for me, linux steam came with the batteries included. I have a fair smattering of games for it that I've already accumulated just as a side-affect of their being cross platform titles.
Clickety Click
You know after posting this I went to steam to check top sellers, in the front page ALL of them support linux. There is even one that supports linux but does not support mac (Dying Light)! The situation improved far faster than I expected...
Most AAA tittles still don't support linux, I originally thought that the AAA would support linux before the more indie tittles would, supporting multiple platforms require a lot more QA and I thought the AAA would be the only ones with enough money and time to do it.
Trolling? There's no harm in running a mixed-mode system. It makes your kernel slightly larger and means 32-bit shared libraries will be loaded when and only when you're actually using 32-bit programs. You still get the speedup for software compiled in long mode. Given that the CPU designers baked the support logic into your CPU anyway, there's really no downside ot using that support when it makes sense.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.