Slashdot Mirror
Valve Seems To Be Working On Tools To Get Windows Games Running On Linux (arstechnica.com)
"Valve appears to be working on a set of 'compatibility tools,' called Steam Play, that would allow at least some Windows-based titles to run on Linux-based SteamOS systems," writes Kyle Orland from Ars Technica. From the report: Yesterday, Reddit users noticed that Steam's GUI files (as captured by SteamDB's Steam Tracker) include a hidden section with unused text related to the unannounced Steam Play system. According to that text, "Steam Play will automatically install compatibility tools that allow you to play games from your library that were built for other operating systems." Other unused text in the that GUI file suggests Steam Play will offer official compatibility with "supported tiles" while also letting users test compatibility for "games in your library that have not been verified with a supported compatibility tool." That latter use comes with a warning that "this may not work as expected, and can cause issues with your games, including crashes and breaking save games."
...2018 is the Year of Linux on Desktop!
Compatibility Mode? It's called OpenGL or Vulkan. Tell Microsoft to ditch DirectX; it's unnecessary and makes crap like this necessary. If people don't like the features of OpenGL or Vulkan you can always hop on the advisory board and get things changed.
-SaNo
The doom and gloom predictions of the Windows Store inserting itself between users and the internet at large seem more and more prescient every day.
I still can't get Linux to install and run with accelerated graphics on my Radeon card.
They promised ease. They promised compatibility. They promised a lot and never delivered.
And any solutions I have sought out have completely failed to be applicable.
Somebody should send Valve a bottle of Wine.
deal with it and be done.
I have ran and finished on Linux several WIndows only games, using Wine. Wine can be very useful, but in my experience, you lose a big amount of time just testing different wine versions and playing with configuration (Windows version, DLL overrides, runtimes, etc.).
So, even if it is only something like PlayOnLinux on steroids, managing different Wine versions and with scripts automating its usage, it could be good if Valve uses a decent amount of its resources to testing. This could avoid the end users to waste lots of time.
BUT, after writing this, I do now think this will be the case. Something like DOSBox, SCUMMVM and that kind of wrappers seem more feasible.
They should charge a 15% commission for all games launched on that OS, down from their normal 30%.
I wonder if they're starting from scratch, or working from the Wine code base. I'd hope the latter, and I'd hope they'd talk with groups like Codeweavers who've been doing this for a while.
#DeleteChrome
A shame that there will probably never be an official Half-Life 3 considering that Half-Life is what originally launched the Steam platform.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
this would be enough to finally get me to stop using Windows.
I play a lot of PC games, windows is a must for this.
Hey how about getting your own shit to work with Linux before worrying about third party stuff.
Hello Vive? I'd love to use you on linux. Fuck sake.
The big reason people should use Linux is to free themselves from proprietary closed source OS that is designed to take away your freedom. You will notice that while SteamOS claims to be open source, actually the critical parts of it like the client, are closed source. I am all for Windows compatibility as a way for people transition away from windows while taking their apps with them. However the compatibility layer needs to be able to work on fully open source OSs otherwise people would just be giving up one proprietary OS with vendor lock in for another proprietary OS with vendor lock in. You should not have to use a particular Linux distro to be able to benefit from Windows compatibility. Wine is the best solution since it is open source. People need to work on making that better rather than fragmenting with another closed source platform.
and be done with it for petes sake.
will that push real Linux or just compile time wrappers / dev provided wine installs?
OS/2 was so good with windows that few true os/2 apps where made and then MS started to mess up OS/2 With all of the win32/s updates.
Games need to move away from wrappers in Linux.
Does anyone still care?
I cared in 1998 when windows was unstable and unreliable. Windows 10 runs rock solid for steam gaming, what problem are we solving here? I guess freeing people from the evil of Microsoft is an admirable goal, but it all seems so early 2000s
All i want is to run all my games seamlessly without messing around with wrappers or virtual machines or GPU passthrough or having to draw a summoning spell in blood on my monitor.
I don't to spend 4 hours googling or needing 2 GPUs or a different config file for every single game or losing a huge chunk of FPS from virtualisation (and needing twice the amount of stupidly expensive RAM) or getting banned because the anti-cheat engine got confused.
I don't want to dual boot, hell half the time i forget what i was doing in the time it takes my web browser to open let alone for a full reboot.
It's a lot to ask i know but gaming is stopping linux going mainstream.
It did actually work fairly decent, I played Civ4 that way IIRC (or was it Civ5 before the Linux port was available).
I'm still fairly wet-behind-the-ears when it comes to Linux (learning curve, gentoomen) but would the above be a viable path?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The only reason I use windows is for games.
But windows 7 will be leaving extended support in a few years, and the rumor is that Microsoft plans to charge a subscription fee for windows.
If true, the ability to play my games on Linux is welcome news, even if it involves some closed source code.
Why does nobody know about this?
Unity engine + game editor for Linux
Really slick 2D/3D game editor, nice and stable, great tutorials as far as they go (not very far), great demo projects, free asset packs, fair licensing. Not bad at all for $0.00. Current version is in the last blog entry. For some reason, not linked from their ports page, why? This one is really buried deep in the internet, but it's awesome.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
DirectX is more then just video!
how is sound in linux?
Directx had an network communication library (not really an issue now days)
How well do joysticks work in Linux?
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9439-QHKN-1308
Sounds to me like binaries compiled for the target platform, not a wine-like environment.
The only thing keeping me from purging the last Windows machines from my family are two boxes running World of Warcraft. The company has zero interest in a Linux client and I have zero interest in logging in and fighting with updates every time they decide to tinker around on their game launcher.
Linux isn't going away, don't worry. It is very apparent that Valve continues solidly behind Linux gaming. Whatever way a game runs on Linux is fine with me, including running Windows in a VM. If there was a game I really cared about and that was the only way, then I would do it, because better than booting Windows, by far. But there is no such game so I thankfully don't need to have my face rubbed in all the things that made me run screaming away from Windows in the first place.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
True, but I recall other issues: its hardware compatibility was rather limited, and its marketing absolutely sucked.
I mean, holy shit. IBM was always so bad at reaching home users. For example, watch these ads touting the same feature, multitasking: OS/2 and Win95. What do you get from them? From the visuals, the music, the voiceover -- what do they make you feel? To me, the former makes it seem bureaucratic, unexciting, work stuff. But the latter makes it seem exciting, whimsical, empowering, fun! Whoever produced that ad nailed it.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Joysticks work great in Linux. I have a fancy, high end one with a bazillion buttons and thumb-sticks and sliders, and it worked out of the box without installing anything. I didn't have to touch a driver. Simply plug-in and go.
That was my experience too with an older, mid-range stick.
The client is just a CDN for your content you've paid for and a unified chat client that works across all your games and a launcher that will handle applying the appropriate wine settings per game that you're trying to play.
Even if valve dropped their rate the publishers would just retain the saving. Just look at the prices of games on uplay and rockstar for example. On the publisher's own webstore where they dont have to pay 30% to valve, the prices are the same.
As I remember it, OS/2 was better windows than windows.
Or at least, it was better dos than dos; developing dos software under os/2 was great, because when you messed up, you didn't need to reboot the whole machine.
Wine (and PlayOnLinux alongside it) really have made huge progress in the last decade. It should be trivial for Steam to provide 'bottling' scripts at this stage.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...
god bless gaben!
That surprises me. Takes forever to configure games to properly recognise mine in Windows.
If your desktop environment uses the GTK+ library, an application using Wine is no less "native" than an application using Qt.
But then you're not only paying to license an additional operating system every few years, as PixetaledPikachu pointed out, but also paying for more RAM in your PC in order to hold two operating systems at once while a game or Windows Update is running. Recall that DRAM prices have trended upward at times, doubling over the course of 2017. You're also starting the Windows VM in a cron job so that Windows can check for security updates without having to do so during your game.
Or you could just stop buying stupid gimmicks. VR is the modern lightgun.
And some people love their Duck Hunt so much that they cook up homemade solutions involving a Wii Remote, an Arduino MCU kit, and a Raspberry Pi single-board computer to force a Zapper to work with a modern TV. See "Tricking Duck Hunt to See A Modern LCD TV as CRT" by Jenny List.
You are confusing the steam client application as being part of the OS, but it is just an application program.
From the point of view of Linux proper, which is a kernel, your desktop environment is an application program. X.Org X11 is an application program. Even sysvinit or systemd is an application program. For the purpose of discussion, where do you draw a line between userspace system software and what a user would think of as an application?
It could be because last time X11/Linux users heard of the "Unity" brand, it was Ubuntu 11.10 forcing GNOME 2 users to switch to the similarly named yet unrelated Un(usabil)ity desktop environment, or Ubuntu 18.04 finally dispensing with it after Canonical realized that users had fled to MATE, Cinnamon, or Xfce.
The 7870 LE s an oddball using the Tahiti chipset instead of the more popular and well supported Pitcairn chipset.
Let me try to rephrase my understanding of the AC's point: The mere fact that poorly supported oddballs exist tarnishes the Radeon brand as a whole. It's like Intel GMA 500 being the oddball for the otherwise general advice prior to Sandy/Ivy Bridge of "so long as all you need is OpenGL 1.x, Intel GMA works well under Linux."
Linux users are already running windows steam on linux using wine.
Well, yes, the DirectX pieces and parts are mapped to equivalent pieces and parts of SDL (now SDL2) libraries. I think it sands for Simple DirectMedia Layer, and has been around since the early 2000s at least. I would have gone with Best Direct Supplementary MediaLayer libraries.
It seems to me that if you're enough of a serious gamer to spend hundreds of dollars on a new video card every year, then the cost of Windows is a non-issue. And you're probably more interested in having a game "just work" than fiddling around with various configuration settings to make it work on an OS other than the one said game has been designed for.
Someone show me a Venn diagram - the intersection's gotta be a tiny area. Valve must employ some people who *really* have an anti-Microsoft hard-on to spend resources trying to cater to that market.
Sorry but the days of me rebooting to go into another OS are over. Long ago.
If I can't virtualise you, or I can't emulate you, then I'm not going to reboot into you. For a start it's a pain-in-the-arse and needs all kinds of work to stay like that through Windows kernel updates etc. I tired of fighting stuff like that back in the days of Windows not recognising EXT2 partitions.
Nowadays, virtualisation is here. If I want to run games at the extreme edge of my computer's abilities, I'd run Windows as the base OS and virtualise whatever else I need on top of it. Truth is, I don't need to bother. A virtualised GPU of any decent spec will play every Steam game on my account (over 1000) to my satisfaction.
Anything old enough to emulate / WINE will certainly work so much better in a virtualised environment with GPU passthrough.
Reboots just shouldn't be happening nowadays. Especially not just to play a game.
Sorry, but my machine reboots in precisely two instances - when the battery fails and it doesn't get a chance to shutdown (it's an old machine, it really needs a new battery), and when I genuinely think there's a valid reason that an installation of new software would require a reboot (e.g. VMWare hypervisor upgrades).
Anything else, I'm not going to reboot for. Certainly not a game. Your game doesn't work in a VM environment or on my platform? Shame. Maybe I'll buy it in a few years time when you wake up.
Hell, I tried once and I ran the latest version of MacOS in a VM with a spec equivalent to a Mac allocated to it, and it ran SMOOTHER than a damn Mac, while my Windows and Linux stuff was all in the background on the same processors.
When will we have a 64-bit client? Steam is right now the only 32-bit program I have running on my Linux system. It's annoying having to install a bing bunch of libraries for just one program.
Maybe Valve could fix Issue #1040 from 2013 once and for all (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/1040). The client wants to manage all aspects of the window instead of letting the window manager do it. The practical result is that the Steam client fights with the window manager and semi-unpredictably makes itself unusable or infuriating. There's really no excuse for this.