Steam'd Penguins

[w1ntermute]

What will make this truly interesting is if 3rd party game developers follow in Valve's footsteps and start porting their games as well. Because that will hopefully then lead to more attention from graphics card driver makers, solving one of Linux's last remaining weaknesses compared to Windows.

With Microsoft following Apple into the post-PC era (or "PC Plus", as MS COO Kevin Turner likes to call it), Linux will be the last major OS with a traditional desktop metaphor as its dominant UI. Despite all the statements that the PC is dead, I think it will still have widespread uses, at least until brain-computer interfaces become a reality, because touchscreens simply cannot replace keyboards/mice in a large number of contexts.

[kayoone]

The Unity Game Engine (unity3d.com) which is very popular will also feature a Linux deployment option from Version 4 on out! Seems like theres alot of movement in the Linux gaming space at the moment, which of course is superb.

[yuhong]

Even on Linux, Ubuntu is moving toward Unity and Gnome3.

[jorts]

I like the phrase "PC Plus." It's exactly my experience. I use my desktop and laptop for most things, but for consuming content when a small form factor works my tablet is great.

[rapind]

I think of Linux as more of a black-box (runs your router, embedded) or server (headless) UI. I've never referred to Linux's desktop as it's dominant UI.

[DeepDuh]

Wait, OSX is loosing its desktop metaphor? Did I miss something? And since when is the desktop metaphor essential to mouse / keyboard control?

[Produce]

>at least until brain-computer interfaces become a reality

A little late to the party.

Sent from my iBrain.

[Ralith]

While I applaud what they're doing, it's a bit weird how that post keeps throwing around open-source rhetoric when neither Steam nor any of Valve's games are open source. The only regard in which this has anything to do with open source software at all is that the platform happens to be predominately GPL-licensed, and may conceivably become an indeterminate amount more popular if more games than L4D2 get ported.

[InclinedPlane]

Is there something unclear about this?

"Our mission is to strengthen the gaming scene on Linux, both for players and developers. This includes Linux ports of Steam and Valve games, as well as partner games. We are also investigating open source initiatives that could benefit the community and game developers."

[nacs]

I'm sure as they work on the Steam client and as they port L4D2 to Linux, they'll start finding and fixing issues in the kernel/OS/related projects, thus contributing to opensource.

[sswezey]

What 'open-source rhetoric'? It isn't a Valve Open-source blog, it's a Valve linux blog - open source is not really relevant at all to this post.

[monkeyfacebag]

It seems like Microsoft has really tied Valve's hands here. Unless something has changed recently, all apps installed on Windows RT will have to come from MS's app store (marketplace? bazaar?), which doesn't bode well for the future of Steam on the platform. I'm hoping they end up doing a lot more than porting Steam to Linux, because outside of Valve's efforts, most of the games on there are not (and will likely never be) Linux compatible.

[StavrosK]

This would mean that (pretty much) the only way you could game on non-Apple hardware would be to install Linux, which would make Linux the go-to OS for gaming, something I doubt Microsoft would let happen.

I really doubt Microsoft wouldn't allow Steam to run on Windows.

[aristidb]

So, there are multiple approaches to Linux software distribution (for free-as-in-beer closed-source software, like the Minecraft client, Skype, Chrome or Steam):

1. Pump out versioned tarballs, and let distro maintainers deal with packaging. 2. Create a very thin launcher, and deal with updates yourself in the Launcher. Minecraft does this. 3. Provide package repositories for Ubuntu and Fedora and deal with updates yourself. Chrome does this.

I think (1) and (2) are preferable. (1) is also the easiest to implement (!), but may result in delayed distribution to the end user.

It is possible to mix (1) and (3), of course.

[fromhet]

The chromium project releases their updates for Ubuntu users thru a PPA, but Canonical also distributes stable packages. A mix that is working really well.

God forbid #2, a system-wide system for downloading and updating applications is one of the zen-things about using the Linux-based OS's.

How it works on Mac OS X and is chaotical, and the way Microsoft does it, with countless messy installers and self-updating apps is hell to deal with.

[morsch]

(3) is much easier to implement for Ubuntu due to PPAs. It's also the most convenient for the users, although trusting a wide range of PPAs is somewhat of a security issue.

[Flimm]

For Ubuntu, you can release closed-source software in the Ubuntu Software Centre.

[Corrado]

Honestly, I dislike the way Chrome works on Ubuntu. I don't like using PPAs and I'm never sure how/when Chrome gets updated. Sometimes it seems like the OS does it and sometimes it seems the Chrome updates itself (just like on other platforms). Maybe its just me.

So, I think my vote for how Valve updates would be (2). Give the Linux vendors something to package but since they move very slowly you need to be able to fix bugs in a timely manor.

[malkia]

Among other things, porting their software to Linux might bring other fruits:

* You can run many instances of a dedicated game server (roughly in the hundreths mb of ram usage) on the same OS, or through virtual machine so it could be moved.

* Gaikai/OnLive live kind of game streaming - again no cost for OS - so they can run each instance of the game per one installed OS and stream video for the rest.

* Console - probably customized version of Linux, and if possible the game running in ring 0 with the kernel. Drawing almost directly to the hardware, without going to API's, user and then kernel functions. (Avoid vertex/index buffer checks, and many other things).

[larrik]

No mention of the fact that a bunch of games on Steam already have Linux versions? Or do their blogs usually ignore non-Valve software?

[grimgrin]

Yeah it would have been nice to see that mentioned. I was curious at how many games could possibly launch with the Linux Steam launch, and there were more than I realized:

http://steamlinux.flibitijibibo.com/index.php?title=Native_G...

[guard-of-terra]

Not only that, but they are also available on Desura, which supports linux.

[fingerprinter]

My biggest hope out of all of this is that Nvidia will get its act together and release proper drivers for Linux now. I honestly don't care all that much about games except that they might force Nvidia to actually care about Linux.

[dkhenry]

Well I will not put money where my mouth has been and buy Left for Dead 2. I have been wanting a lot of Valve games, but I swore off all non-native games after Minecraft ( if Notch can do it so can everyone else )

[jiggy2011]

Minecraft isn't really "native" since it targets the Java VM.

[cturner]

Something that impressed me with minecraft was the audio quality. Generally Java audio is rubbish: very rough at the edges and even unstable. Minecraft is using paulscode and it seems to be solid.

[sp332]

What do you mean by "non-native"?

[columbo]

I'm going to show my lack of linux history here... why not Debian? Are they really building something that is native to ubuntu that you wouldn't work in <insert-debian-fork crunchbang or mint>?

[dudus]

I wonder how much of this is really Valve's effort into making Linux a Gaming platform and how much is just to put pressure on Microsoft to relax the policies on Windows 8 that would make the Steam model invalid.

If this path will lead to a world where gamers don't depend on Windows, that would be awesome for users and really stink for Microsoft.

[baq]

my personal belief is that valve wants to do a linux/x86/steam game console and this effort is a "let's see what we can do with linux" proof of concept.

[andrewfelix]

Steam and Adobe are the only 2 things stopping me making the switch the Linux.

[mitsche]

This. And flakey drivers.

I think this is a big step for Linux on the Desktop. I look forward to the day I can ditch OS X and Windows and replace it with a Unix that has a nice UI, stability, and is open.

[ekianjo]

If you keep to nVidia, you usually get decent performance and decent drivers. ATI is a very different story, that is true.

[rplnt]

Adobe is something that makes me want to switch to Linux. I only use Flash from them though.

[jebblue]

Valve may be sealing their fate as the most successful game publishing company for this century.

[philwelch]

There's a lot of century to go.

[JDShu]

Outside the Quake series, I think Left 4 Dead 2 would be the most impressive game ported to Linux to date.

[rplnt]

I think that Amnesia has a native Linux support and it is a great game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesia:_The_Dark_Descent

[jlgreco]

More recent than the Quakes, Doom 3 had a Linux build.

[jiggy2011]

Will be interesting to see what happens to games sales/usage figures when they release this.

I'm going to guess that most people who are Linux users but are also interested in games will already have a Windows partition that they use for gaming.

So it might be that any increase in Linux gaming on Steam is exactly matched by a decrease in Windows gaming.

I doubt there are many gamers out there who would love to play AAA proprietary games but are holding out until they are ported to Linux.

[munchor]

I just hope they release tarballs of executables or something, because targetting Ubuntu and Ubuntu alone is quite bad. They might say "We'll support other distributions in the future". Yeah, I know that, you will support Fedora.

If you released tarballs (or even open sourced Steam and all your games {just kidding}), it would work, out of the box, on every single distribution.

[onli]

I sure also hope they release tarballs. But supporting officially only one distribution makes sense. With proprietary games, they are in the land of consumer rights and consumer support. They can only say "we support X" if the software really runs on X, X being Ubuntu here. If it doesn't run, the consumer has the right to get his money back (instead of getting it back out of goodwill).

If another distro patches a driver and thus L4D2 runs worse or not at all (or something like wayland changes the infrstructure more than we expect and another disto moves first), this would be an issue for them without that official focus on Ubuntu.

[lucian1900]

If it'll be anything like the windows version of Steam, it'll likely manage games in parallel with the package manager, thus about as distro-specific as tarballs.

As long as Steam itself is packaged as .deb, .rpm and tarball, it'll probably work as well as other linux games.

[fromhet]

In a worst-case scenario, it would not be all to hard to write a script to extract the content of a debian package into a tarball.

[rubergly]

I read the title as "Valve Linux Box" and was a fairly disappointed.

[LinXitoW]

I would think that this is just the first stage towards said box. First, they make their software work on the only OS you can ship for free and then they make their own distro, which they put on their box. If they're smart about it, their distro will be fairly common, with few customizations, so that they can pull in a lot of the open source fixes.

[fromhet]

Why not releasing it in the Ubuntu software store instead of making a new one?

It would be the sensible thing to do if they cared about gamers on Linux. But I guess Steam is more about owning and controlling the channels of software sales and distribution.