Steam for Linux: it's real

No more rumors, this is straight from Valve as of a few hours ago:

Steam’d Penguins | Valve via Valve launches Linux blog, officially announces Steam for Ubuntu -- Engadget via Valve officially announces Steam for Ubuntu, launches Linux blog. : technology

There is an RSS feed for Valve's new Linux blog here: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/feed/?cat=7

 

Port Aliens vs. Predator Classic and I'll be a happy camper.

 

Ubuntu-only?

No thanks.

 

Have some faith and give it time. It was only announced a few months ago. They have to start testing it somewhere...

 

This might take some time. But it's good news. Just got another laptop with no OS to Linux world.

 

Ehrm...

"This doesn’t mean that Ubuntu will be the only distribution we support. Based on the success of our efforts around Ubuntu, we will look at supporting other distributions in the future."

 

I would start to buy games on Steam when I can start playing PC games on Linux.

 

Translated from PR-speak that means "Right now it's Ubuntu only. It might not be in the future if we get enough complaints, but for now it is."

So yes, I stand by my original comments. When they start shipping a proper multi-distribution solution I'll consider it.

 

That's fine. To each his own. I understand.

Having said that, I'll be installing the client on Mint 13 on day one, and I'd bet my shirt that it will work with minimal to no problems. I'm pretty sure the same will be true for Fedora and SuSe: there probably won't be any showstopper bugs.

We will see though.

Edit: Coincidentally:

" Valve Software actually cares about open-source Linux graphics drivers. Last week they had the Intel OTC Linux graphics team out to Bellevue to jointly work on the OpenGL renderer for the Source Engine and the Intel Mesa driver."

I think alot of people will be surprised at how honest, straightforward and awesome the people at Valve are.

 

I have always loved Valve.. They are a true people company... Lets hope this helps spread more games to Linux and help with GPU support and performance.

 

steam for linux is the thing that would make me delete my windows partition forever.

 

Just porting Steam to Linux wouldn't solve anything. Most games still won't work on Linux.

 

But, and this is a very big one, with Steam there will be more and more games that will work. There will be a reason. Problem so far still is Ubuntu. There are some nags with it but I guess they will have to figure those out as well.

This is good news anyway.

 

By maintaining games for the ubuntu family, I think they're going to have their work cut out for them. Because Canonical insists on releasing new versions every six months, I can tell you from experience that often new versions break old software programs. Having to maintain binaries for several versions could be a headache.

 

The biggest step to making linux gaming friendly is really to develop and improve the OpenGL API, provide graphics vendors with a good reason to optimise for OpenGL, and developers with a good reason to use OpenGL, and then we might just start seeing true cross-platform gaming.

 

^ ^ Um, I don't know where you got that information, but OpenGL is a very good API (and is widely supported in the industry), and is easy to program for. Back in the day (late nineties) I did a lot of OpenGL programming, and the capabilities were more than equivalent to direct3d. It was already highly optimized as well.
The great thing about OpenGL is that it's supported across many different platforms, whereas directx is obviously windows only.

 

I think they mean the opengl stack on linux, it's historically been quite behind...

 

Oh I see. I admit that I don't have any experience with it in linux, but I thought it was pretty standard across the board. But still, OpenGL + OpenAL are great APIs to program for.

 

I'm pretty stoked. I just ordered Left 4 Dead 2. I'm sure TF2 can't be far behind.

 

As long as they stick to the LTS (Long Term Support) versions, they should be fine. In fact they just increased their LTS window to 5 years with their newest release.

That means 12.04 will be supported until 2017.

 

This would make me happy. Ubuntu is really the only form of Linux that I have used extensively, so that doesn't really bother me. I do hope they can get it ported to the other versions of Linux though.

 

As noted, the API is fine. Analogy Time.

The API is like the steering wheel of a car. It is an input to the system. The developer is the brain of the human, he directs his hands (which are the developer's code) to operate the steering wheel. The entire system that the developer interacts with consists of his own brain, his code, and the API. Underneath that API there exists a large and complex system that is the bulk of the car.

Also, ubuntu is free, open source software. If you want steam to work in another operating system, you should be just as capable as Valve to make that happen, even if Steam is built for Ubuntu.

 

Not necessarily. I doubt Steam will be open source and there are plenty of ways that it could be effectively Ubuntu-only even if it's not explicitly designed that way.

 

There's a new post on their Linux blog:

Faster Zombies! | Valve

Interesting that they've gotten the opengl renderer working faster than direct3d, not just on linux but on windows as well.

 

just shows you what can happen when someone tries to make a good product

 

Mm. It's not impossible that they'd be very effective at some point if they made parts of the overlay stack open source. Keeping the encryption and network stack closed, etc. Might end up with new variants of the overlay with more "proper" integration into the window manager, for example. Functions called from different apps. Chat window dislocated to a second monitor, or attached to the desktop rather than the Steam application, that kind of thing. No reliance on having a flash-component in the exact same program stack. Very useful for stability, that kind of thing.

And generally it seems Valve is choosing to look at this extremely practically from the beginning. Kind of reinventing the wheel, and so on, but they are doing it properly, with choosing a track towards actual and full support, rather than some obscure binary wrapper support. So this is.. like Groceries says, this is real.

 

That's a very good point, actually. I do get the sense that Valve is comitted to making Steam a first-class citizen on Linux.

Still, I am not terribly hopeful that it will be a reliable cross-distro app unless Valve designs it in a modular fashion. Time will tell though. I suppose they *could* release parts of it as open source as you described...

 

Knowing how fast Valve operates... this port is going to take centuries before it is complete

Although I can imagine gaming at work now

 

Vavle is aiming to release it in the end of 2012 but you can never trust valve time.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

 

There will be a limited beta in October says Valve:

Via: External Beta News | Valve

 

Thanks for the update, 'Groceries.....I'm a Civ 5 G+K guy, but use steam with that and several other games. I'll be watching the site!

 

You do realise this is just steam and valve made (i.e. at this stage source and goldscr engine games)?

It sucks, but I doubt too many other publishers will make their games linux compatible.

Planetary Annihilation, whenever it is released next year, has linux support, but I honestly can't think of any big release coming out on linux.

 

Yes. But it opens a doorway many of us have been waiting for. (!!!)

 

After seeing how Valve made L4D2 render faster in OpenGL on Linux than windows, I had a discussion with my friend. We both agreed that big games companies might take a while to start producing games compatible with linux, if at all. But then I had another idea .. if Valve can make a faster engine running on Linux, they might be able to work put some guys onto the WINE project and improve that in terms of compatibility and performance. The nice thing about this approach is that the windows API is relatively static (although the behaviour might change subtly between releases/service packs) and once it has been tuned the job is essentially done. If a reasonable performance can be achieved in this manner, then we wouldn't need the big games companies to do anything different, and based on Gabe Newell's comments on Windows 8, I would suggest there is a lot of incentive for Valve to make this kind of effort.