Steam on linux officially confirmed

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/steamd-penguins/
What are your opinions on this?

well ... nice of them to set up a blog ... but I sure hope that the dont count ... using wine to run directx stuff ... as running nativly ... ... also seeing as about a third of the games on my to-get list are available on steam ... this would be very nice

... note i am using mint ... so anything ubuntu based should work for me ...

@hutty: Valve has said that they are not looking into wine, but native ports. Source Engine is using OpenGL to they are halfway there already. They even say that they got Left4Dead2 running natively.

Should I merge this topic into this one? I'm afraid we're going to be a bit redundant here.

Amazing! Nothing like playing Left 4 Dead 2 on simply the best gaming platform (dat performance). TF2 ain't too shabby either, and neither are the billions of mods for the Source engine. It's like the worst-kept secret ever, but as soon as Desura began booming on Linux, I guess Valve didn't have much of a choice other than porting their games to the platform of the future.

Gotta say I'm kinda disappointed it's Ubuntu-only, which may not be compatible with Debian. Still, Ubuntu-based distributions are some of the best desktop distributions around, no question about that. And there are lots of support materials available for them too (Ubuntu forum just to name a huge one). This is why the Linux Standard Base is so important (for god's sake though make DEB the default already, it's just used so much more). Particularly that aspect.

Also kind a annoyed about the last paragraph because whilst Valve releases quite a few of their games and tools as freeware, I'm almost certain they've never released anything under an open source license. I'll let that slip just this once.

for god's sake though make DEB the default already, it's just used so much more

popular != better
Actually rpm is technically superior to deb. Things like better compression (lzma) or binary diffs of packages are killer features of rpm. The only thing that deb has in favor of it is that it's used in Debian and Debian has a huge repo. This can be easily fixed by packaging more software for other distributions (OpenSUSE is particularly doing quite good nowadays with their build service and custom repos.)

Also: eventually changing LSB to match the current popular distro isn't the way to go.

The story that deb is better than rpm used to be a minority one from those running Debian which at the time was one of the most non-LSB distros. Then along came Ubuntu and slagging off rpm became a popular pasttime for many users in the mistaken belief that deb inherently avoids the dependency hell that used to be an issue for people who either couldn't work out rpm or were trying to install a non-compliant package.

I'm not sure any packaging system should be part of the LSB in some ways. Unless you're going to strictly standardise absolutely everything like locations of files, naming conventions, ban non-vanilla dependencies, you're still going to find some instance where a 'standardised' package doesn't work properly on one package or other. A deb package from one Debian based distro may not work on any other debian based distro and the same for rpm.

@edh - actually LSB does standardize package names, locations, etc... It's pretty complete when it comes to these things. So yeah - full compatibility between Linux distros has been decided and standardized. Now if only all the distros would actually conform to the standard, we all would live in a happier penguin world ;-).

LOL thanks edh, but I'm well aware of how RPM is a very good package manager now. That's why I based my statement on the ubiquity of DEB. They both get the job done anyway, only ultra-nerds will care about what's better and what isn't.

And let's not forget that loads of others exist, like pacman (a pile of crap) and PiSi (though this is actually awesome, has deltas so less downloads).

I really love these news. This is something I've been waiting for years.

Anyhow, this is quote from the blog information panel:

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.

Maybe this is a chance for Xonotic to hit Steam, as the first "open source game released on Steam"? Just thinking.

Sad and good.

There is no good that non-free software is coming to GNU/Linux. But it's good that more developers and companies accepting GNU/Linux as a Desktop platform.

Maybe this is a chance for Xonotic to hit Steam, as the first "open source game released on Steam"? Just thinking.

Not sure if want. Especially considering that Steam users might not be the demographic that has the most potential to bring us people interested in helping development of a FLOSS project.

EDIT: Anyway, as usual, that's up to the Xonotic team.

Well it's up to the community too. But I totally agree with you then I think about it Mr. Bougo, we will not gather any good except for more player's and possibly maps. Most of those players will probably be CS kids and trolls...

*checks out link*

...

:/ nah its scam

*checks navbar*

...


:|

official valve?








XD


omgomgomgomgomgomgomg... so happy, linux go kick microsofts azz
_______

CS kids and Trolls obviously

-Even worse when both together