Steam'd Penguins
blogs.valvesoftware.com
blogs.valvesoftware.com
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.
A little late to the party.
Sent from my iBrain.
And then there is Finder... but at least I have the shell, if only I could keep Finder dead or at least not visually running I'd be happier.
>After all, isn’t that what open source is all about – the idea that collaboration and teamwork achieve amazing things?
Yes, I suppose it is better for Linux if nobody attempts to sell commercial software which could work with Linux, ever.
This thread is a little overblown and it's too early to point fingers and thump chests - lets see what they put on offer first.
The word "damning" should not even arise. Don't lecture me about thumping chests and waiting to see what they put on offer, I am responding to inflamed language being applied to a company for no reason other than that they sell software.
I love what Valve is doing and I want to encourage them. Still, their usage is just a bit, 'missing the point'.
"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."
I really doubt Microsoft wouldn't allow Steam to run on Windows.
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.
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.
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.
Most likely, Valve will provide a steam_installer.deb, which depends on all platform libraries Steam needs, and which only contains a script that creates the necessary users and rights, reserves some directory for steam, fetches the actual Steam off a Valve site, authenticates it, and runs it.
I guess this is for performance reasons, but I'm sure my PC can run Braid and do some disk IO at the same time.
I also can't find a way to have different games installed on different partitions/drives. This would be very useful if you have an SSD but can't fit all of your games onto it.
You can do this by moving the directories in question into the other disk, and then creating a junction (symbolic link) from the original location to the new one. On windows 7: mklink /j "path/to/steam/steamapps/common/gamefolder" "path/to/the/other/disk/gamefolder"
Shame this isn't made a bit easier.
You can do it manually. Activate the game to play, alt-tab to Steam. Library, view the downloads. The download will be suspended, pause it and then you can unpause it and it'll resume downloading. Alt-tab back to the game.
Lots of work, but it works (or at least I think it did when I last tried it).
* 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).
As this very blog post explains, Valve's dedicated servers have always supported Linux.
> 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).
A system like that would be so different as to barely benefit at all from the reality of what Valve is doing.
http://steamlinux.flibitijibibo.com/index.php?title=Native_G...
nVidia has always cared about Linux. They've supported non-Windows platforms well for a very long time. They've done a lot of work to provide a good workstation experience on Linux. Today the notable exception is Optimus, but I'm hoping that's going to come down the pipe as nVidia pushes its inevitable KMS branch further down the line.
AMD drivers are still not really usable; you can work around some of the bugs with open-source drivers, but then your speeds are severely crippled.
The mantra among Linux users has always been "buy nvidia". Those with ATI quickly grow to regret it in my experience; a meaningful illustration may be that my parents have two Linux boxes, both relatively low-end PCs with onboard graphics. One of these is almost four years old now, and has an onboard nvidia GPU. The other was purchased three months ago and has an onboard AMD GPU ("APU" according to marketing material. Bobcat? Or was it Bulldozer?). We still use the 4-year-old machine for gaming there because the nvidia drivers are actually sufficient to play the game; the new machine is using an open-source driver due to Catalyst bugs and runs games at probably 20% the performance of the machine 16x its age. That's the experience you get with nVidia's competitors.
A game developer as important as Valve officially supporting Linux has the potential to force nvidia to finally start playing nice, or even better, get their head out of their asses and just open-source their drivers and get them into the kernel. That way every nvidia user on Earth can benefit from an officially supported, open, community-driven driver.
Slim chance, but I would've said the same about native L4D2 if you'd asked me 2 months ago.
SDL_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_DISPLAY=1
SDK_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_HEAD=1
Will fix the dual monitor/twinview issue for some programs.
I do hold out hope for nvidia gaining full xrandr and kms support at some point. The latest beta drivers have significantly increased xrandr support.
They wrote on that post that they do indeed want to support other distro's in the future. I suspect they just want to get some stability before committing to a wide range of distro's. Ubuntu is very popular, so it makes sense.
Distro's can take the .deb files and extract them through their package managers to fit their systems, probably without much hassle.
Saying that, Ubuntu is popular, there may be some commercial connections with Canonical, and picking one distribution to do the testing should streamline their efforts.
But... # pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA
Is all I did for the work install, took longer to finish the setup but thats more due to me having 2 monitors than anything else, one is mad simple. Can't speak to the ati stuff. I know SuSe is about as simple as well.
Yes. Yes it is.
But having installed Linux back in 1997 and dealing with X11Rwhatever it was back then and minicom and all that jazz, kinda makes my view of hard a bit off of what most people view as hard.
One nice thing about Arch though is the ArchWiki: it has copious amounts of documentation on software that is usually applicable to other distros. A good example is https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Awesome
I'd say Arch is pretty simple, just not easy [0]. Easy would be inserting the install cd, walking away, coming back and being able to hit the internet. Which is fine, if that's all you want to do. Arch installation isn't easy, it's simple, and more importantly it works. When I install windows from scratch you know what it comes with? Nothing. No drivers, no programs, nothing. Not even an ethernet driver for me to get the other drivers. Arch comes with all of it out of the box, you just need to go through the tutorial so you can choose which things in the box you actually want.
Arch is simple in that if I go to any scary looking file in /etc and open it up I won't be completely baffled by what's in it. I can randomly shut down any service running on my machine and I know my box will keep chugging and I can recover from it. There's no weird services that I don't know what they do, no scripts that run on startup that I can't understand let alone find. There aren't inter-dependencies that I don't know about. When I run ps aux I can account for every single thing running.
And even then, the package management is simple AND easy. I have never had a problem installing something with pacman, not once. There's this oft-repeated line about upgrades breaking systems, but I've never seen it. If an upgrade fails I look at the front page of archlinux.org and see that some manual commands are needed, copy-paste them and voila things work. I've used arch on three computers now, two laptops and a very old desktop, and have never had any problems. I know there's going to be some horror stories, but I can counter any of them with a quick search for the same in windows. Problems upgrading happen, but they're not common, and not something that's inherent to Arch like I've seen people suggest.
I dunno what I'm doing that's so magical; I just install the dang thing.
[ ] Desktop
[ ] Server
[ ] Embedded
[ ] Custom
This ultimately comes down to a user interface issue, but it's different than the kind of user interface often associated with the HN crowd. It's more like an API user interface, be that a web or programming library API. A crucial feature of good APIs is 'graceful degradation' in terms of easiness/control. Take a look at the libcURL library[1]. cURL has 3 levels of access: "easy," "share," and "multi." If you don't care about a lot of features and just want to download a webpage, the easy interface will get you what you want in a few lines of code. If you have something more complicated, you can go all the way down to the multi interface to access many of the raw functions of the API.
They key takeaway is giving the user control of her complexity level. If I'm a sysadmin compiling an image meant to be deployed on thousands of servers, then something like Arch would be pretty great -- I can fine-tune things how I want. If I'm just a random developer, then I would like to stick to 'sane defaults,' with the option to revisit those defaults later if needed.
I really don't care what cron I have, don't force me to pick one against my will.
I was seriously hoping for a Valve distro, which would be perfectly tuned for all things media (they hired the SDL guy). Maybe have Steam as the package manager for everything.
Instead, they just joined a camp - this is not good.
The other way they could have approached it was to support Android - not as a playing system, but rather as a console device connected to peripherals - and sponsored some project to run Android apk on Linux with access to the sound and graphics layer (SDL?? )
This is exactly what they should be doing, not further fragmenting an already gratuitously fragmented market.
Every time some commercial vendor makes a move into Linux and people start bickering about distros I just /facepalm.
And why would a new distro make sense? Now you can have gaming if you just install ~~Windows~~ ValveLinux.
However, the Linux market is already fragmented. And even worse, it is deeply religious. Just google for the bickering that ensued when Meego chose rpm over deb. People have already started talking about why not Arch, etc.
The point that you are missing is that, if anyone could unify the Linux fragmentation it is Valve. Steam is a killer app, and I can totally see people migrating towards a distro built around it (and laptops certified for it).
I want Valve to succeed - how will it succeed in a severely fragmented market ? Can it justify the cost of its Linux team then ? Android is having a similar problems in version fragmentation. People have posted articles here on how they are unable to justify multiple version (distro?) development. Multiply that problem by a thousand - different audio toolkits, poor driver compatibilities. I am not able to see how they are going to succeed, unless they unify atleast the multimedia toolkits (something like CoreAudio)
Games in the Humble Indie Bundle releases have Linux builds. (.tar.gz or .bin) I haven't had major issues beyond installing the libraries that I get prompted are missing. That could get automated, especially now PackageKit abstracts away from the details of different package management utilities.
Also, you could cover a huge portion of the linux market by just supporting Ubuntu and Fedora. Other distros (e.g Arch) have a community that has some experience in repackaging these for their distro.
Anybody willing to switch distros just to run a game might as well just install a Windows partition.
If the attitude towards fragmentation is to fork a new distro for every application, am I supposed to restart my computer every time I want to task switch or run hundreds of virtual machines?
There are some specialised situations where a custom distro makes sense, like appliance type applications (smoothwall, backtrack etc)
Would certainly take me significantly more than half an hour to switch to Fedora though since I would need to re-learn the package manager, move all my settings across and figure out the subtle differences in configuration etc.
The only real differences in package management for I'd say 95% of use cases is if you type 'yum' or 'apt-get' before typing 'install whatever'.
If Valve wants to make their own console, which is the more likely case, they can license Ubuntu support for cheaper than they could make a terrible distro and it would be win-win-win (which is, of course, better than a win-win scenario).
If someone comes up with a upgradeable open pc-based console of sort running steam, well THIS could be the final nail in the traditional PCs coffin. Actually loving playing games on a desktop I hope that doesn't happen any time soon!
They could probably solve a lot of issues with fragmentation by establishing steam in a chrooted environment on the system so that it could maintain it's own versions of certain libraries etc. This could then be targeted by developers as opposed to targeting a specific distro. In essence, a "distro within a distro".
Where they could provide value though is to create a stable platform cross distro that is well supported for game/app developers. Anything that allows porting to Linux without worrying about distro fragmentation is a good thing.
Besides when it comes to more esoteric distros I'm sure they will be able to tap into the community to help bring it there.
In any case, the client may very well run on Debian, it just won't be officially tested or certified by Valve (for now).
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.
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.
I've started using Unity (shock, horror) and the whole thing provides such a polished experience that most of the time I forget that I'm using a desktop linux distro. Problem is that when everything is so well polished, problems stemming from bad drivers (nvidia) become really jarring.
I'm hoping that wayland will go a long way to addressing this somehow.
IIRC the nvidia Linux drivers actually replace parts of X with their own proprietary stuff which makes things hairy when integrating with software designed around "standard" X.
For example nvidia "twinview" seems to make many applications believe that my two 1920x1080 monitors are actually a single 3840x1080 monitor. I can correct this by using a seperate X session for each monitor but then this stops compiz from working.
In fact, none of the GPU vendors with closed-source drivers are providing kernel mode-setting, which would be essential for Wayland.
NVidia ships Xrandr in 302 drivers (now in beta, available to ubuntu in ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates) so this should be a problem of the past.
It's been very annoying though, especially games which try to be clever and position the window centered on the screen or maximize to full screen have been half on the left and half on the right monitor.
SDL_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_DISPLAY=1
SDK_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_HEAD=1
What surprises me, given the number of programmers that use 2 monitors. How does this stuff not get found when applications are being tested?
Not like it would be a difficult fix either, just test for weird resolutions like 3840x1080 then ask the user "are you using 2 monitors?", if they answer yes then adjust the rendering target.
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.
edit: [1] - I mean games with no native Linux version(Portal 2 have also Mac version)
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.
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.
If you're a die hard Arch/Gentoo/Slackware user you're probably used to not having much in the way of commercial support anyway.
As long as Steam itself is packaged as .deb, .rpm and tarball, it'll probably work as well as other linux games.
If they make a game console, which is rather likely it seems, they could just license Ubuntu embedded or ubuntu core (can't remember what it is called) for orders of magnitude less than it would cost them to build their own distro. Anything else just doesn't make sense.
Now, not saying they'll do that. The game industry is notoriously bad with NIH syndrome.
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.