

Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public - Nathandim
http://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1747660173332716773

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avolcano
Interesting that they're using GitHub for issue tracking, although there's no
actual code in the repo: <https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-
linux/issues>

~~~
basil
I've seen this quite a bit recently. It's a hack but it's a quick way to get a
public-facing issue tracker out there.

Are there any better solutions for getting a tracker set up easily where non-
contributors can raise bugs and discuss feature requests?

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jcastro
<http://launchpad.net> has a bug tracker and a blueprints function.

~~~
emperorcezar
Can only say one thing about Launchpad, "ew". It has a horrible UI.

~~~
4ad
Speaking as someone who has to use it everyday, the horrible UI is the least
of its problems.

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Shorel
Care to elaborate a bit on that?

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csense
What black magic do they use to make the games run under Linux? Wine?

Are all Steam games now compatible with Linux, or only a few titles that the
developers are willing to support Linux? Is there a list anywhere?

~~~
clauretano
There's a list, found here: <http://store.steampowered.com/search/?os=linux>

Very few games are compatible, but Team Fortress 2 is one of them.

~~~
mylittlepony
And Amnesia, which was already supported -.-

Left4Dead was also going to be available, not sure what happened.

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batiudrami
My understanding is that the plan is for all Valve Source Engine games are
going to be ported (and should be relatively simple now that TF2 is working).

Everything else is up to the various game studios, though all games in the
Humble Indie Bundles support Linux so hopefully they are added to Steam soon.

~~~
s_husso
> though all games in the Humble Indie Bundles support Linux > so hopefully
> they are added to Steam soon

Darn. This what I'm waiting for as most of my games are from humblebundle.
Well at least uplink+defcon should work :)

~~~
ojii
uplink works. defcon doesn't, unless you some manual "patching" (download the
demo, fire up defcon in wine/windows to get your steam key, activate it on
linux). It'll eventually come though.

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jhealy
I'm not much of a gamer, but I thought I'd give this a go on my Debian amd64
system. However the package is i386 only, so it won't install.

Are they planning to support amd64 too?

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mariuolo
It doesn't work for me. Still saying it's a closed beta.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
You need to update the client to fix that. Easiest way to do this is to evade
the beta check (start steam with "steam steam://store"), then choose
"steam/check for steam client updates" from the title menu.

~~~
mariuolo
I did that. For some reason I also had to delete ~.steam and
~.local/share/Steam and start from scratch to be able to log in.

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Shorel
Just in time for my new Ubuntu install.

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jayferd
Holy EULA, Batman.

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drivebyacct2
I'm not 100% sure why they have a "repo" for an "installer". It sort of rather
defeats the purpose. If they're going to do that, just put the client in a DEB
and put that in the repo. At this point I see no reason in adding the repo to
apt.

Either way, it'll get sorted, Steam for Linux is already quite great. Still
can't get over that TF2 runs better in a window in Linux than I've ever had it
run in Windows.

~~~
w1ntermute
> I'm not 100% sure why they have a "repo" for an "installer". It sort of
> rather defeats the purpose.

It's because they don't really grasp yet how these things work on Linux. Which
is understandable, since they're coming from a Windows world, where package
management has to be done manually. So the Steam executable you download is an
installer that downloads/installs the Steam package manager, which then
downloads/maintains the games.

Ideally, all the Steam Linux games would be maintained in APT repositories and
you would update them through APT, but I don't know if that will ever happen.
At least this is better than nothing at all.

~~~
stephen_g
They'd have issues with their DRM doing that.

They should ship the Steam binaries properly through apt and yum repositories,
but I doubt that they'll ever ship the games that way.

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thristian
I don't see why. If the Steam-DRM'd version of a game requires Steam installed
in order to play, they can just add the Steam package as a dependency.

Possibly a bigger issue would be that Steam has incremental updates (fixing a
bug in a game requires downloading a fixed binary but not the multi-gigabyte
data files) while most Linux package managers do not support incremental
updates (when Debian releases a new LibreOffice package that fixes some
dependencies for the s360 archictecture, I still have to download hundreds of
megabytes of changes on amd64).

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jiggy2011
There is also the issue that a Steam game may have dependencies on different
versions of certain libraries than those which may be shipped with popular
distros. You also have to think about people with custom PPAs etc.

I think it makes sense for Steam to be isolated from the rest of the system as
much as possible.

It is also helpful to Valve if it is as consistent with Steam on other
platforms as possible.

Game downloads can be pretty big and take a while too, I'd rather not have apt
locked for an hour while it grabs some large game update.

~~~
arnoooooo
The libraries can be installed from steam packages as well.

