
Steam'd Penguins - mwilcox
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/steamd-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.

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

------
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.

~~~
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.

~~~
ergo14
It is, since they recently hired SDL developer - and it appears he will be
working on it full time, same goes for darkplaces engine creator. So this is
direct help to open source libraries.

~~~
Ralith
They've been hired to work on their respective libraries and publish the code
openly? What's Valve getting out of that?

~~~
baq
these guys know linux graphics and audio stacks from the inside out. having
such people around the office which you can come to, ask pretty much any
question and get a meaningful answer is practically priceless IMHO.

------
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.

~~~
jiggy2011
They will still allow people to game, just you will have to buy all of your
games via the Microsoft Store rather than Steam/Normal Download/DVD

------
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.

~~~
aristidb
Well, Steam is by necessity an independent package manager. So you can't
really have that Zen if you want to use it. Might as well update itself, too.
;)

~~~
obtu
To pinkbucket: you seem to have been hell-banned when your account was new.
You will need a new account. My condolences.

------
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).

~~~
Ralith
> 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.

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.

~~~
obtu
It allows them to amortise porting efforts with sales on multiple platforms.

------
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...](http://steamlinux.flibitijibibo.com/index.php?title=Native_Games)

~~~
StavrosK
I buy mostly indie games, usually the Humble Bundles, so a very good chunk
(maybe most?) of my library of 100ish games have Linux versions.

------
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.

~~~
cookiecaper
wut.

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.

~~~
freehunter
Sounds like you missed the discussion on Torvald's "Fuck You" video and
nVidia's response. nVidia only cares about Linux when it's easy.

~~~
hapless
Torvalds was angry about Tegra, not GPU drivers.

~~~
coldpie
Possibly, but their GPU drivers are also frustrating crap. Yes, AMD/ATI's
drivers are far worse, but nvidia is still dropping the ball. Binary blobs in
your kernel are bad for everyone. Kernel developers are often rightly
uninterested in kernel problems that occur in environments that are "tainted"
by black-box code. Nvidia's driver doesn't play nicely with the Linux GPU
stack and ecosystem. Consider their "twinview" nonsense, requiring a legacy
xorg.conf, and duplicating functionality present in the standardized xrandr
1.2. Fullscreen programs are an iffy proposition at best with nvidia's
drivers, made even worse if you have multiple monitors, as a result of their
refusal to work with the community and the standard tools.

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.

~~~
hapless
The nvidia driver codebase is HUUUGE, much of it is valuable proprietary
information, and much of it is third party. It would be extremely challenging
for nvidia to open source it, from both legal and business perspectives.

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.

------
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 )

~~~
sp332
What do you mean by "non-native"?

~~~
dkhenry
something that needs WINE to run. I want a Linux binary I can run.

~~~
sp332
Did you miss this part: _it now runs natively on Ubuntu 12.04._

~~~
dkhenry
Right which is why I am buying it. They have earned their money

~~~
sp332
Oh! You said "I will not put money where my mouth has been" did you mean
"now"? :)

~~~
davvid
Money spent cannot be eaten (or.. put in one's mouth)

~~~
sp332
It doesn't mean eating, it's about talking.
<http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/put+money+where+mouth+is>

------
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>?

~~~
sandGorgon
This is why I think they just miscalculated. They still dont know the
religious wars of Fedora vs Ubuntu, or rpm vs deb.

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?? )

~~~
cageface
_Instead, they just joined a camp - this is not good._

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.

~~~
sandGorgon
actually I am indeed talking about the "bickering" that is going to start. I
use Ubuntu myself and am most definitely not bickering about Fedora.

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)

~~~
cageface
_Steam is a killer app, and I can totally see people migrating towards a
distro built around it (and laptops certified for it)._

<http://xkcd.com/927/>

Anybody willing to switch distros just to run a game might as well just
install a Windows partition.

~~~
jlgreco
Eh, switching from Fedora to Ubuntu would not be a big deal at all. The
differences really are quite minimal and the actual install would take what,
half an hour tops? The effort to install a windows partition would be much
higher.

~~~
jiggy2011
I think they are responding to the suggestion that Valve releases their own
distro.

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.

~~~
fingerprinter
Valve releasing their own distro would be just craaaaaazy. That would be like
Amazon or Google doing it. Why bother? There is an awesome one out there for
free (Ubuntu).

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).

~~~
sandGorgon
Amazon or Google _is_ doing it - ChromeOS, Android, Amazon's fork of
Android....

------
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.

~~~
jiggy2011
Flakey drivers are a really big sticking point now, for certain hardware like
video cards (most of my drivers "just work").

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.

~~~
Ralith
Wayland can't do anything about drivers. Gallium3D, and manufacturer support
for it, might. Most of all, though, if Valve starts supporting Ubuntu as a
first-class platform, they might be able to put pressure on GPU manufacturers
to improve their drivers.

~~~
jiggy2011
I thought (correct me if I am wrong), that part of the reason that graphics
drivers were so messy was that they had to integrate with X which is archaic
and not really designed with hardware acceleration in mind.

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.

~~~
exDM69
> 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.

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.

~~~
jiggy2011
I can fix it for many (not all) applications by adding this to
/etc/environment.

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.

------
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.

~~~
jlgreco
Quite so. The differences between 2000 and 1912 are hard to truely fathom. I
don't know how you could possibly attempt to predict at that sort of
timescale. Even a decade would be pushing it as far as I am concerned.

~~~
jebblue
I don't think it's too long of a time span considering these guys started in
1911:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM>

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

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

~~~
jiggy2011
Not more recent than quake 4

~~~
jlgreco
Ah! Good point, I completely forgot that existed.

~~~
krakensden
And Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which was actually pretty great. It also had
megatextured maps, which were nifty.

------
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.

~~~
naitbit
Well I did not buy AAA games that I wanted to play that were windows only(like
Portal 2[1]), but I would bought them if they are ported to Linux, so I would
argue that they will expand their user base(a little). I must admit that in
case of some games were to good to miss and I played them on wine(like Witcher
2 - my excuse is that it was DRM free and different enough that it was worth
rewarding even when there were no Linux version).

edit: [1] - I mean games with no native Linux version(Portal 2 have also Mac
version)

~~~
jiggy2011
Perhaps, but I imagine the number of people in the entire world like this are
measured in the 100s.

------
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.

~~~
jiggy2011
Hopefully they won't actively try and prevent people from running it on other
distros though, providing they find a way to do so.

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.

------
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.

~~~
fingerprinter
I said this somewhere else in this thread, but making their own distro would
be just craaaaaazy. Ubuntu is already free, comes in several varieties and is,
frankly, better than anything they could do for the cost.

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.

------
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.

~~~
jiggy2011
That's exactly what Steam is about and always been about, what else could it
be about?

