
Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more - shazow
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTExMDM
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jiggy2011
This will be welcome by me, steam on Linux that is.

I've bought a number of games from steam when they have been on sale, games
that have a Linux port available.

Of course I am unable to run them without buying the Linux copy separately at
present but once this is implemented I will already be able to play a fair
cross-section of my games on Windows and Linux.

Of course this could be a net negative for my productivity.

~~~
icebraining
Linux developers doesn't necessarily imply there'll be Steam for Linux
Desktop™. It may be that Valve is looking to finally build their Steam Console
and base it on Linux.

~~~
AJ007
I'm going to take a guess that Valve is hedging their bets on a Windows 8
flop. I think it is very possible that Linux and OS X will become the two
dominant desktop platforms over the next 5 years.

Valve can not really enter the mobile marketplace in a meaningful way. Both
Microsoft and Apple will likely try to put the squeeze on Valve with their own
respective OS marketplaces. (I think neither will successfully be able
reproduce Steam's high quality user experience and extras.)

~~~
duaneb
I think that if Linux becomes the dominant desktop platform, it will be a new
form (i.e. not based on Gnome or KDE). Just a (biased) hunch, though.

~~~
freehunter
Ubuntu is positioning itself for that possibility. They've been playing the
long game, and it's still not finished, but they've broken from Gnome, broken
from X.org, and with the Software Center, are really steering away from the
terminal. Of course, they've pissed off a lot of Linux traditionalists, but
that could be a net gain for the desktop market.

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prezjordan
Sort of off-topic, is there a reason Steam on windows is so unresponsive? Mac,
too, but I think that's because it's a port.

It seems to me that Steam is not written in native windows code and that's why
it runs so sluggishly. Some say they have no idea what I'm talking about,
while others agree. What does HN think?

~~~
ineedtosleep
Define "so unresponsive".

Recently (less than a year ago), I had a switch in hardware from a Athlon X2
3200+, 4GB RAM machine to an i5-2500K, 8GB RAM and 2 SSDs. Sure there was a
noticeable difference in responsiveness, but never on either machine would I
consider Steam "so unresponsive".

~~~
barrkel
My last machine was an i7 920 with 12GB and Intel 80GB SSD; I now have an
i7-3770K with 16GB and Samsung 256GB SSD; and Steam has always been fairly
unresponsive.

Specifically, it's most unresponsive on the "preparing disk space" page when
installing games. It takes multiple seconds for no apparent reason. There's no
high CPU usage and no high I/O usage. It's also very slow to start, and very
slow to let me play a game.

My theory is it's due to some degree of online activity, that it's gated on my
internet bandwidth. Since I only play single-player games, that's a huge
annoyance to me, and I often don't start playing games because I know I'll
have to sit through Steam startup for several seconds.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Steam does have a very slow boot time, but the expected behavior is that Steam
is always running in the background so I can't imagine it's a priority. I
can't fathom a ~3 second wait when installing and launching a game being a
real problem. Minor annoyance sure but that's less time than you'll be forced
to see stupid splash screens for!

~~~
barrkel
I just quit Steam (so it was fresh in cache, never mind relying on SSD etc.),
and started a Steam game. It took _20 seconds_ before the game launched (not
playable, just started).

That's massive. Pretty much any of my non-steam games will be launched and
playable within 10 seconds.

(I also hate unskippable intro videos; I'm fairly sure I've collectively spent
much longer searching for ways to delete / skip such videos than I have ever
lost watching them.)

~~~
forrestthewoods
With Steam already running the moment I double-click an installed game from my
list it's taking about 2-3 seconds before they pop open full screen. If you're
taking 20 seconds then it may or may not be Steam's fault, but it certainly
isn't an intrinsic property of the software.

~~~
barrkel
Sure, but my point is that I tried it without Steam running (most of the time
seems spent on logging in to my account). I don't run Steam by default - it'll
be updating, downloading patches, popping up notifications and all sorts
interfering with my daily life.

~~~
forrestthewoods
That is neither the expected nor the standard use case. If you use a product
in a way it's not designed to be used you shouldn't be surprised when it's
behaves in a non-ideal fashion. Notifications and auto-update can be disabled.

~~~
barrkel
That's completely unacceptable - the idea that I need to keep a background app
running at all times just so I can play a game once or twice a month. Imagine
if all apps took such an arrogant approach; our machines would barely run
under the weight of the cruft. I similarly avoid Intel installers when using
their drivers because they also like to install and keep running a half dozen
services and widgets. Same thing with iTunes - I use a shell script to start
it up so it can start up all the extra services and kill them later after
iTunes exits.

There's a lot of entitled software out there that arrogantly assumes
sovereignty over your machine. I don't accept it.

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moistgorilla
Great news! Honestly, the only software that will be holding people back from
switching fully to linux now will be creative tools (audio, 3d + 2d design,
video editing). I think this can be solved by us. If we show them that there
is a demand for these tools on linux someone will move to supply. Open
operating systems provide too many advantages to ignore.

~~~
shazow
Some of the best tools in the industry (Audacity, Blender, Inkscape, others?)
are already free, open source, and native on Linux.

~~~
moistgorilla
Sadly, some people refuse to work if they aren't using
photoshop/illustrator/autocad/etc. But yeah, I'm with you, I use gimp and
inkscape but I'm no professional.

~~~
twog
A perfect example are front-end developers. It can be tough for anyone to make
a living in that line of work without being able to edit/open photoshop and
illustrated without having to configure wine.

I truly believe Adobe holding back their products is one of the largest
roadblocks linux has to get widespread adoption amongst the design/developer
community.

~~~
jiggy2011
I'd be surprised if Adobe isn't at least looking into this, especially
considering their sometimes sour relationship without Apple.

A lot of the more "arty" people I know would consider giving them a Windows
computer to use as a personal insult and would probably be more open to
switching to Linux than Windows.

Getting arty people to use desktop Linux could be a huge net positive if they
decide to help "pretty" the place up a bit.

~~~
Kerrick
It's certainly nice when UI/UX people run GNU/Linux distributions. Daniel Foré
is in charge of Elementary OS [1]. Because he's a designer, the project
already has a proper set of Human Interface Guidelines [2], a set of uniquely
designed (and easy to use) core applications [3], and a beautifully coherent
look to the entire OS and website.

[1]: <http://elementaryos.org/> [2]: <http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-
interface-guidelines> [3]: <http://elementaryos.org/discover>

------
shinratdr
So that thing that this very same site has insisted is in full development and
is near ready to go... is going through a hiring round for devs to build the
thing? Right.

I'm so sick of these articles. Ever since the Mac version came out this site
and other Linux focused blogs have insisted Steam for Linux is minutes away.
Every single time they've been proven wrong or miss their timeframe.

It probably is being built, but the last person who has legitimate up to date
info on the project is Phoronix. They seem to just be making things up.

~~~
jiggy2011
IIRC they actually went to valve's office and showed screenshots of source
engined games running under Ubuntu natively.

I wouldn't be surprised if they have it "90%" ready-to-go and just need some
serious domains experts to do the last 90%. Not to mention for bugfixing ,
updates down the line as well as maybe porting some of their new tech (HL3
engine?) to Linux.

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Keyframe
I don't use linux as my desktop OS for quite some time (now it's windows and
osx, used to have Redhat and later fedora workstations). My question is, is it
possible to target 'linux' in general as a single platform at all? I thought
heterogeneous nature of linux distros is what would hinder that effort.
Something like when you buy certain graphics programs, you get to have only
this and that linux variant with this and that software on it in order to run
it.

~~~
shazow
You don't need to ship distro-specific packages. You could ship a tarball with
a statically linked executable. Take a look at the Humble Bundle, for example.
Every game published in the bundles is cross-platform, and work great Linux
regardless of distro choice.

~~~
Keyframe
Ah, never thought about that. As good old DOS games were, everything contained
within program/directory itself. Interesting, makes using some of the external
code a bit harder due to licenses though.

------
bfrog
Will this finally mean linux becomes more and more mainstream for commercial
games and applications? I actually hope so!

Thank you Gabe and Valve, for bringing things a step ever closer.

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pixie_
Does anyone else think this has little to do with 'bringing Steam to linux'
and a lot to do with SteamBox, the rumored console Valve is working on.

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sandGorgon
I have a Dell Vostro with an ATI 6600m card running ubuntu 12.04.

Putting "echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch" effectively boosts
my battery time from 1 hour to 3 hours.

What I'm seriously hoping from Valve is not a game per se, but a linux distro
(or a standard) that is compatible with my drivers, multimedia devices (dual
hdmi monitors - I'm looking at you) and audio/video.

I would pay serious money for that kind of a distro.

~~~
helmut_hed
_a linux distro (or a standard) that is compatible with my drivers, multimedia
devices (dual hdmi monitors - I'm looking at you) and audio/video_

yes, that would be great! Major distros (I use Kubuntu) are understaffed and
concentrate on getting the new features from their upstreams integrated, not
on making sure fancy hardware is supported. It's a question of resources.
Although I think Valve is less likely than a hardware vendor to have a
business reason for doing this work.

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shmerl
The problem of Valve is their usage of DRM. I won't use them just because of
that, whether they release Linux client or not. I.e. it's better to run a non
DRM-ed Windows game (let's say from GOG) on Linux using Wine, rather than
native one from Valve but with DRM.

But their entering to the Linux scene in general is good, since it might
encourage others to do it as well, and eventually non DRMed distributors like
GOG will push for more Linux games too.

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ghc
Oh, thank Gabe! I've been waiting for this for a decade now!

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integricho
At first I read valve FIRED their first wave of linux developers...

