Valve: Steam for Linux Not In Immediate Future

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[citation][nom]stm1185[/nom]It is that kind of sentiment that is always going to keep Linux as nothing more then it is right now. Without Commercial development for an OS there is really no point in using it beyond simple activities like web browsing or text editing.[/citation]

455 out of the top 500 supercomputers use Linux. Over 40% of web servers use Linux or FreeBSD. Apache is the most common web server software. I wonder how they managed that without commercial development.

And if Microsoft or Apple collapse tomorrow in some huge financial crisis their software ecosystems might go down with them. What would happen to Microsoft or Apple if they lost 2/3 of their market share? Linux and open source software on the other hand don't need mass acceptance or commercial success.

That said, it costs a lot of money to make quality games nowadays and I can totally understand why developers are reluctant to port the game to a niche OS.
 
[citation][nom]killerclick[/nom]455 out of the top 500 supercomputers use Linux. Over 40% of web servers use Linux or FreeBSD. Apache is the most common web server software. I wonder how they managed that without commercial development.And if Microsoft or Apple collapse tomorrow in some huge financial crisis their software ecosystems might go down with them. What would happen to Microsoft or Apple if they lost 2/3 of their market share? Linux and open source software on the other hand don't need mass acceptance or commercial success.That said, it costs a lot of money to make quality games nowadays and I can totally understand why developers are reluctant to port the game to a niche OS.[/citation]

valve has to pay someone to develop steam on linux
/thread
 
Who? They already did all the work to get it onto Linux, the only problem is getting steam to be protected. Linux Users tend to have an above average understanding of computers and have full access to everything on their machine. They can probably bypass their anti-theft programs.
 
To those saying Linux is too small, can't afford this or that, needs commercial support to survive, you do realize that Linux has a larger PAID development staff than any other OS out there. The commercial support is massive. In fact, the reason why Linux isn't migrated to the latest version of the GPL is because it would kill commercial support and effectively kill the OS.

I know this because my company does massive dev work for Linux, along with our competitors, as well as our partners. And I promise you this, all of us are paid to do it. And this is only the people working on the real time version of Linux. The thing is, no one company is developing Linux, so since you can't peg a single company to it, it seems a lot smaller.

The problem holding wide spread deployment of Linux in the public eye back is that everybody is doing development work on it to aid in infastructure rollout. From our standpoint, we're spending our money on how to minimize context switching overhead and developing self managing high availablity load sharing and not on developing a pretty GUI. But the statement that nobody is developing for it is a MASSIVE misconception.
 
[citation][nom]falchard[/nom]Who? They already did all the work to get it onto Linux, the only problem is getting steam to be protected. Linux Users tend to have an above average understanding of computers and have full access to everything on their machine. They can probably bypass their anti-theft programs.[/citation]
and we all know linux users are cheap bastards because they can't afford a real OS when they won't pay for an OS why do you think they'll pay for a game
 
[citation][nom]2real[/nom]why should valve support a niche market any way there are 50000 flavors of linux and all the fanboys will start crying when steam doesn't work on their distro[/citation]
That's why you release tarballs or source code. So you can compile it on any Linux machine.
 
[citation][nom]zain_asad[/nom]That's why you release tarballs or source code. So you can compile it on any Linux machine.[/citation]
why the hell would i want to do that when windows makes it easy
 
Why the hell would Valve give away their source code? Open source advocates need to accept that the Red Hat model will not work for all software, especially games. They can't sell support contracts for Left 4 Dead. People would just play without paying. The whole Linux movement is based on the false premise that volunteer programmers can make up for companies like Valve.

Linux has commercial support but it is mostly on the server side. On the desktop it is a pain for software developers due to all the different distros and windowing systems. There isn't even a standard audio API.
 
[citation][nom]zain_asad[/nom]That's why you release tarballs or source code. So you can compile it on any Linux machine.[/citation]


WTF? if you seriously believe then then you should get the hell off this site as you obviously dont know sh!t about anything to do with computers
 
[citation][nom]Silmarunya[/nom]In a way, it's better if software like Steam stay out of Linux. After all, Linux is open source and that's its great strength. Closed source software really shouldn't be welcomed in Linux. On the other hand, there are little alternatives for certain pieces of software, so that idealistic point of view isn't realistic - yet.[/citation]

successful troll is successful...
 
[citation][nom]matt87_50[/nom]come on Vavle! it would be so easy now you have the OSX version. soo like linux, just remove the gay and your done![/citation]
one gay os is enough
 
[citation][nom]lauxenburg[/nom]Screw you Valve. And I was just starting to like you guys.[/citation]

You obviously havn't been around the gaming scene very long.
 
Either way, Linux gamers should stay tuned for further news.
Click to expand...

The majority of Linuz based use is server applications. Most people who are just PC techs will use Linux for a work/home based server or even firewall.

The ones who use it full time are more than likley not gamers.

Considering that there is a large amount of different versions and add to that people specific versions, getting Steam and the games to work on them all would be the same as MS getting Windows to be 100% bug free on every possible hardware combination out there. Just not possible.

Add into that, no true updates for the OS for compatability or stability, if Steam doesn't work you are screwed unless you are a really good coder.

In all, I doubt we will see a major Steam release for Linuzx for the time being. Its just not a big enough market. And while Mac is also not a very large market, it still has enough to justify its version of Steam.

But still, PC will hold on to gaming for a long time.
 
[citation][nom]2real[/nom]*12 post of linux hate* [/citation]

Son are u mad?

I can wait, they'll dev it up eventually and then it'll be out. I can hoenstly see Steam's dev group being a little leery of Linux for the obvious reason that it honestly is the OS of choice for people that REALLY know what the hell is going on behind the scenes of an OS. It runs what? 80-90% of the servers on the internet? Linux is F'ing huge and there's so many home user based variations it'd honestly backfire for them to just support one distro. And yes also the threat of someone reverse engineering Steam, making a distro made for pirates, but why? When pirates honestly just use the non steam versions of games because it's nowhere near the hassle in the first place.

Also it might butthurt MS when gamers migrate over to Linux so they can run their game of choice, with maxed out settings, with a computer running half the required specs on the MS machine. (money saved on annual upgrades)
 
[citation][nom]stm1185[/nom]It is that kind of sentiment that is always going to keep Linux as nothing more then it is right now. Without Commercial development for an OS there is really no point in using it beyond simple activities like web browsing or text editing. Steam would bring gaming to Linux, and not that terrible emulation experience; but a slick easy to use interface. But then that would mean Linux would move beyond being an OS for really boring nerds.[/citation]
Well, I can't say that linux is only for boring nerds - no-one who has used a modern distro can say that. But I do agree that this radical 'open only' attitude will harm it in the end. Not that I don't like open source software, I just don't think that all software has to be open source to be good. I use linux from preference, not principal.
 
The 'open only' attitude is what has kept it at 1% for over a decade. Companies like Steam clearly aren't welcome. It's also clear that open source programmers cannot provide enough software to compete with proprietary offerings.

Linux would easily have as much market share as OS X if it welcomed proprietary companies. But that would go against the open source movement so they in effect choose to remain a fringe group. Linux is really just a nerd religion.
 
I dont get the whole "The internet runs on Linux" pitch. How does that relate to home users in any way what-so-ever? People aren't running Windows Server at home to play games. Linux wont ever become a gaming platform nor will it surpass any other consumer OS. Face it. No standards, no 3rd party involvement. Yeah, Linux is all about choice and what-not but sadly all that choice is why Linux get no developer love. And no, Ubuntu won't change that. That, and your ridiculous update schedule forever breaking things. Imagine supporting a game when 1000 distros decide its update time. No thank you. Remember, it's not about supressing Linux. Businessess think further than Open Source and GPL's and the so-called "freedoms".
 
Well, if Valve work on a linux-client again, they should consider working on a whole "gaming distro".

Focus on what's needed to play steam games and screw the rest. Let's have an optimzied kernel, minimal background processes and all that fancy stuff you can do with linux to make it run games as fast as possible (and, well, all those little things like voice communication etc. you need for gaming). Use a file system most benefitting load of huge textures, have a network stack optimized for gaming (and maybe voice). Then have some benchmarks published showing that (all/certain) steam games work faster on linux and *BAM* the enthusiast gaming crowd will switch - and others will follow. And you might also get NVidia and ATI to spend more time on their linux drivers...

...and then I wake up.
 
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