There's Now 500 Games On Steam For Linux

[tomtomme]

desura

Serious Linux gamer here! (And game dev!)

The early days of Linux-for-Steam definitely had a lot of problems with games. But there have been improvements both by the vendors and by Valve improving its runtime support library, and newer games seem to work fine for me. I think these are expected teething problems, as for many devs this is their first real experience with making Linux games.

For the record, I have Steam games that don't work well in Windows 7/8, either (usually games from the XP era). My Mac-using friends also report a lot of serious breakage, especially between OS X versions.

It remains extremely baffling that you have no way to return games, not even for credit, on Steam. If you bought a game and it doesn't work as advertised, well, it's your loss only. There is obviously a risk that this will infuriate future SteamOS gamers: console gamers have far less patience than PC gamers. Steam better get rid of any game doesn't work on every Steam Machine before they hit the shelves.

Anyway: 500 games is amazing! Many of them are "casual games" ported from cross-platform mobile, that's still stunning considering that just a few years ago all we had was solitaire, TuxCart and Sauerbraten. I still reboot to Windows sometimes (I call it "GameOS", and it's just Windows 8 with Steam installed, nothing else), but I find myself more and more staying in Ubuntu.

Michael, please do some reporting on Desura, too. You mention Steam and even GOG, but Desura is a minor player in this market that has supported Linux for a long time, and has many titles that Steam doesn't ... it would be curious to know statistics there.

Reports on desirable would be. Nice. And hints how it can be run on openSUSE. It crashes or has graphics corruption in the interface since years. Maybe due to radeonsi OSS driver?

[Cyber Killer]

Reports on desirable would be. Nice. And hints how it can be run on openSUSE. It crashes or has graphics corruption in the interface since years. Maybe due to radeonsi OSS driver?

Proper English would be nice too - it took me a while to understand what you mean.

Anyway, the Desura client runs mostly ok on OpenSUSE, at least as far as installing and running games goes. Browsing the store causes crashing atm, but that can be done from a separate browser. Exiting doesn't work at all and never has.

There is the floss client (Desurium) on OBS, you can try to use that, it works... hmm... I wouldn't say better, cause it has bugs also, but it has different bugs so it might be better for your use case ;-).

[emblemparade]

Regular Linux Steam gamer here: Numbers are one thing, but having some AAA titles around is also important. Luckily that starts to look good too.

Also very important is that all the major gaming engines now support Linux or are close to supporting it. This will have a huge impact on the amount of effort it will take for future AAA titles to have Linux support.

I do want to point out that engine support does not give you automatic Linux support: the devs still need to make the decision as to whether they want to go D3D or OpenGL or both. Many games still need a lot of custom shaders beyond what the engine offers. Still, engine support goes a very long way towards making a Linux port feasible.

[tomtomme]

Proper English would be nice too - it took me a while to understand what you mean.

Anyway, the Desura client runs mostly ok on OpenSUSE, at least as far as installing and running games goes. Browsing the store causes crashing atm, but that can be done from a separate browser. Exiting doesn't work at all and never has.

There is the floss client (Desurium) on OBS, you can try to use that, it works... hmm... I wouldn't say better, cause it has bugs also, but it has different bugs so it might be better for your use case ;-).

sorry for the bad english. Smartphone autocorrection played with me. I am no native however...

I used desurium before and just tried it again. Today is one of the better days - it works more or less...
Is the offical client closed source? Does it offer different features (you only mentioned different bugs )?
I think last time I tried it was 3 years ago...

[Cyber Killer]

sorry for the bad english. Smartphone autocorrection played with me. I am no native however...

I used desurium before and just tried it again. Today is one of the better days - it works more or less...
Is the offical client closed source? Does it offer different features (you only mentioned different bugs )?
I think last time I tried it was 3 years ago...

Desurium is the (almost) official client - only the branding is different. The current client downloadable from the Desura website is from a time before the code was opened a few years ago and no updates were made ever since. The whole idea was that the community would take over the client code and in the end Desura would only slap their logo on it and put it on their site. This method has more or less failed at the same time when Desura got rid of their paid coders. So the current situation is: the official client is way old and Desurium is made by a couple of motivated people, but the development version is still not ready to be put as the next official Desura client. :-(

[emblemparade]

The official Desura client is indeed closed source, and the Linux client hasn't been updated in years... which would be acceptible if it was truly bug free.

I had a very negative experience reporting bugs to the Desura dev team. Instead of thanking me for taking the time to report, they argued with me that it was Linux's fault (and my fault, too) and that should be doing something else (something *very* user unfriendly in the command line that really no casual user would ever be able to do). I was really turned off from trying to help them in any way.

Still, I think it's worth reporting about Desura on Phoronix. IndieGala (the major competitor to Humble Bundle) distributed many of its games on Desura, basically anything that isn't hosted on Steam.

[Apopas]

IndieGala (the major competitor to Humble Bundle) distributed many of its games on Desura, basically anything that isn't hosted on Steam.

Humble Bundle used to offer Desura keys at the beginning as well, but not anymore

[Calinou]

people would get laughed at for trying to game in Linux.

They still get laughed at for playing free/libre games on GNU/Linux, which is sad.

Today, we have 500 titles. Amazing.

How many of them are genuinely interesting? How many of them are paid or only “free to play”? How many of them are free/libre?

It's a good day to be an open source freak

Except that you aren't, if you're playing Steam games.

[sarmad]

...but do they work?

Out of 10 games or more I have tried, only Planetary Annihilation doesn't work. The rest all work fine.

[sarmad]

Michael, please do some reporting on Desura, too. You mention Steam and even GOG, but Desura is a minor player in this market that has supported Linux for a long time, and has many titles that Steam doesn't ... it would be curious to know statistics there.

Thanks for bringing this up, I've never heard of Desura before. I'll check it up later tonight. Is this also a contained platform in the sense that installing games is just a matter of downloading them into a folder under your home directory like Steam does, or does it use apt or yum and litter you system folders when you install games?