Is Valve's Steam Client Bad & Damaging For Linux?

[Rexilion]

The sense of entitlement that some people have is just amazing.

Freedom of speech is a fundamental right in most civilized countries. Which backwater island are you from? Enlighten us (and send photo's).

[entropy]

Once more; in case of Steam it's up to the developer/publisher if any kind of DRM is shipped.
Steam/Valve does not enforce DRM in any form. Yet, it does support it.

There are games which don't come with DRM.

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_games_on_steam/page1

Once installed, you can launch them right from the corresponding SteamApps directory without a running instance of Steam.
You can even copy the game folder to another computer (yes, without Steam) and launch the game without issues.

If the game supports Steamworks (achievements, Steam community stuff, etc...),
you have at least account-based DRM as Steam has to run.
But even in this case, some developer/publisher provide an alternative binary _without_ the Steamwork features (see link above).

Again, it's up to the developer/publisher!

Compare that to Ubisoft's Uplay and EA's Origin.

[Kano]

Basically commerical games on Linux are the only way to tell companies like AMD/Nvidia/Intel that the customers want the same speed for Linux games compared to Win - or better the OpenGL stack should be equal. Intel+Nvidia seem to work closely together with Valve it seems, smaller game studios do not seem to get the same level of support. AMD is some steps behind in some ways, hopefully they begin optimizing OpenGL soon. When you look at the Nvidia slides then OpenGL is not only important for Linux games but even to support new gfx features for Win XP users (many of em seem to be in China). So maybe this helps as well to increase OpenGL usage. OpenGL games usually run with Wine very fast and could be ported to Linux/Mac much simpler than those that rely only on Direct3D.

[johnc]

I'd have Gabe's child if I could.

[log0]

Most open-source games look like shit and beyond the artwork the latest open-source engines really aren't competitive or comparable to Source Engine, Unigine, or Unreal Engine 3.

Dear Michael Larabel, please use this sentence as much as possible in your coming articles. I am sure it will encourage the few open source games and engines out there to become much more awesome. Really great work you are doing here.

Btw what is the deal with SDL2? You've been reporting some time last summer, that it would be close to release. They must be running on valve time too I guess...

[Bomyne]

If we start enforcing an open source only policy on linux, we'll be scaring away the very people we are trying to recruit to ourside. Valve is doing the right thing and not all Linux software has to be open source. Just as not all Linux software has to be free. It's an operating system and we should treat it like we would Windows, Mac, DOS, whatever. Developers are free to choose what their software's license is.

[Prescience500]

There is no such thing as a distro-neutral approach. The large majority of potential Linux Steam users are probably people running Ubuntu. I think this is an assessment made in advance to cater to the biggest group. In this context, one could consider Ubuntu to be 'distro-neutral'.

Furthermore, if it runs on Ubuntu it will probably even run on Gentoo without much hassle.

As a Fedora user, I can assure you're guess is very wrong. It took me a great deal of time to get the steam client to work. It also took a a lot of effort to get some of my games to work. Some of my games I still haven't gotten to work. There is a distro neutral approach. They could have a separate Steam install directory. Sometimes this would mean duplicate installations, but it would take most of the headache out. I promise you that no one without extensive knowledge of Linux will get steam running on anything other than a debian based distro.

[GreatEmerald]

I have already said my view on this. Steam is bad - I will never accept its EULA or its DRM, - but at the same time it's a good tool for creating interest in the GNU/Linux platform, which could lead to more open-source efforts in the long run. So let's allow people who don't value their freedom to create more interest in the platform that is friendly to us, people who do value it. In the mean while, we have HIB, Kickstarter and Desura.

[entropy]

As a Fedora user, I can assure you're guess is very wrong. It took me a great deal of time to get the steam client to work. It also took a a lot of effort to get some of my games to work. Some of my games I still haven't gotten to work. There is a distro neutral approach. They could have a separate Steam install directory. Sometimes this would mean duplicate installations, but it would take most of the headache out. I promise you that no one without extensive knowledge of Linux will get steam running on anything other than a debian based distro.

At least it runs great on Arch.

Including the multilib repository and doing a pacman -S steam did the job.

[AJenbo]

A lot of the work being done on Linux is being done to support proprietary products. Valve is looking in to releasing there d3d to ogl translator as open source and is directly working on several open source tools. At best I think you could argue that it means less work on wine, but that aren't solving the issue in a better way any way. I bet steam on Linux will result in more source releases of older games as well.