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Valve's Gabe Says "Yes" To Steam Linux This Year

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  • #11
    Originally posted by uid313 View Post
    You do have a point.
    When I heard about Android, I was so excited about it. When I finally got one, I felt a bit disgusted with it, but stuck with it realizing everyone else is as bad or worse.
    I like Linux because its free, open source, and pretty free of DRM and malware.
    Ubuntu now have a partner repository with proprietary software.
    How long is it until we get spyware and browser toolbars, changed browser home page, popups and adware and shit like that?

    As Linux gets increasingly commercialized the plagues of Windows and the proprietary/commercial software ecosystem infect us.
    Are you serious? Maybe I'm naive, but doesn't the GPL pretty much protect us from having this kind of stuff forced down our throat? Don't like something that gets merged into an open project? Fork it! There'll always be choices of other distros aswell.

    Having big commercial companies backing Linux has ALWAYS been the case (Red Hat, IBM, etc), and it's only improved things as a whole for the ecosystem. I'm surprised anyone could see this as a bad thing. If you don't like it, no worries, don't use it, but don't bag it when it could easily improve some of the tools you use everyday. Not convinced? Lets wait and see then...

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    • #12
      I hope you realize that :
      • This is the best opportunity for Linux to expand its user base
      • Linus Torvalds himself is not against proprietary software, but considers free software as extreme
      • It's not your decision whether Steam will come to Linux or not
      • Steam coming to Linux will not alter in any way its philosophy
      • BTW, Linux distros have so many different philosophies (look at Ubuntu, making their own store, & compare with Arch/Gentoo/Debian...)
      • Anyway, there's no DRm'd game for Linux yet

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      • #13
        Originally posted by kirillkh View Post
        I hope this is a bad joke. Commercialization and embracing of Linux by corporations threatens to turn it into yet another flavor of Android.
        Oh you mean like Red Hat, IBM, Novell, HP, Dell, Cray, Amazon, and Co? Sorry but that's not how this works. The embracing of Linux by corporations provides the other half of the development. Whereas individuals and hobbyists do most of the innovation, It's Corporations who end up doing most of the grunt work that almost nobody wants to do. This allows the open source community to take advantage of both development types and taking advantage of both is really important for the real success of any software. To be blunt even with proprietary locked down programs people are still going to mod it in order to try to make it better for themselves. Obviously if it's more open then they can do it better. One of the best examples of this are Bethseda games, the games themselves are basically open source with a proprietary license attached which is the main reason people actually buy it. It's usually not to play the game itself but to mod the heck out of it.

        Thing is ultimately the two major dynamics this will change will be massive net positives.

        #1. Game Companies in order to have better linux support will work on improving the gaming related infrastructure (graphics drivers, the sound system, etc). After all here they're allowed to tune things unlike any other platform to do what they need, so why wouldn't they?

        #2. Having these game companies will finally draw in gamers. Now this is massively important because it brings in the other prong properly into place for that infrastructure. And the other thing it will mean is that development of open source games for linux across all genres is very likely to see a boost. Particularly as we head into the second Age of videogaming where the age old publishers die off and distribution services like GOG and Steam, along with crowdsourced funding begin their rise. Leading to a return to the 90s and early 2000s where the Game industry was a relatively diverse place rather than rather than being restricted to a few main genres. Groups like The Dreamers Guild who had vowed to never sell their souls to publishers but eventually had to cave in, can now actually thrive because of digital distribution platforms.

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        • #14
          Originally posted by Kamikaze View Post
          Are you serious? Maybe I'm naive, but doesn't the GPL pretty much protect us from having this kind of stuff forced down our throat? Don't like something that gets merged into an open project? Fork it! There'll always be choices of other distros aswell.
          Linux kernel is GPL'd, and how did that help Android?

          Originally posted by Kamikaze View Post
          Having big commercial companies backing Linux has ALWAYS been the case (Red Hat, IBM, etc), and it's only improved things as a whole for the ecosystem. I'm surprised anyone could see this as a bad thing. If you don't like it, no worries, don't use it, but don't bag it when it could easily improve some of the tools you use everyday. Not convinced? Lets wait and see then...
          Just recall uid313's point about Ubuntu pushing 'partner' stuff on us. Now note that Ubuntu is by far the biggest distro out there. How did this happen? My understanding is that Canonical and other corporate players on the Linux arena are making serious marketing efforts to attract a larger, clueless, audience to this developing 'market'. In addition to marketing, they are actively modifying the distro to appeal to the "normal" (i.e. clueless) user. You can see that, e.g., in the fact that Ubuntu chose to push Unity and scrapped Kubuntu.

          Linux has always been a high-barier/high-gain environment. RTFM used to be the motto, and for a good reason: if you give a clueless user easy, "dumb" tools, the community loses twice:
          1) such tools (think NetworkManager) often mingle with the OS and make advanced features harder to use by disregarding "unsupported edge cases, which 95% of the audience doesn't care about"
          2) even worse: if a clueless user doesn't need to learn to succeed, in vast majority of cases THEY WILL NOT LEARN, and thus the community's level will degrade with time

          My firm opinion is that the correct way to attract new users is offering a set of high-quality [self-]education tools (manuals, forums, IRC, etc.), not spoiling them with half-baked dummy tools. This is what made Linux such a good system, and this is the only way forward.

          Now, given all that, how will the availability of DRM and tier-1 games affect this environment? I am pretty sure it will have catastrophic events, as it will be impossible for anyone with concern for free software to compete with their resources, their manpower, marketing force, features, organization, budget, etc.


          Basically, in 5 years from now I expect the Linux scene to be fractured into a very small, even marginal, free software distros and a huge scene of "Android" distros. In no time, *these* distros will steal even the name "Linux". That will be destruction of the free software Linux as we know it. Our current free software community (still in its core, anyway...), will be marginalized and will have to start all over again.

          I know it sounds grim and dramatic, but this is my long-term opinion about this...
          Last edited by kirillkh; 04 June 2012, 05:53 AM.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by kirillkh View Post
            I know it sounds grim and dramatic, but this is my long-term opinion about this...
            ... Just because Steam is coming to Linux ?
            Man, get real !

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            • #16
              Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View Post
              Oh you mean like Red Hat, IBM, Novell, HP, Dell, Cray, Amazon, and Co? Sorry but that's not how this works.
              Their strategies were based on something else. For example, IBM always only wanted a stable server system to support their corporate hardware (Power) and bloatware (DB2). Novell's plan was similar to Canonical's (embrace, extend, profit), but there was not enough audience at that time. Now there IS enough audience, so where Novell failed, Canonical (Ubuntu) and Google (Android) succeeded. Hell, is Android not enough? This model of appropriation is already working.

              As to the advantages of attracting gamers, etc. - I wonder what advantages you have in mind? Increasing the number of users of an OS is not a goal in itself. Just look at Unity, which is obviously designed for dumb people. Do you like that? Now imagine what happens if more dummies arrive to the scene: the whole desktop environment will be like Unity. Everything will be dumbed down. No more console for you. No more root. No more address bar (exaggerating here). Do you want another Windows or Android clone? Give this some thought. (Also see my previous rant, where I relate to this kind of user base expansion.)
              Last edited by kirillkh; 04 June 2012, 06:15 AM.

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              • #17
                I can fabricate such a screenshot in less than 60 seconds.

                Michael, please, stop posting things which barely even resemble rumors.

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                • #18
                  I dont think it would be a hard switch from opengl to opengl es to support android. do you really think that is out of target, i dont. one problem with current android devices is the limited storage - pc systems usually have got much more. so usually android games ports are stripped down from current games. some older titles get ported as well which makes sense as those did not use so many prerendered videos and other high volume data. many successfull games are very simple to learn - thats the problem for ports, those may be already too hard to play on those devices. you can attach a bluetooth gamepad, but dont expect much sales if you require such a tool. but in the future it would be stupid not to develop for android/ios as those plattforms get pretty fast gfx hardware that is even faster than those in current consoles. as you already see you need to develop games for casual gamers and not for "core" gamers who just play every 1st person shooter out there. valve's current games are for core gamers, but i am sure they will develop much simpler games in the future as well. everything else would be really stupid...

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by kirillkh View Post
                    Their strategies were based on something else. For example, IBM always only wanted a stable server system to support their corporate hardware (Power) and bloatware (DB2). Novell's plan was similar to Canonical's (embrace, extend, profit), but there was not enough audience at that time. Now there IS enough audience, so where Novell failed, Canonical (Ubuntu) and Google (Android) succeeded. Hell, is Android not enough? This model of appropriation is already working.
                    Uhuh.. Which is why Red Hat is THE number one contributer to the Linux ecosystem, and Novell has tended to be in the top 5, IBM contributes plenty back, and there's a reason I didn't include Cannonical on the list for the time being. What you fail to realize is that people AND corporations taking linux and the free software ecosystem and tweaking it to their needs is what this entire system is based upon. It's completely a system of merit, and the idea that companies can't or should participate inside the meritocracy is stupid, particularly given that we need companies for unfun grunt work.

                    What you're really failling to understand is that while non-contributing bodies don't add anything to the Ecosystem, they also don't subtract anything. They're a null balance. If they are creating any harm, it is likely to be only to themselves, see Ubuntu's Unity for example. It's a design unlike any other one that's been claimed, actually is chasing after OS X, but thing is, you know what? I don't have to deal with it, because I can use whatever distribution I want, and I won't have to deal with that there as long as I avoid Ubuntu (which I started doing long before unity showed up). Because we are diverse which some might call "fragmented", ultimately if there's something you want or don't want, there's likely a distro for it. For instance want to resolve package dependencies by hand, you can run slackware, to the slackware community what other people are doing with automated package dependency resolution doesn't matter to them, it's what they want to do. So since avg users, and the bigger distros are doing it, and they're not.. everyone else has a null effect on them in terms of packaging, zero, zip, none.

                    The ultimate point here being if you don't want it you don't have to take it, and it won't effect you other than maybe making the infrastructure better for you.

                    Originally posted by kirillkh View Post
                    As to the advantages of attracting gamers, etc. - I wonder what advantages you have in mind? Increasing the number of users of an OS is not a goal in itself. Just look at Unity, which is obviously designed for dumb people. Do you like that? Now imagine what happens if more dummies arrive to the scene: the whole desktop environment will be like Unity. Everything will be dumbed down. No more console for you. No more root. No more address bar (exaggerating here). Do you want another Windows or Android clone? Give this some thought. (Also see my previous rant, where I relate to this kind of user base expansion.)
                    Gamers bring these extremely useful people called Modders with them, an influx of modders means an influx of people capable of doing coding, art, graphics, sound, etc.. This means this means an influx of people who will not only improve and better our games, but are also likely to improve our infrastructure as well as I outlined in my previous comment.

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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View Post
                      Uhuh.. Which is why Red Hat is THE number one contributer to the Linux ecosystem, and Novell has tended to be in the top 5, IBM contributes plenty back, and there's a reason I didn't include Cannonical on the list for the time being. What you fail to realize is that people AND corporations taking linux and the free software ecosystem and tweaking it to their needs is what this entire system is based upon. It's completely a system of merit, and the idea that companies can't or should participate inside the meritocracy is stupid, particularly given that we need companies for unfun grunt work.

                      What you're really failling to understand is that while non-contributing bodies don't add anything to the Ecosystem, they also don't subtract anything. They're a null balance. If they are creating any harm, it is likely to be only to themselves, see Ubuntu's Unity for example. It's a design unlike any other one that's been claimed, actually is chasing after OS X, but thing is, you know what? I don't have to deal with it, because I can use whatever distribution I want, and I won't have to deal with that there as long as I avoid Ubuntu (which I started doing long before unity showed up). Because we are diverse which some might call "fragmented", ultimately if there's something you want or don't want, there's likely a distro for it. For instance want to resolve package dependencies by hand, you can run slackware, to the slackware community what other people are doing with automated package dependency resolution doesn't matter to them, it's what they want to do. So since avg users, and the bigger distros are doing it, and they're not.. everyone else has a null effect on them in terms of packaging, zero, zip, none.

                      The ultimate point here being if you don't want it you don't have to take it, and it won't effect you other than maybe making the infrastructure better for you.



                      Gamers bring these extremely useful people called Modders with them, an influx of modders means an influx of people capable of doing coding, art, graphics, sound, etc.. This means this means an influx of people who will not only improve and better our games, but are also likely to improve our infrastructure as well as I outlined in my previous comment.
                      I don't want to reiterate everything I said above, so I'll just repeat that Linux used to be an OS designed with best interest of USERS in mind. If a corporation gets involved, it's not due to any kind of philanthropic intentions, but with a clear vision of exploiting the infrastructure for their gain. Sometimes the company's direction coincides with what is best for users, sometimes it doesn't. Due to intelligent and suspicious user base, big companies didn't have a lot of chance to subvert the development in their direction (however, there are examples of it, such as Java and Mono making it into the distro repositories). Until now. As Linux's user base expands, the old-hat free software advocates' importance vanishes, and the resistance towards subversion vanishes together with them. Again: just look at what happened to Android.
                      Last edited by kirillkh; 04 June 2012, 07:05 AM.

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