Valve's Gabe Newell Talks Linux Steam Client, Source Engine

[AnonymousCoward]

Where's the picture of you and Gabe together? Did I miss something? Also as already noted, no transcript, no citations, not one word from Gabe. I'm a bit underwhelmed...

[dodgy]

Where's the picture of you and Gabe together? Did I miss something? Also as already noted, no transcript, no citations, not one word from Gabe. I'm a bit underwhelmed...

^ This.

"Valve's Gabe Newell Talks Linux Steam Client, Source Engine" is a very misleading title. It's just two pages of nothing new (except a couple of pictures), with a smattering of unsubstantiated paraphrasing, instead of actual quotes.

[dagger]

Yeah, but Ubuntu represents 95% of the Linux target audience. While Gentoo's target audience is sadists.

I'm not sure where did you get these numbers from, but they are far off from actuall results. I wasn't talking about Gentoo specifically in my post. I was only suggesting it will cause market fragmentation if only one distro is addressed.

Gentoo and Ubuntu address different markets. Gentoo is designed for power users who can make their own decisions about OS configuration, where Ubuntu's target audience are Linux newbies with no real Linux experience, where decisions are made for them. Obviously Ubuntu will have much bigger market share for that reason. There is plenty of space for both distros on the market.

[[Knuckles]]

Ah c'mon people, in the past Michael might have posted a bit too much based on some very small news that indeed turned out to not be so accurate in terms of timeline and all, but you've been watching way too many movies if you think he architected some kind of very elaborate farse, with pictures and a history of how he went to valve and all that, just to continue a "rumor".

For me, I think for starters this serves as proof. Now let's hope that Valve's execution goes well.
And I hope to see "steam linux beta invites" for phoronix users, that would be awesome

[mdias]

Hmm, interesting!

http://www.develop-online.net/news/40592/Valve-confirms-console-and-mobile-hardware-plan

[Nedanfor]

Where's the picture of you and Gabe together? Did I miss something? Also as already noted, no transcript, no citations, not one word from Gabe. I'm a bit underwhelmed...

I guess Michael will post more pictures and informations in the next posts/days. Why? Because he's not working for free and needs more visitors to make profit. What would you do if you have such a good scoop and a website? In my opinion it's legit.

[TeoLinuX]

Valve and Linux

Good job in being invited at Valve's.

My considerations:
The Title is misleading at least.
I'd like to read some Gabe's quotes on a future article.
With Microsoft evolution (Win8 being a tablet like OS, probably in a locked-in environment enclosing Windows, Xbox, WinPhones...) and Apple becoming #1 mobile game distributor (similar to that Android)... with locked-in markets (google play, Apple app store, in future MS) Valve faces a gloomy future in the long term. I guess they want to have a plan B for distributing they top-tier contents.
SO: yes, I second the vision of those who talked about a SteamBOX based on some unix flavour (not necessarily Linux due to GPL licensing, unless they can do some TIVOization).
Gaming and even more console-gaming industry needs stable and standard HW, stable and standard APIs/Graphic-Libraries.
I find it hard they start to port games to linux for generic distributions (which will be the one they target? maybe ubuntu, but like other distributions it's a moving target). Plus linux is 1% of desktop market and I think it won't gain much in the near future.
So I believe that if they ever port games to Linux OS on desktops (not probable), they will do that with their own gaming distribution, which will be the de facto standard and the target for games developers. Maybe a spin-off of Ubuntu or Fedora or Debian. But still, why they should (economically speaking)?

[Nedanfor]

And I hope to see "steam linux beta invites" for phoronix users, that would be awesome

Me too! Would be great being able to play with a microphone in L4D2 (my audio input port doesn't work with Windows 7, but works great with Ubuntu), I bought it for this reason Writing in chat is so boring... I may even install Catalyst driver if it is really needed for testing!

[allquixotic]

What "more" could Valve do than release their games and Steam for Linux? Sounds like one of two things has gone unstated:

1. Steambox
2. Open sourcing of engine(s) and/or the Steam client itself

I'm really intrigued by Valve's apparent willingness to hire people who aren't directly doing OpenGL. On the other hand, I wish they will hire some people to work on the open source graphics stack. Mesa commits from people with emails @valve.com !?! I can't wait!

If they do push a Steambox, I hope they use a platform compatible enough with what most people run on their desktops, so that we can also play their games on popular Linux distros. It would be a huge disappointment if they reinvent the graphics stack once again, like Android did and like Chrome OS did, rather than using Xorg. Because if they use Xorg + GLX + OpenGL, it's hard for it not to run on Linux distros for the PC, unless they decide on an ARM chipset for the Steambox.... that would destroy the ability to run their games on x86.

[Sverro2]

Epic

This is some EPIC news . I hope Trine 2 and Oilrush for Linux will also be added to the steam client.