There Is No Doubt, Steam Is Coming To Linux!

[CNCFarraday]

As I've said, Source builds and runs on Linux.

The problems are political, not technical. It is a nightmare to offer proper, commercial-grade support for Linux software. Please don't bull*** about Novell & co, they offer support for technical people. 99.9% of gamers are not 'technical'. There's one thing to offer support to *nix admins or *nix programmers, another for people who just want to pop in a disc, install, ok, ok, play. The problem is that, when you sell a product, for cash, especially a product that HAS support for other problems, you can't tell your (new) customers 'RTFM!' and pray that only 'professionals' and 'hobbyists' will buy and install your titles. Most people use 'digital appliances' not computer systems. That's why Apple's gadgets (Macs included), consoles and 'fashion phones' are so popular.

So, either Valve will draft some sort of "you are on your own on Linux" type of EULA for their titles and their distribution service or will only offer support for installing on x,y 'official' versions of Ubuntu, openSuse, Fedora and a handful of other popular distros.

However, I'm far more disturbed at the prospect that they will release some sort of Cedega-like assistance software for running games in wine.

[Flyser]

There's a problem where the client makes both a Steam and a steam folder in the home directory (windows paths are case insensitive, so it probably thinks they're the same folder). It seems to stop the error in the log file if you copy the files into each other.

But it still dies - it seems to be the fatal error in the updating that kills it, not the thing about failing to open a file that shows up in the log...

You could try to create a symlink called 'Steam' to the 'Steam' directory. I can't try this out right now, but I certainly will do that later.

[sylware]

If valve read this, PLEASE! DO NOT FORGET 64bits generic BUILDS!!

... and if you have a good automated build system, some architectures optimized builds are welcome (advanced user tab in steam?). That's called leveraging open source plateform power.

[V!NCENT]

Linux support a nightmare? bla bla bla bla...

Epic ever had a problem? id ever had a problem? Fscking astroturfing nonsence FUD...

[CNCFarraday]

Id sold boxed games that were played over LAN. Steam is a digital distribution system.

How many games did Id sell for linux? How many different titles. How many titles with complex online multiplayer system (TF2, L4D(2)).

Do you have any FACTS to back up your statements ? What level of support did Id or Epic offer for their games ? Is it anywhere near comparable to what Valve offers for both the Steam service ( did Id provide a complex online distribution system for 3rd parties? ) and its online games (TF2, L4D2).

Linux support IS a nightmare for money making corporations. The ecosystem is too heterogeneous and requires technically skilled people to use properly especially when it comes to drivers and binary blobs. How many binary blobs are are on deb repositories ? Right...

Again, Linux is heaven as long as you know what you are doing. Games and the people playing them, especially today's consoles breed, are as far as technical as you get. It is really easy for you or me, who know the ins and outs to do the proper thing and make a game or a binary blob work ok and jump through all the hoops.

People at the other end of the support line are not "*nix geeks" (i hate this term) and are NEVER going to be. Valve is not going to spend money on highly skilled people to sit at the phone/mail, analyze system/kernel/libraries configurations and provide solutions for end users. Nobody in their right mind will.

What happens when ATi's latest blob crashes everything? Or nVidia's latest blob has horrible support for X card that otherwise work fine in Windows? Or the latest auto update of the x,y,z distro pushes some shared library that makes steam/tf2/whatever crash, or causes connectivity problems. The most popular distro with non-tehnical people, Ubuntu, comes with pulseaudio by default. I can write a faking 3-volume novel about pulseaudio and how much crap you have to put through to be sure Ubuntu doesn't fuck up everything on the next update and, even if it seems to work, if some app uses pulse while you play a game, it brings the whole thing down. I know how to fix it. Does 'average joe stacks' ?

[Riotta]

I hope this time the news are real, I'm tired of using wine to play Counter-Strike, please someone confirm this news with Valve.

[d2kx]

I have read that the Steam client only lets you connect if you are part of the Mac OS X beta program (if you have been invited).

[dopehouse]

What happens when ATi's latest blob crashes everything? Or nVidia's latest blob has horrible support for X card that otherwise work fine in Windows?

Didn't we saw this kind of things already on Windows? I for my part can say 'YES'.

Or the latest auto update of the x,y,z distro pushes some shared library that makes steam/tf2/whatever crash, or causes connectivity problems.

Shared Libraries are not a problem for commercial proprietary applications, cause you just need to link against a half recent libc (e.g. the oldest version you want to support that is shipped with the oldest distro you want to support). All other libraries will than be shipped with the application and will be used. Thats why games like SC3K, ET:QW and other games brings their own versions of libraries for SDL, Freetype, CURL or whatever they need. For example, here is the ldd output of Heroes of Newerth binary.

	linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xf7727000)
	libpthread.so.0 => /lib32/libpthread.so.0 (0xf76e8000)
	libk2-x86.so => /home/xxx/games/HoN/libk2-x86.so (0xf6ebb000)
	libstdc++.so.6 => /home/xxx/games/HoN/libs-x86/libstdc++.so.6 (0xf6e02000)
	libm.so.6 => /lib32/libm.so.6 (0xf6ddc000)
	libgcc_s.so.1 => /home/xxx/games/HoN/libs-x86/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xf6dd1000)
	libc.so.6 => /lib32/libc.so.6 (0xf6c8c000)
	/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7728000)
	libdl.so.2 => /lib32/libdl.so.2 (0xf6c87000)
	librt.so.1 => /lib32/librt.so.1 (0xf6c7e000)
	libz.so.1 => /usr/lib32/libz.so.1 (0xf6c68000)
	libpng14.so.14 => /home/xxx/games/HoN/libs-x86/libpng14.so.14 (0xf6c44000)
	libfreetype.so.6 => /home/xxx/games/HoN/libs-x86/libfreetype.so.6 (0xf6bbf000)
	libxml2.so.2 => /usr/lib32/libxml2.so.2 (0xf6a95000)
	libcurl.so.4 => /home/xxx/games/HoN/libs-x86/libcurl.so.4 (0xf6905000)
	libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libX11.so.6 (0xf67d6000)
	libncurses.so.5 => /lib32/libncurses.so.5 (0xf679f000)
	libspeex.so.1 => /home/xxx/games/HoN/libs-x86/libspeex.so.1 (0xf6788000)
	libspeexdsp.so.1 => /home/xxx/games/HoN/libs-x86/libspeexdsp.so.1 (0xf6776000)
	libfmodex.so => /home/xxx/games/HoN/libs-x86/libfmodex.so (0xf6559000)
	libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib32/libxcb.so.1 (0xf653b000)
	libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libXau.so.6 (0xf6537000)
	libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xf6531000)

I can still even play SC3K on my Ubuntu 9.10 x64 without problems. And that game doesn't receive updates since a few years (Loki did a great job on that).

[Shining Arcanine]

They could be developing the client on Linux for Mac OS X. The fact that the files have support for Linux does not mean that they actually intend to support it. The best that you can conclude that Linux users will get is unofficial support without an official announcement.

[gav616]

looks like i just got an update..