Valve Pulls Its Unreleased Linux Client From Server

[energyman]

a) if you use rhel (or centos) then your distro is supported by amd's drivers and you don't have to care about some superduper new Xorg server.
b) it is - because fedora is constantly broken.

[gilboa]

So, without knowing anything about me, you:
A. Assume that I don't use RHEL and CentOS. (False assumption #1)
B. Assume that using Fedora in work environment is quote "idiotic". (False -and- arrogant assumption #2)

Just a thought (as you know far better then I what I should and shout not do): Has it ever occurred to you that maybe someone is using RHEL for software deployment, while the development is being done on RHEL-in-VM(s)-under-Fedora, simply because Fedora has far better development tools and desktop environment compared to RHEL 5.x?

Mind boggling isn't it?

- Gilboa

[energyman]

so you are working for someone - but you are not using a stable platform like ubuntu lts, Redhat enterprise linux or SLED - and then you are complaining about drivers?

Sounds - idiotic.

[gilboa]

Do something - ANYTHING other than complain on every freakin' forum about your xorg not being supported. Either sell the ATI card or stop using Fedora. Just sayin... at some point you have to be solutions oriented.

Had you bothered to read my post completely before pressing the "Submit reply" button, you'd notice that I -am- doing something.
AMD/ATI lost more than 10,000$ of mine and my employer money due to their problematic upstream support. (Including a number of 470's that I'm currently in line for).

The main problem with your post is not that you dislike Fedora (Seems pointless to me, especially when you consider how many upstream development RedHat/Fedora is doing, but OK), the problem is that somehow ATI/AMD got the notion that if they support Ubuntu upstream, they can ignore X.org releases, and according to your post it seems that you're OK with it. (And far worse, it seems that Ubuntu management is OK with it).

Talk about being short-sighted.

- Gilboa

[Joe Sixpack]

Yeah because graphics on linux suck because Xorg, mesa, whatever sucks. Then along comes fedora that employs people to work on Xorg, and turn it into a decent display system.

Then proprietary graphics drivers don't work on this new system, and fedora sucks. Damn you fedora fanboys...

As for me, still waiting for KMS on proprietary display drivers. And xrandr 1.2.

If you feel that fglrx's xorg support keeps holding you back just switch to a distro that doesn't have that problem. Example: Ubuntu because they get betas for their releases. Arch has a repository and Gentoo has an overlay server that both offer the beta that Ubuntu uses. Or, you could use a distro that makes sure they ship a fully supported xserver.

Do something - ANYTHING other than complain on every freakin' forum about your xorg not being supported. Either sell the ATI card or stop using Fedora. Just sayin... at some point you have to be solutions oriented.

(PS: You said it yourself - it's a new system. The bigger problem to me is Linux went from having only a few bleeding edge distros to only having a few stable ones. When did shipping the latest *stable* and tested version become a bad idea?)

ROFLMAO! I'm sure that people say the same thing about Gentoo, Arch, Mint, and Ubuntu users as well.

No hate for Debian? Man they really have fallen from grace

[V!NCENT]

Steam comes to the Mac:
WWDC viewers will know it. Some Apple fanboys will like it. When the hype is over more or less a lot of people will know it. This will be nice for Apple but it will not give them a single customer extra because Apple products are costly and Steam hardware surveys show that only a tiny percentage is having expensive hardware; combinations like a 5 year old AMD Athlon 64bit with two cores, but mostly one plus a last generation avarage GPU and about 2GB RAM.

Steam comes to Linux:
The www will explode. Mark my words! A lot of people will switch to Ubuntu permanently. And face it; Word ? -> 2003 .doc format is the de facto business standard and PDF. Nothing OpenOffice can't handle nowadays...

[Yfrwlf]

I really wish that was true, but I don't see that happening. Here's my thinking/observations:

1) The Windows client update is scheduled to be released specifically today, whereas the Mac version will be released "by the end of the month".

2) It makes more sense to do these on separate days so that you don't have your technical resources split if you run into multiple issues.

3) They've hyped the Mac version for two months. Why would they do that, and keep the Linux version "secret"?

4) It makes sense to release the Mac and Linux client in two different marketing blitzkriegs - so that you get free advertising from the tech sites for Steam on two separate occasions.

Hmm maybe, though maybe they're keeping it secret because they were paid off to not advertise Linux, but instead will sneak it out the back door so to speak, but who knows. All speculation until it's released, and even though its release, like any software release for Linux, is sure to help Linux in general, I'm personally not too excited by many of their games any way except for a few.

If you think about it though, that might be fairly "practical", I mean, a major social gathering like Steam tells everyone "THERE'S A LINUX VERSION", that could potentially have a pretty radical impact via unhappy Windows gamers switching to Linux, you never know. Yeah, I'm sure many gamers have heard the term by now, but a gaming portal supporting it? Might be a blow both Microsoft and Apple wouldn't care to bare.

Just go up to Steve Balmer and shake him and ask him what kind of deals he made with Valve against Linux, I'm sure he'd tell you outright.

[Svartalf]

Which is unfortunate, because the modern API is so much faster, and geometry shaders are especially helpful for subdivisioning.

I know this. AMD and NVidia know this. However, getting people like 3DS (Catia) to change their code has been...heh...entertaining. AMD and NVidia are loathe to force the issue, though- they make quite a bit of coin supporting boosting in software (and small amounts of special hardware in some cases) these old antiquated modes by transforming that immediate mode stuff into the fastpath stuff for them.

That's what things like TIMMO is all about.

[Remco]

As an observation, much of the CAD, etc. stuff that works under Linux use immediate mode operations (yes...) and they much less use the "fastpath" stuff that games tend to use or things like shaders- mainly because they're using fairly mature codebases that the companies are loathe to mess with.

Which is unfortunate, because the modern API is so much faster, and geometry shaders are especially helpful for subdivisioning.

[Svartalf]

Phoronix: Valve Pulls Its Unreleased Linux Client From Server

The past few days we have been reporting on Valve's Steam client coming to Linux (and some of the Source Engine games too) soon as we had found Linux references within the Steam Mac OS X client and then other Linux references. We even ended up finding the unreleased Linux files on the Valve servers...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODE3OA

Michal... While it's nice that you get scoops like this- it's probably "better" if you wait a smidge before disrupting things for the vendors like this go at things. If I got my planned rollout leaked like this, I'd have at least fleeting second thoughts on the matter as a result.