Valve Pulls Its Unreleased Linux Client From Server

[gilboa]

EXACTLY. And all they get is bitching.
...
and if you think fglrxy sucks, you are free to help to make the OSS driver perfect. So people have no reason to bitch around.

Not sure what's your point.
If ATI wants to compete on my money (And I'm not talking about one workstation a year...), they can and -should- do better. I find it unacceptable that their binary driver has yet to support Xorg 7.4 (F12) when 7.5 is out (F13 in ~2 weeks) and 7.6 is on its way.

Of-course, they could choose to drop their binary driver, and like Intel (Minus Poulsbo [sp?]), go fully OSS driver.

Make no mistake - I respect ATI/AMD's decision to release the complete documentation and help the development of the OSS driver. Trust me when I say that if the R800 drivers were to give ~50% of the performance of their Windows counterparts, I wouldn't have been sitting on the pre-order list for GTX 470's...

- Gilboa

[AdrenalineJunky]

Tell this to amd/ati guys. They are the obstacle between us linux users and an active linux gaming.

funny, i seem to recall half life 2 and portal running quite well on AMD hardware / Catalyst - and that was in wine, and on integrated graphics, i would imagine the situation would be far better with it running natively.

sure, from current reports i would imagine evergreen hardware might have some issues - but r600/700 hardware should have no problem with the games....

[VinzC]

Don't you see that premature exposure hurts the case?

that's called ?premature assumption? !

(In your face, pal )

[zappa86]

I agree with BlueKoala. I use Linux and I don't pirate software. While I support the F/OSS ideals, I am also pragmatic. Honestly, if GNU/Linux cost money and Windows was free, I would pay for former, simply because I feel it provides a nicer computing experience and fits my needs better. I also have spent roughly $1000 dollars on steam games over the past years and I would love to play them (or at least a subset of them) on Linux.

[Zhick]

Btw, @Zhick, you say that Heroes of Newerth is working with r300g? When did that happen? Last time I tried it crashed after hitting 100% of the game loading screen.

Have a look at this thread. Essentially it's working since a few days, and hasn't been broken yet. So quickly go grab a git-snapshot and get to compiling.

[BlueKoala]

A better question would be what demand they are expecting from Linux users who would actually pay money for software and services.

I would suggest that in raw data, there is probably a lot more pirates in the windows camp than on Linux percentage wise. One of the many reasons I use linux is so that I don't have to pirate windows. After paying good money for 95, 98, 98se and a couple of XP oem licenses, I don't see the value in paying money again and again to a giant that I don't want to support, and that frankly doesn't give 2 $#!7s about any of their users and their needs as long as their stanglehold on the market is strong.
And I have 152 games in my steam games list.

For most users using ubuntu, the games on steam vs the OSS games in the repository represents an unfair advantage in favour of steam for the most part; because that's where the money is. The equasion is also pretty simple: money = better games.

I'm sure there will be plenty of paying users from the Linux camp.
Even if Linux only accounts for 2%~ish of the desktop market. I'm sure that 1 year after steam come to linux, that 2% might look more like 4-5%.

I find it quite genius that Valve is coming to linux even if it ends up costing them a lot in the short run. Getting a great big foothold before mass adoption is sure to win them the market when it develops. And I was ridiculed not too long ago for suggesting that Steam might make it's way to Linux fairly soon :P I WIN!

[Remco]

A better question would be what demand they are expecting from Linux users who would actually pay money for software and services.

World of Goo sales seem to suggest that there is quite the demand for Linux games. After 2 days, Linux version downloads had already accounted for 4.6% of all downloads. That's 4 times the percentage of Linux users worldwide, so apparently Linux users are more likely to buy games than Windows users.

[BlueKoala]

The sheer amount of people that are willing to trade in opensource drivers for binary drivers here is staggering. It is also totally unrespectfull to the ATI devs who are sticking their necks out for us.

Did you guys ever concider using Windows? It seems you don't care about opensource anyway.

Don't get me(us) wrong. I would really really like to use the OSS driver. The reality of it is that my HD4850 performs more like an HD4850 with FGLRX than it does with the OSS driver at this time. With the higly progressive rate of the OSS driver; there will be little reason to use FGLRX in the near future.

[rbmorse]

The most interesting thing to find out would be what demand they are expecting from Linux users.

A better question would be what demand they are expecting from Linux users who would actually pay money for software and services.

[tmpdir]

Phoronix, i follow you for years now and i have to tell i find that trying to make sensation like this is not your real skill

Second that... already found myself another news site thats more objective, but phoronix is still one of my favorites.