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It's Official: Valve Releasing Steam, Source Engine For Linux!

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  • #21
    I don't think we should say "It's official" until we hear it directly from Valve. Still, I'm inclined to believe it, given what we know already.

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    • #22
      Finally!!

      Originally posted by homerhomer View Post
      This is amazing news. Hopefully publishers port some games to Linux. My only concern is that I run a ton of Steam games through wine, and I know there only a certain number of those will be ported. Will steam support a wine wrapper for those games not being ported?

      Anyhow, this is great news!
      The exact question i am asking, indeed this will be even better!!, but maybe there are legal problems ??

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      • #23
        For those that are like "What is Steam and Valve and Source and all?":

        Valve = game developper
        Source = Valve's game engine
        Steam = Valve's client for keeping your games up to date

        Later on other developpers came to Steam, Steam expanded as a store (no retail discs needed anymore. Later Source games required Steam).

        Source powers one of the most succesfull games ever made and still massively played to this day.

        Lots of people buy their games solely from Steam.

        Valve's DRM is not restricting but enabling. Other studio's have their of DRM that is very restricting. You are informed upfront though Steam what kind of copy protection games have. Valve games require one time activation per install. Games can be downloaded unlimitedly and Valve games do not have an activation limit of any sorts. WHen Steam goes down you can not check the master servers for online servers, but you can still enter IP adresses to connect to online servers. When Steam goes out of business Valve will release patches to crack your games. In order for the patches to work you must have made a backup of your games for which there is a non-hidden GUI option in the Steam app, but you can also backup your games by means of your file browser.

        'Nuff said?

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        • #24
          Originally posted by mendieta View Post
          I thought Steam was some sort of interface to download binary-only games on Windows. But it seems that I was off. And it seems they also develop a games engine?
          Valve makes games. They have made a number of very well received, critically acclaimed, top seller games (/marketing-speak). Among these are the Half-Life series, the Left 4 Dead series, and the Portal series. Their game engine, called the Source Engine, now has an OS X port and supposedly will soon have a Linux port. The Source Engine is available to developers essentially for free, and a LOT of indie and hobbyist games have been developed on top of the Source engine, as well as a number of non-Valve commercial games. With the engined ported to Linux, these games can (if the developers so choose) port their mods over to Linux now. Even though source for the engine is available, it is NOT "Open Source" according to the OSI; it's very much a proprietary license that happens to allow you to view and edit the source code.

          Steam is more or less exactly what you thought it was, albeit it has some additional features besides just downloading games. It functions as a store, an update/content delivery network, an online match-making service, and a general community service (in-game chat, achievements, and such). Porting it to Linux makes it easy for devlopers to distribute games to Linux users. In all honesty, the most important thing it would achieve for Linux users IMO is to work around the fucked up and user harmful packaging model that the major distributions keep shoving down users' throats.

          With Steam, we'll finally have an easy and reliable way to get third party software installed on Linux without developers needing to make 18 variations of the same damn software to support each version of each distribution and without requiring users to be shell gurus capable of manipulating bits and doing manual dependency management and otherwise getting simple binaries to actually freaking run. We'll finally have that for games sold via Steam, at least.

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          • #25
            Why is it that Phoronix seems to be on a crusade on this topic? Every time it is mentioned, they do everything to say that it is coming. We had no real evidence that Valve intended to release software for Linux until today, yet we have a plethora of links in the article about it that basically say "we covered it first!". Until today's announcement, the only evidence that existed showed that Valve's developers were developing Stream on Linux, but none of it could definitely show that Valve intended to release Stream for Linux. While this is certainly exciting, it does not seem to merit the crusade mentality that Phoronix seems to have.

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            • #26
              It is the beginning of linux world domination.

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              • #27
                Bah. The forum is slow as molasses again. I figured it would be something steam related. Don't know if this is a bandwidth thing or a you're just serving the site from an Intel Atom based Netbook

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by Shining Arcanine View Post
                  Why is it that Phoronix seems to be on a crusade on this topic? Every time it is mentioned, they do everything to say that it is coming. We had no real evidence that Valve intended to release software for Linux until today, yet we have a plethora of links in the article about it that basically say "we covered it first!". Until today's announcement, the only evidence that existed showed that Valve's developers were developing Stream on Linux, but none of it could definitely show that Valve intended to release Stream for Linux. While this is certainly exciting, it does not seem to merit the crusade mentality that Phoronix seems to have.
                  I have my sources.
                  Michael Larabel
                  https://www.michaellarabel.com/

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by monraaf View Post
                    Bah. The forum is slow as molasses again. I figured it would be something steam related. Don't know if this is a bandwidth thing or a you're just serving the site from an Intel Atom based Netbook
                    The server tardiness today is unrelated to the Steam news.
                    Michael Larabel
                    https://www.michaellarabel.com/

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by Michael View Post
                      The server tardiness today is unrelated to the Steam news.
                      Its the ad servers they a creating too much money, clogging the airflow of the forum server.

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