Is Valve's Steam Client Bad & Damaging For Linux?

[Serafean]

I'm not an avid steam user, too much lock-in for my taste... But whatever. Steam coming to Linux is awesome for the GNU/Linux desktop.
The client in itself is simply terrible though :
-Who in their right mind would decide that the X button doesn't close but only minimizes the app?
-Every menu in the client is a subwindow! WTF? Implications you ask? If I have a glow around active windows, the steam client keeps on losing and regaining focus, thus gains a very annoying flashing glow.
-The client doesn't follow desktop themes, AT ALL. Suppose you mix around the order of minimize/maximize buttons, does steam follow it? (I am not requesting they follow the desktop theme, just keep the behaviour I want).
-must have flash...
-As said before, ubuntu-centrism is mostly based on FUD, although I understand their position. (Gentoo/Arch user here)

That said, Steam on linux is still fantastic news, even though I will personnally never use it for more than testing. All my games will be coming from GOG.

Serafean

[Gps4l]

As a Fedora user, I can assure you're guess is very wrong. It took me a great deal of time to get the steam client to work. It also took a a lot of effort to get some of my games to work. Some of my games I still haven't gotten to work. There is a distro neutral approach. They could have a separate Steam install directory. Sometimes this would mean duplicate installations, but it would take most of the headache out. I promise you that no one without extensive knowledge of Linux will get steam running on anything other than a debian based distro.

I do not have extensive knowledge of Linux, I can hardly use the commandline.

Still I have steam running on openSUSE.

Valve has changed something, because non ubuntu distro's had a sound issue.

pulse vs pulse audio

Don't believe me, visited the steam for Linux forums, and see how many people have steam running on non Ubuntu distro's.

[Bomyne]

Agreed for the most part, but the problem is that the Humble guys are becoming more and more willing to just distribute Steam keys. I wish we could count on them like we used to, but since the THQ Bundle they have gotten less and less reliable (I am looking at their weekly sales here).

I can accept Steam being there for those who want it, but it has actually recently caused me some concern as more and more studios are just trying to get on Greenlight instead of looking at alternative distribution like many used to. People screaming about it simply being a choice should also realize that some choices could be being robbed from those of us who do decide to opt out of it merely due to Steam's dominance. And Steam's monopoly has been causing some harm to PC gaming, as any monopoly would.

The screeching in this thread is unreal though...

I want to touch on this monopoly thing. Right now, there is only one monopoly in PC gaming that we need to be concerned with, In my opinion. Microsoft's. Not even the Apple MacOSX is as widely used and supported as Windows is. How many developers natively support a non-windows PC OS? Not many. Certainlly none of the big budget titles. Blizzard supports Mac, I believe. But none of these games come to Linux.

I think we should let Steam have it's monopoly for now. You and I know it'll only be temporary, but the important thing is that when companies like EA and Activision see Valve waving a massive Linux banner around, and seeing how many users are downloading Steam's Linux titles, it'll encourage them to look firmly at their linux position. Many in a year, we'll see Origin for Linux. Maybe in a year, we'll see some other Steam competitor for Linux, and then Steams monopoly will be broken. But for now, Valve needs to keep waving that banner.

[Kite]

I cringed when "antithetical" was mutated into "anti-ethical".

[AJenbo]

LSB is RPM centric so it's not like they would be that flexible if they stuck to it.

[jayrulez]

Freedom of speech is a fundamental right in most civilized countries. Which backwater island are you from? Enlighten us (and send photo's).

I am from Jamaica. You may call it a backwater country if you want to but we are also entitled to freedom of speech here. Here are a few pictures for you: http://startupjamaica.com/p/

I would like to know what freedom of speech has to do with someone feeling entitled to being privy to whatever Valve may have under NDA, some one feeling that they are entitled to the source code of Valve's product and all the other unjustified sense of entitlement you can discern from the original thread. Please, enlighten me.

-------
I would like to thank you for requesting photos regardless of the reason. Thanks to that, I've realized that I'm missing about 2 GB of photos. Now I'll have to attempt to recover them .

Regards!

[Luke_Wolf]

LSB is RPM centric so it's not like they would be that flexible if they stuck to it.

Not really no. It specifies RPMs as the standard packaging format but the rest of the standard has pretty much nothing to do with it. The besides of which is this the packaging is essentially meaningless for developers. RPM/DEB/Tar that's all essentially meaningless to the developers themselves (assuming they're not writing package management software), as that's the packager's job.

[Rexilion]

I am from Jamaica. You may call it a backwater country if you want to but we are also entitled to freedom of speech here. Here are a few pictures for you: http://startupjamaica.com/p/

Thanks!

I would like to know what freedom of speech has to do with someone feeling entitled to being privy to whatever Valve may have under NDA, some one feeling that they are entitled to the source code of Valve's product and all the other unjustified sense of entitlement you can discern from the original thread. Please, enlighten me.

You are allowed to request the source, whether you are entitled to or not. I stated the above based on the notion that you are allowed to do so. From your response, I concluded you were against the fact that people are currently pushing Valve to release the source code. Hence my comment.

I would like to thank you for requesting photos regardless of the reason. Thanks to that, I've realized that I'm missing about 2 GB of photos. Now I'll have to attempt to recover them .

Regards!

...




Sorry to hear that. Look here.

[r1348]

As a Fedora user, I can assure you're guess is very wrong. It took me a great deal of time to get the steam client to work. It also took a a lot of effort to get some of my games to work. Some of my games I still haven't gotten to work. There is a distro neutral approach. They could have a separate Steam install directory. Sometimes this would mean duplicate installations, but it would take most of the headache out. I promise you that no one without extensive knowledge of Linux will get steam running on anything other than a debian based distro.

Huh? All it took me to run steam on Fedora was to add this repo and issue a "yum install steam". And I'm even on x86_64!

[qlum]

I think valve sure is helpful for linux as a whole, sure there are problems on non debian based systems sure its not open source but desktop linux would never really go into mainstream use without closed source stuff, steam just is closed source always has been and always will be. Among the users especially the new users valve wants to attract debian and more specifically ubuntu based systems are most common so primarily supporting those is fairly logical especially if you realize that non debian based linux distro's only amount to around 0.31% of the steam users this is devided under all the non debian based distro's with individual versions most of the individual versions are no more then 0.01% of the userbase so really the stat's don't lie.

Anyway 2 other big factors to the linux growth is the kickstarters and humble indie bundles and unity which has large indie support being ported to linux in turn.