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

[DanLamb]

So Phoronix covering Valve Steam = Phoronix advocating and/or telling me that i should be using Steam?

One word: bullsh*t.

I never said nor implied that mere coverage was the same as advocacy. You must be responding to someone else.

[jayrulez]

I never said nor implied that mere coverage was the same as advocacy. You must be responding to someone else.

Present your evidence of advocacy then.

Just to put things in perspective. 15 of the 162 posts so far in this thread agree with your claims. That is 9.3%.
Unfortunately, all those 15 posts were made by you. No one else seem to share your unwarranted concerns. Please provide tangible evidence to support them or just agree to respectfully disagree with the majority and move on.

[Gps4l]

I do not get why some people see Valve as evil.

openSUSE had a problem with the license. I managed to bring together the right person from Valve and the right person from SUSE.
They talked it over, and Valve changed the license, problem solved.

Valve has solved problems with steam not ubuntu related.
They helped me and others with openSUSE.
It was a dream come true, I had never expected them to do this for such a relative small group.

From spending most my time on windows, now I spent most of my time on Linux.
Thank you Valve.

I can't see in steam if I am on windows or Linux, there is almost no difference.
( the only difference is my game library, which by default only shows the game you can play on your current o.s. )

[ninez]

I never said nor implied that mere coverage was the same as advocacy. You must be responding to someone else.

Being intellectually dishonest will get you nowhere in life.

You certainly implied that phoronix and other outlets were advocating Valve Steam, while you believe we should be advocating alternatives... So yes, you did imply that, and i am responding to your comment - no one else. - again, stop being so intellectually dishonest - it's VERY obvious that you are simply dodging any responsibility for things you have said / claims that you have made...

Present your evidence of advocacy then.

Just to put things in perspective. 15 of the 162 posts so far in this thread agree with your claims. That is 9.3%.
Unfortunately, all those 15 posts were made by you. No one else seem to share your unwarranted concerns. Please provide tangible evidence to support them or just agree to respectfully disagree with the majority and move on.

+1

[DMJC]

Why OSS Games suck

There are many reasons why OSS games are failing but for myself the number one reason was lack of tools. I am not going to get into a discussion about FPS games or other Genres. My genre is space flight sim/trading games like Privateer/Freelancer. I actually worked on the Vegastrike Privateer mod, Wing Commander Privateer: Gemini Gold. The biggest problem facing me was the lack of tools and developer support. The response from the lead programmer of Vegastrike was to learn Python or wait for a tool to get made. Well it's ten years later and no tool was ever made to create a star system or to create missions/levels. Everything in the game has to be scripted by hand. For a non-programmer this makes it impossible to mod the game. I want a simple 3d mission editor like Freespace2's FRED where I can place ships and create mission scripts by selecting objects and assigning times/actions to be completed. I do not want to have to get my head around 10,000 lines of python to get bored and then 6 months later when my interest picks up have to re-learn howto code missions. OSS has a very bad habit of getting stuck reinventing the wheel and not adding useful features to games. There's a reason why Freespace 2 has so many mods 10+ years after original release. The sourcecode to the game allowed the engine to be updated to have nicer graphics, and the entire game has 3d graphical tools from ship creators/importers/editors that let you place weapon hardpoints on ship models to the mission editor. Anyone can pickup the tools and create in seconds what the original game developers made.

In real game development studios, the programmers create tools for the artists to use to import models into the games native format. The mission editors etc don't always get released to the public but they do exist. Otherwise the programmers themselves handle all mission design elements. This needs to get fixed in OSS games. The reason the FPS games are so popular is they have editors as well as code. Cube/Saurebraten has its in-engine editor and the quake games have GTKRadiant. It's the games which do not have editors which are languishing or are remakes of other/older games. That's why there is very little content in OSS games. I think there needs to be a 3D game for each major genre with a full tool suite before Linux OSS gaming will do anything of note. Where is the racing game with tools where I can view my model in 3d and tell the game that the round bits on the car are wheels which should be spinning independantly of the rest of the model? At the moment all of that sort of programming has to be done by hand without tools. This is a major problem and it is scaring artists off of working on these games.

[Kivada]

There are many reasons why OSS games are failing but for myself the number one reason was lack of tools.

Glad to see I'm not the only one that sees the problem. Show of hands, who here spent countless hours as a kid making custom maps or characters in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Twisted Metal, RPG/Fighter Maker, Neverwinter Nights, Armored Core, etc.? I know I did, and actually still have many of those old saves backed up on a CD somewhere via the Gameshark PC link cable to my Playsation.

Map making can be as simple as making a sandbox grid and have a bunch of pre-made items that take up one cube each that anybody without any even any command line, let alone any coding skill can put together a map all on their own in an hour using all pre-fabricated items already found in the standard game. This alone would make all OSS games fore more interesting to play.

It was tools like those that allowed games to have allot more replay value and caused a dedicated community to build up around the game.

If you are a perspective OSS dev, shoot for something closer to Garry's Mod over a canned shooter and you will actually build a community around the game of more then a handful of narcissistic coders that can't be bothered to do anything but tell people to hand code it themselves.

[nightmarex]

Glad to see I'm not the only one that sees the problem. Show of hands, who here spent countless hours as a kid making custom maps or characters in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Twisted Metal, RPG/Fighter Maker, Neverwinter Nights, Armored Core, etc.? I know I did, and actually still have many of those old saves backed up on a CD somewhere via the Gameshark PC link cable to my Playsation.

Map making can be as simple as making a sandbox grid and have a bunch of pre-made items that take up one cube each that anybody without any even any command line, let alone any coding skill can put together a map all on their own in an hour using all pre-fabricated items already found in the standard game. This alone would make all OSS games fore more interesting to play.

It was tools like those that allowed games to have allot more replay value and caused a dedicated community to build up around the game.

If you are a perspective OSS dev, shoot for something closer to Garry's Mod over a canned shooter and you will actually build a community around the game of more then a handful of narcissistic coders that can't be bothered to do anything but tell people to hand code it themselves.

Define "kid" I was banging away on an Apple ][ back then =p, friggen basic. This point however is very valid and learned the hard way. When I start projects these days the first thing I do is build a tool set =). The best part about creating tools is they often can be repurposed or reused.

[a user]

You are not a developer, huh? You do not know how hard it is to battle fragmentation on Linux. If I was an enterprise, I would partner up with Canonical too.

sounds more like you are not a developer here.

[DanLamb]

Present your evidence of advocacy then.

Sure, from the original article:

Fortunately, most Linux gamers don't see this way as Steam being a detriment to Linux. Valve supporting Linux has been the most significant boost to the Linux desktop in many years, perhaps ever.

That is advocacy, not merely coverage.

Coverage would be saying that this service is announced but not making judgement of whether it's good or bad. Calling Steam "the most significant boost to the Linux desktop in many years, perhaps ever" is more than impartial coverage.

[DanLamb]

I do not get why some people see Valve as evil.

"Evil" is too emotional and unnecessarily dramatic. I never called them evil. I can make calm, reasonable, logical points without resorting to that type of excessive hyperbole.

Valve has every right to charge whatever they want and demand whatever legal terms they want of their partners. Steam is completely proprietary and owned by Valve and they are allowed to do whatever they want with it even if it's not in the interests of their partners, developers, or the community.

However, it's not in the interests of the Linux community to have such a proprietary service like that as the central backbone for all Linux gaming like Steam is on Windows.

The Linux community should advocate for something with more open terms, that stresses more developer freedom and rights. Also, any middle man marketplace fees should be zero, near zero, or failing that, go to companies more involved with Linux infrastructure like Ubuntu or the kernel team, rather than an outsider company like Valve.