About 20% Of New Titles On Steam Support Linux

[V10lator]

And if there are problems, you won't get much support from Valve. That's all I'm saying

Really? I see them having a FAQ how to install it on various distros: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/...am_under_Linux and working on bugs that aren't confirmed on Ubuntu (like this, which hasn't even the steam runtime enabled) : https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Sou...mes/issues/951

What more support do you want?

[mmstick]

To the people with the foul childish tongues... (8 year olds maybe?)... look, I'm just saying that Steam has decided what distribution they are supporting. That's all. Yes, you certainly can get the steam client to work on other distributions. However it is not a gurarantee that all Steam for Linux games will play. And if there are problems, you won't get much support from Valve. That's all I'm saying (sheesh ya'll are immature).

Valve doesn't care what you use. All Linux distros work the same underneath. As you have been told before, if you have a problem it is your own distros fault for not properly packaging software.

[cjcox]

To the people with the foul childish tongues... (8 year olds maybe?)... look, I'm just saying that Steam has decided what distribution they are supporting. That's all. Yes, you certainly can get the steam client to work on other distributions. However it is not a gurarantee that all Steam for Linux games will play. And if there are problems, you won't get much support from Valve. That's all I'm saying (sheesh ya'll are immature).

[x616e]

Ok.. I've been Linux only since 1993. I've had a Steam account for a very long time, using Steam under Wine, where titles like Half-Life and Half-Life 2 have run for many many years.

So.. now we have "native Steam".. however, realize it's native Steam for a VERY particular distribution of Linux that is known for very peculiar behaviors and choices.

With that said, many of us, especially those with existing Steam accounts, and the extreme minority like myself, that have had Linux-Steam only accounts for many years... have figured out how to twist the highly proprietary target "native Steam" client into a functioning program on something other than "that" distribution of Linux.

Here's the problem. If you see a Steam app that works with Linux and you're are NOT running "that" distribution, odds of it actually working are probably less than 50%. And most app makers do not include any free demo... which isn't necessarily a guarantee that things will work, but still...

Recommendation... I think Linux "native Steam" needs a "free" period for apps. That is, your access to an app through Steam should work for a set period from the moment you download it without having to pay for it. Then, if it's a title you want to keep, pay for it.

Right now... "native Steam" on Linux, if you're not using "that" distribution.. it's a huge risk.

I am using Fedora and have about 170 out of the 190 or so available Linux games and they all work. Being as this is still the early stages, I could not ask for much more. Take your FUD elsewhere please.

[chithanh]

Google won over Oracle with Darwin as implementation of Java execution environiment. Why shouldn't WINE as implementation of winapi execution environiment?

WINE itself is probably not problematic. But in order to be useful, some Microsoft DLLs have to be installed (often shipped along with games), and the copyright situation is less clear here.

[Bucic]

Did you RTFA or did you just jump into the forums? These are statistics from a phoronix reader not Valve itself.

I've found the topic browsing the forums, yup. My bad. But then there won't be 2 months before another portion of bollock-statistics from Valve will be posted here on Phoronix, so...

[brosis]

I would imagine the issue with wine is not that they are copying files from Windows but that a single patent lawsuit could completely destroy wine. Just take a look at the battles between Microsoft, Apple, and all of the companies that produce Android devices. They have been forced into punitive lawsuits over the most trivial matters in an OS that is completely different to their platforms.

Google won over Oracle with Darwin as implementation of Java execution environiment. Why shouldn't WINE as implementation of winapi execution environiment?

[mmstick]

I would imagine the issue with wine is not that they are copying files from Windows but that a single patent lawsuit could completely destroy wine. Just take a look at the battles between Microsoft, Apple, and all of the companies that produce Android devices. They have been forced into punitive lawsuits over the most trivial matters in an OS that is completely different to their platforms.

[AnonymousCoward]

I thought that myself but there are a few problems with that:
1. Wine performance is generally crappy, to the point that it will upset customers who bought a game claiming to work on specs that it in fact don't play the game properly. Valve doesn't want to be held accountable for people complaining about games not running properly in an environment the games were not intended to be used in.

This is starting to change with the recent CSMT patchset. It still hasn't completetly closed the gap but performance is a lot closer to Windows on most games than it used to be.

2. Wine breaks easily after updates. This will result in people buying a game that works fine one day and fails to start the day after.

Yes, this is a fair issue. I suspect Valve would use a stable version of Wine but that also means that new performance/bug fixes don't filter down as quickly. Perhaps switch to a well tested development release every now and then as stable releases don't come out all that often.

3. Using wine will discourage developers from making an actual linux-native client, as it is a really quick and easy (but sloppy) solution.

Possibly. Perhaps games should have to meet some minimum standard to be included as a 'Wine' game in the native Steam client, i.e 70+% performance of Windows and all features properly supported. If not they have to make a native release, which they should be strongly encouraged to do in any case.

5. In some countries, there's probably some legal restriction for using wine.

Yeah it's possible that some of the Windows libs could be a problem here but the Wine developers have replaced many of them with their own versions that shouldn't have any legal issues (but I'm not a lawyer)

The major drawback to this solution is it often requires the software to already be installed, meaning, this would be piracy.

If they have an agreement with the actual developers I can't see this being an issue. Games are already shipped with Wine + binary and they can do the same here with support by the developer. It does mean that if you wanted to run unsupported games you couldn't do it directly from Steam but unsupported games should probably just be left to the user to run Wine and configure it.

Finally, I think D3D10/11 is going be the major issue with Wine and Steam going forward. It hasn't been a problem for the most part until recently but games are starting to drop their D3D9 renderers and those games won't function at all with Wine at the moment. There has been development going on but it's probably still quite some time before it's even in a partially usable state.

[dietrdan]

41% of my personal Steam collection now is supported on Linux (105/254 games). That's pretty awesome, considering how little time it's been.

I've been running Steam on both Arch Linux and Gentoo without problems. I'm really quite happy.

Yes, same here. No problems with Steam on Arch / Manjaro Linux and around half my collection is already Linux compatible.
I still keep Windows around for the games, which aren't ported yet and and probably never will. But for new games I care about Linux support.

Valve/Steam sometimes offers you to play some games for free over the weekend, so that's like a demo, where you can try out the game before buying it.
I did that for example with Natural Selection 2 and Left 4 Dead 2. You have to keep an eye on their catalog though.

I think "Top games by current player count" is more important than if a game is so called "AAA" or not:

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/?l=german

4 out of the 10, or 40% of most played games on Steam at the moment have Linux support, namely: Dota2, Team Fortress 2, Garrys Mod & Counter-Strike.
Sure, if somebody did that statistic for the Top 100, I guess the percentage of Linux coverage would go down a bit, although I'm surprised how many Indie games with good Linux support are in there.
Even if it's a slow process, Valve needs to convince more AAA game producers to bring Linux support from day 1. It's not that I am into those games anymore, but if you cannot play the newest Call of Duty, Assassins Creed or Fifa, you will not convince any Windows user to switch... Actually, it would be a start if the publishers, which offer already a Mac version, would offer a Linux version too.

I've personally enjoyed those Free2Play games from Valve lately and I played especially many hours Dota2. Great competitive game and fair, you don't need to spend any money to gain an advantage.
What I am finally missing personally are the Sega Football Manager (2014 edition coming to Linux!), Elder Scrolls series and some more Paradox games (Hearts of Iron) to be completely happy