Happy Second Birthday To The Steam Linux Client

[kwagga]

Make is 50 more!

To Valve if youre reading, well done on your steam platform en exposing Linux users to more games.

Your efforts are greatly appreciated!

Michael: keep up the great coverage

[pracedru]

Games on steam

I'm not much of a gamer, but once in a while i play Left4dead2 with my freinds.
Now i dont need Windows at all any more

[GraysonPeddie]

Portal 2! I played this game about 15 to 20 times to death already. I got myself down to 2 hours 24 to 25 minutes of playtime and this is with the loading times.

AMD A10-5700 with built-in Radeon HD 7660D and Linux kernel 3.17 with Mesa 10.2 in Debian. DE is GNOME 3.14 in Debian, but I have been having problems with GNOME Music and Totem not loading, so I'm planning to switch over to Ubuntu GNOME 14.10 even though my problems with some applications are irrelevant to the thread. I would love to switch over to Arch if it weren't for KXStudio repositories when it comes to installing kxstudio-meta-all (installs all recording/music creation/graphics/video editing software) and kxstudio-desktop-base (installs JACK and Cadence tools).

[nanonyme]

Portal 2! I played this game about 15 to 20 times to death already. I got myself down to 2 hours 24 to 25 minutes of playtime and this is with the loading times.

AMD A10-5700 with built-in Radeon HD 7660D and Linux kernel 3.17 with Mesa 10.2 in Debian. DE is GNOME 3.14 in Debian, but I have been having problems with GNOME Music and Totem not loading, so I'm planning to switch over to Ubuntu GNOME 14.10 even though my problems with some applications are irrelevant to the thread. I would love to switch over to Arch if it weren't for KXStudio repositories when it comes to installing kxstudio-meta-all (installs all recording/music creation/graphics/video editing software) and kxstudio-desktop-base (installs JACK and Cadence tools).

Too bad the entire concept of Steam runtime for Linux is you have an ever-expanding collection of libraries from Ubuntu 12.04. Can't be recompiled so doesn't work on modern Linux distros without.

[mike4]

Happy birthday!

Huge fun with Metro Last Light and looking forward for Project Cars.

[vortex]

This really shows there is not any interest in steam for the vast majority of linux users. Looking at the raw numbers, you see it flat, if not declining, which is really bad news for valve.
It still shows that pretty much all the publishers don't wish to waste their time doing a port for a very, very small user base, and not get anything for the effort. (There is virtually no return on investment).

So, the question is, why are the vast majority of linux users not buying games that are available via steam ?
One of the answers to that is the huge rift in any good standards going on, with multiple forks of pretty much everything, and they are different enough to give huge headaches to the people trying to port over games.

Then you got the horrible shape of the open source drivers, compared to the binary blobs, while they are slowly improving, it still shows that game players don't want the hassle, and rather just install windows, and then play any game they want with virtually no issues compared to linux.

Will steam OS fix this ?
That is one way to tackle some of the issues above, but, realistically, nobody is going to replace their current distro for that, which means that there will still be a very small user base that won't get the attention from the big game publishers.

Steambox would need to have killer features for people to use that instead of consoles, and from the ones that leaked out, you aren't getting that much over what the consoles offer.

About the only bright spot is that there is finally someone willing to spearhead linux issues that have been plaguing linux for a very, very long time.
I still wish vavle the best of luck, they are going to need it!

[pal666]

It still shows that pretty much all the publishers don't wish to waste their time doing a port for a very, very small user base, and not get anything for the effort. (There is virtually no return on investment).

you got it backwards. when there are no competition, all million of linux steam users will buy your game. so first to market gets big roi. and linux porting is simple after mac porting, but somehow you don't cry that macs have no games.

Will steam OS fix this ?
That is one way to tackle some of the issues above, but, realistically, nobody is going to replace their current distro for that, which means that there will still be a very small user base that won't get the attention from the big game publishers.

steam os is for replacing consoles, not current distros