Valve to raise Steam for Ubuntu Valve has confirmed that Steam will launch on Linux, with an Ubuntu port of the 'iTunes for PC games' download service set to roll out alongside zombie thriller Left 4 Dead 2. The company used the first post on its new Valve Linux blog to reveal that it is currently refining the software, optimising L4D2 to a suitably high …
A RHEL/CentOS/SL 6 version would be nice. I really am getting extensively fed up with various software of late not providing a working package for the most popular, stable, enterprise grade Linux distribution while they are providing packages for poobuntu. Granted, generally a version for Fedora is provided, but it is insane to expect users to constantly be upgrading their distribution every 6-ish months to keep up with the latest bleeding edge distributions.
Most popular _stable_ distribution. Fedora is a perpetual pre-alpha bleeding edge incubator for RHEL (just for an idea of how pre-alpha it is, look at the stabilization period between when a Fedora is released and when RHEL based on it is released (F6->RHEL5, F12->RHEL6). Poobuntu is not much better, due to it's unending pursuit of the bleeding edge.
Ubuntu 12.04 is a LONG TERM SUPPORT release. That is, it's supported for 5 YEARS on the desktop and server (used to be 3 years on the desktop for previous LTS releases) so it's good until April 2017.
The next release of Ubuntu (12.10 in October) will be supported until April 2014).
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
RHEL6 is supported until November 30th 2020 (and by the looks of things general support seems to end around Q2 2017).
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/
Surely most people would probably upgrade their hardware and distros every 4 or 5 years.
Rob
@ Rob Beard:
You are missing the point. If you are targetting a frequent-release distribution, you are effectively setting yourself up for having to support every new release as it comes out. This can require a lot of work and is a waste of development effort that could be better spent elsewhere. Otherwise you're going to have to argue over what is supported and what isn't to a horde of poobuntu fans crying foul because they just upgraded to a new version of the OS and now their games no longer work.
RHEL and CentOS are primarily server oriented distros. Ubuntu is primarily a desktop distro and indeed the majority of desktop installations use Ubuntu.
So that's why they're releasing for Ubuntu first, though I'm sure that someone that uses an "enterprise" distro as their desktop will have no trouble getting an Ubuntu package to run on CentOS.
You clearly never tried such things.
The problem is that packages have library dependencies, and if the versions are too different, you end up with un-reconcileable dependency differences between the software you are trying to install and most of the software on your system.
This is why frequent release cycle distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu are not fit for purpose for people who are not prepared to reinstall their system every 6 months. Imagine MS rolling out a completely new version of Windows every 6 months and only supporting each version for 12. That is the level of longevity expected of Fedora. Ubuntu is a little better, but not much. It isn't a viable approach.
One possible workaround is shipping all dependencies with the package itself, or providing a monolithic statically linked standalone package which _should_ work for most people on most distributions. But even then it doesn't always work out due to developer competence (or lack thereof). For example, static Skype 4.0 for Linux still has an external dependency on libtiff.so.4, which it turns out, doesn't exist in any version of Fedora (F17 has libtiff.so.3, F18 has libtiff.so.5).
> un-reconcileable dependency differences
Nonsense. I have had both new and ancient software co-existing on Linux for pretty much as long as it has existed. Some things are as trivial as tricking the old software into thinking your new library is the old library. Alternatively, you can just have the old libraries.
I find your lack of examples disturbing.
@JEDDIAH
If you are running statically linked binaries or you have built your own library-compat packages from scratch, I can believe that. But if you're going to do that, using a packaged distribution isn't really an advantage in terms of time-saving - you might as well roll your own Linux-from-scratch.
> "it is insane to expect users to constantly be upgrading their distribution every 6-ish months
> to keep up with the latest bleeding edge distributions."
Not really. The simplest trick in the book would be to build every dependency into Steam and it's game as static. That way, the games would run regardless of your other libraries' version. Sure, each game would become bloated as heck compared to their windows counterparts, but then Valve is already doing that with their Mac releases anyway.
An alternative is to bundle the required libraries in steam's directory (Linux is usually smart enough to try to match the binary's call to the most compatible library) and have the games call those instead of the libraries that shipped with the distro. Unfortunately, this will only work well with Valve's own games. Third party games distributed through Steam will either need to build their games using the libraries Valve use, or ship with their own libraries as well.
@RAMChYLD:
Making the game static vs. bundling the shared libraries both suffer from the same degree of bloat. The only way you benefit from shared libraries is if you are linking against what already ships with the distro. Otherwise you might as well make the binary static as far as the memory footprint is concerned.
The middle way would be to auto-detect the library versions that exist on the distribution, use the locally available ones where possible, and only bring your own for the ones that are missing. For extra points, make a yum/apt repository for each of the distro releases and integrate the libraries the system libraries the games need by adding a repository to the distro. Which then means you have to support multiple distribution packaging methods in addition to Steam, instead of just Steam. Somehow I don't see a game distributing system developers to put in that much effort. The only viable options I can see are either fully-static binaries or only supporting distributions with an infrequent update cycle favouring stability over bleeding edge features (e.g. RHEL and Debian, rather than Fedora and Ubuntu).
...it is insane to expect users to constantly be upgrading their distribution every 6-ish months to keep up with the latest bleeding edge distributions.
You don't pay much attention to the PC game market, do you? Developers expect gamers to be upgrading their hardware every six months to keep up.
PS. How can you "constantly" be doing something at a intermittent interval?
"You don't pay much attention to the PC game market, do you? Developers expect gamers to be upgrading their hardware every six months to keep up."
This FUD again? Really? For the love of...
Look, I built my desktop 6 and a half years ago. Sure, it's a monster, but I haven't upgraded it since. It started out on XP64 and Half Life 2, and now it runs Win7 and Crysis. In Eyefinity.
I upgrade about as often as new console generations come out. What's the big deal?
"Eyefinity" = modern shorthand for "SLI'd 7900GTXs through a ridiculously expensive Matrox external splitter.
Well....if I'm really honest, that's how it was when I first started playing Crysis, and then like an idiot I incinerated the cards, all £400 worth. Fortunately, the splitter box is so insanely expensive that flogging it easily covered the price of an actual mid-range Eyefinity card at about the same power level as my previous cards, so not really an upgrade so much as "idiot burns out expensive cards". I even made a little profit off the splitter box, so PC gaming really did turn out cheaper. ;-)
At least with the PC it was my own stupid fault. When my PS3's yellow light came on, that sure as hell wasn't my fault...
This is largely not true. Crysis dates back to 2007. That was when I built my last gaming rig. I still have it, unchanged (Intel C2Q, Nvidia G92). It runs Crysis lovely with everything except AA turned up to max on a 1920x1200 screen. I have played through a fair number of games since then and have never felt the frame rate drop below what my eyes can pick up. So your premise that we are expected to upgrade every 6 months or so is very wrong. The only vague reason to upgrade since then is OS related (there are some games, albeit very few, that require DX10), not hardware related.
RHEL/CentOS tends to be quite a bit behind on the versions of software they are running - older, but very stable. RHEL6 is based on 3+ year old software, updated with security patches and bugfixes. (only a few packages are relatively new, such as firefox version 10). So getting it to run on RHEL would be alot harder than a distro that is based on recent versions of software.
Yeah that would be awesome running Left 4 Dead 2 on your corporate Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktops :-)
Seriously though, according to the blog they'll look at supporting other distros in the future too but they want to get it stable on one distro first (and that's an Ubuntu distro with long term support for 5 years on the desktop, so the goal posts aren't likely to move). No doubt when it's officially released it'll support other mainstream distros, and who knows, maybe they'll supply a tar ball of binaries (even statically linked binaries) for the not so mainstream distros.
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu on the desktop since they introduced Unity, but I can understand why they've chosen Ubuntu due to it's popularity. Personally I use Mint 12 and Mint Debian Edition so who knows when they'll be officially (or unofficially) supported :-)
Rob
This post has been deleted by its author
Any Steam games already available outside Steam on Linux will be available very fast... but any games designed for Steam will probably be heavily Windows-orientated so this could be a chicken & egg problem... developers wait to see if there is a Linux market to justify the time porting the game or developing new games for Linux, users wait until some games turn up to start suing the service.
Won't proper Linux fans complain the Steam platform uses DRM, demands a web connection and is closed-source?
I don't know about the whole "no games for Linux" thing. If you look at the Humble Bundles (which come with Steam codes), all the games I've seen on there have a Linux native version available. There's a *ton* of indie games which will work on it immediately, I would imagine.
Except that, other than, you know, online multi-player games, it doesn't demand a web connection. I don't play much single player anymore, usually when I do it's because the internet is out, Steam pops up a no connection notification, click OK, and carry on.
DRM, well, there's plenty of Steam versions of games available for download as torrents already if it really bothers them.
You have somewhat of a point about chicken/egg, but I think it will be moot.
Valve's entire catalog will move and they'll give it time to work, they're doing it because they want to do it.
They also have unique history among game companies selling other's products, especially indies. Combine that with them already having mobile phone apps and the possibilities for dealing with 3rd parties and new markets there.
Then there's also word they're moving into non-gaming software, which would not only give an immediate huge catalog of existing Linux products, but also let them move beyond the consumer gaming market on PC and Apple as well.
My sense of the timing of these things is Valve is making a much bigger play than just Linux games. More like going head to head with iTunes, NetFlix, Amazon et al.
And who exactly do you think is going to do that work? If you write a Windows-only game, it is man-months of work to make it properly cross-platform. That could cost $50-100k... of course then you can re-use the tech in new games but still it's a LOT of work if the code was not written cross-platform to start with (i.e. DirectX only).
No harder than a MacOSX version, and probably easier in many cases due to wider OpenGL support.
In some cases it's actually trivial, as if you picked a cross-platform SDK to build on then almost everything will work fine - games don't have to interact much with the window manager.
If you use OpenGL, then the hard parts are sound and joystick, both of which should be abstracted by your SDK.
That is why WINE works so well.
Steam on Linux will very likely be very much like steam on MacOS.
To some degree this will just be a marketplace for games that already exist (mainly indies). That's not a bad thing. I am not sure that Canonical is up to running an app store. A 3rd party game oriented one is not a bad thing. It will probably hit most of the likely need for a commercial app store for desktop Linux.
This can only be a good thing. Having Steam officially supporting Linux (along with MacOS) and having games run natively in Linux (without the hassle that is Wine) will mean we can choose whichever OS we want. The only problem I see are the grumbling Linux "free software ONLY" ideologists. The Ideologists being a separate problem with Linux anyway.
> The only problem I see are the grumbling Linux "free software ONLY" ideologists.
No, the major problem is that most of the games aren't written by Valve and will still be Windows/OSX only.
I had Steam on my hackintosh but in the end a reverted to windows for gaming because dual-booting just isn't fun. Its easier to install windows natively and do all your proper work in a *nix vm.
However, perhaps this might pave the way for a *nix console.
Its an interesting move by Valve. It isn't going to bring in lots of cash in itself (it might actually cost Valve more as already-bought games are re-downloaded for *nix) but it might encourage devs to do more multiplatform work -use opengl rather than directx.
Pretty sure Valve are seeing the writing on the wall so far as windows and the desktop is concerned. As apple only sell their OS with hardware, and the console markets are locked up tight, moving to linux gives them future proofing should MS go tits up , decide GFWL is the only allowed gaming platform on windows, or move their entire development effort to tablets.
I'm surprised they are using an existing linux distro actually. Might make more sense to provide a "ValveOS" cutdown linux with known drivers etc you can install in addition to your regular distro in a small partition, run off a USB stick etc. Game storage could be put on any drive after all.
Wrong!!! That should read:
Maybe they could rename the zombies 'windows (l)users'....
Perhaps a bit of editorializing also, the 'good guys" being represented by Penguins, and the "bad guys" being represented by that `windblowZE logo`. Every time a "bad guy" gets hit, the `windblowZE logo` shatters.
> I think you'll find that actually iTunes is Steam for music...
...except programs actually have a reason to be associated with a single quasi-monopoly vendor. Music does not. Programs by their very nature have to be associated with a particular platform or vendor.
Music is an industry standard that got turned into a single-vendor proprietary standard by Apple.
The proprietary and DRM aspect of games only reflects the status quo that has existed since the dawn of computing.
Err the title that is not a good example - we are techies, I would say more of us know about Steam than Itunes, now someone has said that Itunes is like Steam for music, that makes a little more sense, but I bet the Steam client is lot better and you get more entertainment out of it.
Well, Macs don't use direct x, and there's a Steam client for it.
I'll bet that the Linux version of Steam is actually a port of the Mac version, given how Macs are pretty much Unix boxes with lipstick anyway. Sure, it uses a BSD kernel instead of the Linux kernel, but uses most of the same core libraries that Linux does (including zlib) - even using OpenGL. The only difference is the low-lying sound layer and the low-lying video layer. They'd need to change from PortAudio to ALSA and QE to MESA. Which shouldn't be too much work.
Well, if you only open Steam (which updates every 8-12 weeks) twice a year to play Team Fortress 2 (which has an update about quarterly) then yes, it's going to need updating "Every. Sodding. Time." If you open it when you boot, and let the thing sit in the background sucking up its 0.2% CPU occasionally and squatting on 32MB of your 8 GB of memory, then everything's ready when you actually want to play.
The real point, IMHO, is Steam means that Valve games can be updated. Things get FIXED. Games get new material. New hardware with new drivers don't end up rendering your game permanently incompatible. Gosh, that's horrible.
"Idle question. When I buy a game like Civ 5 it comes on a DVD but the first thing the installer does is connect to Steam and (re?)download the game files -- all 1Gig of them"
You think Civ5 is only a gig? When I install a Steam game from DVD, it installs everything on the DVD, then goes and gets me the latest updates from Steam as part of the install. If there's been a GOTY release in shops since the game came out, Steam normally gives it to me for free. (I got UT3 Black Edition on Steam by registering a standard edition code, for example).
That download was likely a ton of extra content and patches.
This is why I start up Steam as soon as I get to my PC, then I let it run in the background while I go browse El Reg for a bit. Then when I'm ready to play, the update's either done or almost done :P
I have no problem with that actually. It's no different from other online games I have.
But yes, as pointed out before, you can disable updates on a per-game basis. Just don't complain when a server refuses to let you on when you want to play multiplayer, because you're running an outdated version of the game.
The games I have installed on my Mac partition, other than the indie bundle type games, all the big names are run through a WINE wrapper. Even big names like The Witcher, for example.
There are not many big name games that are done as separate entities (except GTA's Mac ports which are true ports done by a separate company and thus appear twice in the main library for good measure)
Wow. Just...wow. You are absolutely right. I don't know whether to be awestruck by Wine having come so far or depressed that Mac games aren't true Mac games.
OK, I'm over it. I'm awestruck.
<goes off to spend the rest of the week ignoring spouse, children and sleep whilst reacquainting self with old-skool *nix awesomeness>
Try and buy a PC game without it and you'll see what I mean. I do not want another forgettable, hackable username and password creating just to play with a toy. I will not risk some third party's servers fucking up and denying me access to software I've paid for and I resent the accusation that I'm a pirate and I need to be proven innocent first.
It's bad enough on Android with the perpetual "license error" bugs. If I'd have known that paid apps on that platform were basically Steam-ish shite by another name, I'd have not paid for them. Just another thing driving me towards root and the 'bay.
Ya hear that, Valve? Google? EA? Ubisoft? The lot of you fucking retards? Paying customer here, or I could be. Get rid of your invasive malware or I will make unauthorised, ironically malware-free copies out of principle as much as practicality. There is a bloody big difference between copy protection and the shit you are pulling.
Steam is most probably the least invasive game-controlling environment I have ever tried.
- it does not run a hidden service that runs whether you play or not (looking at you, EA Games)
- it does not require that you re-download your entire game collection if you restore your Windows system (looking at you HARD, EA Games)
- it does not even require that you reinstall Steam if you wipe your OS partition and reinstall Windows (I'm bloody sick of looking at you, EA Games) - if you install the same OS in the same version as before, obviously
- Steam has weekend deals that are sometimes astounding (got L4D2 for €5, can anyone top that ?)
- Steam allows me to play my games without bothering with a bloomin' disk
- unless the game I play uses an online server, Steam allows me to play offline (hear that, Blizzard ?)
- most importantly, the games on Steam play on the PC I have - yes I know, that's obvious, but it is also true of titles that were WinXP or before, like Evil Genius, or Supreme Commander, or, say, SimCity 4 - games that I have but did not succeed in installing on my Win7/32 configuration
- my Steam games have always been available to me when I wished to play them, not like LotRO or Diable III
- there is no such thing as a license error on Steam
So your rant against Steam seems perfectly unreasonable to me, and if your rant actually concerns DRM control or whatnot, then you must have stopped buying games since Y2K, because most major titles since 1995 have had some form of (annoying) DRM control embedded into them which seem to bleed onto the PC and take control of it. Why I remember a certain Lemmings II that wouldn't run anymore if I so much as chose a different boot option in the bad old days of DOS 5. And I also remember Painkiller, which I bought in a lovely box set and brought home only to find that it simply wouldn't install, since its paranoid DRM didn't believe that its own install disk was genuine. I was forced to go find a pirate copy to be able to play the game I bought - and I'm sorry, but I do not for one instant feel like a pirate for doing so.
On the other hand, Steam has survived two OS versions and I don't remember how many OS reinstalls and has never bothered me more than to ask for my login and password after the fact. It has even survived partition change and disk swapping without complaining. My game library is intact from day one, unless I feel like uninstalling something to free some disk space. And I can re-download whatever is in my library whenever I want. Heck, I can even install Steam on two or more PCs if I feel like it and access my same game library. Of course I can't play on two computers at a time, but I can have my home configuration and my laptop configuration for when I'm traveling - and that one can be offline, remember ?
To sum it up, Steam is great. It is the best game-selling platform there is. You may not appreciate that your are being checked when you play, and I basically agree with you on that point, but you're not really being given a choice anymore - well, not outside of indie titles, that is. So you might as well choose Steam, because there is nothing better.
So...
I can use Steam without creating an account? Or hoping that Steam's servers don't fuck up for the activation of a game I've bought? In fact can I play a game without somehow activating it, like Micriosoft's insidious and just as awful WGA abortion?
Ah. I can't.
Sucks, then. Sorry. No, I haven't tried it. I just have to see other people trying it to know I don't want it. There are games out there that don't demand installation of malware though, fortunately. They are few and far between... but they get my money. Valve does not. If it's not as simple as "install and play", I am not interested. It's a toy, for fuck's sake.
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