

It's Official: Valve Releasing Steam, Source Engine For Linux - yigit
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_steam_announcement&num=1

======
ramy_d
Valve Corporation has today rolled out their Steam Mac OS X client to the
general public and confirmed something we have been reporting for two years:
the Steam content delivery platform and Source Engine are coming to Linux.
This news is coming days after we discovered proof in Steam's Mac OS X Client
of Linux support and subsequently found more Linux references and even the
unreleased Steam Linux client. The day has finally come and Linux gamers
around the world have a reason to rejoice, as this is the biggest news for the
Linux gaming community that sees very few tier-one titles.

Those enthusiasts within the Phoronix community even managed to get the
unreleased Steam Linux client running up to a partially drawn UI and other
modifications, but now that work can stop as Valve is preparing to officially
release the Steam Linux client from where they will start to offer Linux
native games available for sale. For all those doubting our reports that
Source/Steam would be coming to Linux, you can find confirmation in the UK's
Telegraph and other news sites. An announcement from Valve itself is imminent.

Found already within the Steam store are Linux-native games like Unreal
Tournament 2004, World of Goo, and titles from id Software such as Enemy
Territory: Quake Wars and Doom 3. Now that the Source Engine is officially
supported on Linux, some Source-based games will be coming over too. Will we
finally see Unreal Tournament 3 surface on Linux too? Only time will tell, but
it is something we speculated back in 2008. Postal III is also being released
this year atop the Source Engine and it will be offering up a native client.
We have confirmed that Valve's latest and popular titles like Half-Life 2,
Counter-Strike: Source, and Team Fortress 2 are among the first of the Steam
Linux titles, similar to the Mac OS X support. The released Linux client
should be available by the end of summer.

Similar to Valve's strategy with Mac OS X, it's expected that they too will be
providing Linux game releases on the same day as Windows / Mac OS X for their
new titles and that there will be first-rate support across all platforms.
Portal II should mark the first of these efforts.

This is terrific news considering the last major tier-one game release with a
native Linux client was Enemy Territory: Quake Wars back in 2007. There was
also supposed to be Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux with claims of it still
being worked on, but two years later that has yet to see the light of day,
except now it could with the release of the Steam middleware. In the past few
years there has just been less-known game releases like Shadowgrounds:
Survivor via Linux Game Publishing (LGP) and then the community-spawned open-
source games like Alien Arena 2009, Nexuiz, and Sauerbraten, but what Valve
has just done should prove to forever revolutionize the Linux gaming scene.

Our friends at Unigine Corp though will now face greater competition in the
area of developing the best game engine that is supported on Linux. The
Unigine developer is quite visually advanced (and at the same time, very
demanding on the hardware) while their developers are quite friendly towards
Linux, but to this point besides a couple of great OpenGL benchmarks (found in
the Phoronix Test Suite), they have yet to really touch any Linux gamers --
but that will change once Primal Carnage and other titles are released.

We are so grateful that Valve has finally publicly confirmed via the Telegraph
(and another pending announcement is likely) that they are bringing Steam and
the Source Engine to Linux as this should provide a huge opportunity for the
Linux distributions and other Linux stakeholders to prove their viability
against Windows and can begin attracting gamers if successfully leveraged. We
have already shown that in terms of OpenGL performance, Ubuntu 10.04 is on par
with Windows 7 for ATI/AMD and NVIDIA graphics and that Linux is a faster
gaming platform to Mac OS X.

Stay tuned for plenty more coverage. Of the six years that Phoronix has been
around providing many exclusive news stories and Linux hardware/software
coverage, Valve's move with the Steam Linux client / Source engine will likely
prove to be the most significant event and opportunity that the Linux desktop
has been provided at least since the time of the initial Linux netbook push,
if not since the entire time we've been around. Only time will tell though if
Linux vendors and stakeholders will fully capitalize upon the opportunity that
has the potential of greatly expanding the Linux desktop user-base.

~~~
ramy_d
page takes for ever to load, here's the article

~~~
ytilibitapmoc
Thank-you from those of us behind brain-dead filtering proxies... :-)

~~~
oomkiller
Would you rather the proxy be sentient like GLaDOS? ;)

~~~
jrockway
As long as the morality core doesn't fall off.

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krschultz
So now Linux users: BUY BUY BUY.

I'll be sure to buy a few things from it once it is available even if I'm not
likely to play many games.

Passively supporting this isn't very helpful, vote with your wallet. The more
money they make the better it is for Linux in the future.

~~~
jws
Inside the Steam program:

    
    
      Failed to load web page (unknown error).-324
      Failed to load web page (unknown error).
    

Then after much reloading a simply black screen. It seems they did not plan to
service the spike.

~~~
TeHCrAzY
Unlikey, the load from this is being produced during the low in thier daily
performance graphs. You can confirm that by googling 'steam stats' or
something similar (ill dig up the link when i'm off my mobile).

Steam internally uses webkit, perhaps your os is missing something it needs.

~~~
TeHCrAzY
As promised: <http://store.steampowered.com/stats/>

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wingo
I feel like an out-of-touch old man. (Getting there, perhaps?)

Both the article and the comments assume a baseline level of understanding
("Steam Mac OS X client"; "Linux support"; suitably vague nouns). Searching
helps me resolve these words, to some degree; but I still don't know what this
thing is (that is not a quotidian HN topic).

I'm sure Lisp implementation articles are similarly opaque to non-initiates.
But, um, a little help, please? :)

~~~
johnswamps
Steam is sort of like an app-store for games which only ran on Windows for a
long time. You buy games on Steam and can then download the games on any
computer you install Steam on. There's a bunch of other stuff such as being
able to talk to your friends, multiplayer, and keeping track of achievements.
Valve (the creators of Steam) are porting it to Mac and Linux. This is not,
however, sufficient to play all games on Steam, since games from many
companies are on Steam and not all of them are interested in making their
games cross-platform. So, in addition, Valve is porting their Source engine,
which powers games such as Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and
Portal to Mac and Linux so that those players will able to play them. They
will of course be able to play any other games on Steam that are class-
platform.

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sirn
Phoronix's source seems to be from the Telegraph.co.uk's article[1]. While I
don't doubt Valve will release Steam for Linux, I'd wait for the slightly more
official statement before declaring it's official.

    
    
      [1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7715209/Steam-for-Mac-goes-live.html

~~~
yangman
What's more, the second source cited is basically a copy-n-paste of the
Telegraph article.

Phoronix can pretend to be a reliable primary source all it wants, but it's
questionable stuff like this that makes its reporting a complete joke amongst
the X and DRI/Mesa development community.

~~~
_delirium
I've had a similar impression. There's more than one time I've read a Phoronix
article and thought: "Finally, an article on this subject! Only, this one
isn't very good."

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jerf
Any idea how this is going to interact with DRM? Because I might buy games
from Steam, but the idea that I'd put DRM on my Linux system is little more
than snicker-worthy. (Sure, just let me compile that into my kernel for you,
no sweat....)

~~~
windsurfer
The DRM is, for the most part, userspace and is mainly an authenticaton scheme
to determine if you are authorized to play the game.

~~~
jerf
Where is your information from? I can't seem to Google anything up. "For the
most part, userspace" doesn't really mean much.

It is difficult to imagine the authentication scheme that wouldn't be fairly
trivial to crack, given that I have full control over the entire software
stack from top to bottom, including not merely the kernel but my choice of
hypervisor.

~~~
ptomato
Steam is relatively trivial to crack on Windows as well. Certainly nothing has
prevented the various Steam games from being cracked wide open and distributed
independently.

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ericz
The only reason some of my friends still dual boot Windows is to play games.
Cheers for one of the biggest gaming developments in Linux. Now hopefully
there will be others that follow!

------
javanix
I honestly wasn't sure if this day would ever come.

After all, if OS X, with all of Apple's resources, couldn't wrap up much
developer support, what hope did Linux have?

Absolutely fantastic news!

~~~
mrcharles
It's not really news yet. Valve won't officially get behind it until such a
point as they can be sure that it will function solidly on the majority of
major Linux platforms. Even beyond that, they'll want to make sure there's a
market for it, and that's going to be the harder part. I expect any linux
stuff done so far is exploratory rather than a guarantee.

I mean, the support that's there could be just one or two guys noodling
around. At one point in the life of Neverwinter Nights, there was a BeOS port
done by a BeOS fanatic in the Bioware office.

Sadly, until there's an official announcement, I wouldn't get too excited.

~~~
apakatt
Check the image from the Mac Steam announcement:
[http://media.steampowered.com/apps/mac/MacSteam_AlfredJasonG...](http://media.steampowered.com/apps/mac/MacSteam_AlfredJasonGabe.jpg)
The guy has TWO penguins on his desk! That must count as an official
announcement as well, right? ;)

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k0eselitz
Heh. It's "official" - if by "official" you mean "not official at all."

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rbreve
I downloaded Valve for OSX , but there are not many games for mac right now,
all the good games are only available for windows

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papachito
There's nothing official yet from Valve.

~~~
timdorr
FTA: "An announcement from Valve itself is imminent."

So, you found evidence of it, even got it running, but all over unofficial
channels. This is about as official as a table is an banana.

~~~
ComputerGuru
_a_ banana.

Sorry. >.<

~~~
timdorr
Whoops. Wrote another analogy (table is an elephant, I believe) and then
changed it without updating my grammar.

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bitwize
Huh? Games? On _my_ Linux?

~~~
eru
Unix was one of the first operation systems to come with games out of the box.
Linux proudly follows that tradition.

Some other interesting commercial games for Linux are available at
<http://www.wolfire.com/humble>

~~~
ugh
That may be true but Linux still sucks as a gaming platform. That’s just how
it is and facing up to that reality might help.

~~~
Jach
Because of lack of professional quality games, lack of external controller
drivers (not sure how common this is), lack of DirectX? Please be more
specific with its suckiness, since it seems like you think the problem is some
inherent issue with Linux itself, and I'm not aware of anyone denying those
few problems I listed. I'm not sure I'll buy the lack of users willing to pay
money, but that's not a problem with the platform anyway.

~~~
ugh
Because of a lack of professional quality games. That’s not a inherent problem
with Linux and I never claimed there to be one (I honestly don’t know whether
there is one).

~~~
code_duck
There might be issues with sound subsystems across distributions (or um..
within distributions), but games on Linux perform quite well and are
indistinguishable from other platforms (I spent a good bit of time playing UT
2003 on Linux, and it works perfectly).

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swah
I don't understand, why is this program valuable to be open-source? What does
it do?

