Steam for Linux Enters Internal Beta in October

[Thunderfox]

[citation][nom]samkl[/nom]Eco-system I referred to is the OS platform, ie - Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. If I buy a game on Valve it's more likely to work across all platforms and because I basically "stream", even thought it has local files. And of course if games supports it.Physical disk you mention is a distribution ecosystem instead of the platform. Two different values in user's eyes. Makes sense?-SK[/citation]

You don't stream anything. This is not onlive. Steam installs full games to your machine, and they must be created to run on whatever OS / hardware you have. The only difference with Steam is that you get some extra stuff running along with the game to make sure that it won't run unless you have bought it from Steam.

 

[Guest]

Waste of time. I would rather develop more for an established OS, even OSX. Linux even lacks good, efficient drivers, so why the hell port games for it?


As much as I want Linux to be ported, it's extreme fragmentation, lack of good hardware support, and overall lack of end user friendliness turns me off greatly. Modern computers are supposed to erase most of the work, not generate it.

 

[jerm1027]

[citation][nom]edogawa[/nom]People will still continue to use Windows 7 for quite some time like XP, but I can't see Linux becoming anywhere near as big as Windows is for gaming, at least not for years. Windows 9 will likely be a much better improvement of Metro, hopefully. Linux is great and all, but for normal desktop use, it will never be good for consumers, it's to much work to get things installed and so many different flavors; it's just simply not user friendly and simple as Windows.[/citation]
For gaming, I can Linux getting more popular. OpenGL has been technologically superior than Direct3D and easier to program with. OpenGL also doesn't break compatibility. However, the multi-billion dollar company with cutthroat marketing tactics (F.U.D) made sure the open-source software never saw the light of day in mainstream gaming. The xbox 360 is the only console that doesn't support OpenGL, which forced cross-platform developers to use DirectX. However, OpenGL is coming back; surely you've heard of the OUYA and Android, iOS games, popular benchmarking tools like Unigen Heaven, and FurMark; all of these run OpenGL.
For normal use it's quite the opposite. Windows 7 took me six straight hours to get installed and everything set up. Ubuntu, less than an hour and a half. Even if Windows is pre-installed, it still takes quite some time to update out-dated drivers and remove the crap the manufacturer pre-installed in addition to setting up the usual, such as Anti Virus, codecs, Flash, Java RunTime, and dotNET framework. This is one of the very reasons why Ubuntu/Linux has gained so much popularity in recent years; there is very little set up required and most updates are applied during the installation.
Installing software on Linux isn't a strong point, but I'd say it's a hell of a lot easier browsing a catalog and clicking install vs browsing websites, downloading, and running the install wizard. However, catalog organization could use some more work, and installing software outside of that catalog can be a huge pain, especially for new comers; fortunately the catalog has most everything any user would need.
Ubuntu clearly has the ease-of-use advantage, and anyone who's ever used Ubuntu past version 8.04 knows this. It's the unknown and unfamiliarity that makes consumers stray away from it. They want what they're already used to. This is why Windows 8 will change the game in favor of Linux/Ubuntu.

 

[technoholic]

There is one thing i'm afraid about Linux. That is the variety of distros and the variety of package dependencies in the system. There are a lot of different distros and many different desktop shells like xfce, kde, gnome etc. Granted, my Ubuntu crashed a few times. I learnt that some packages/updates i installed were not suitable to some in my system. (now for instance if you try to use newer gnome shells in ubuntu, you must take a big risk of crashing your system). Especially if you want to install beta software in Ubuntu/Linux there is a big possibility you may crash your system. And it is a pain in the back, especially for a not-so-experienced user like me, to track down and solve the issue what causes my system to not boot in graphical interface. Too many dependencies, too many varieties, makes things too complicated. Yea, complicated code is what makes the code itself more "clever" but Windows for sure handles this perfectly when compared to Linux.

 

[Guest]

@technoholic

i agree, its not as hard as you strain, though

the biggest thing you really need to do before getting complicated (and what a lot of people miss), is to just install the right distribution you want, kubuntu, lubuntu, and mint are like the only good distributions these days that are as best as windows, any other system and your just stating the obvious about the distribution you choose, but hey, thats a problem, someone needs to stand in front of everyone and suggest a distribution before they try half-dead fedora