Steam for Linux trollery

[dmroeder]

So I've been pretty excited for Steam coming to Linux, it's been getting a lot of attention lately. That being said, I searched the forum and found that there were topics back in 2010 where there were rumors of it "soon". I've seen some articles that where Valve claims it will be here before the end of the year.

If / when it happens they will sell a copy of the two games rumored to be released to me that they wouldn't have normally. I'm super excited about it. What would be even more amazing is Counter-Strike. I'd like to stop playing it on my crummy work notebook. I'm not a huge gamer, but I am a Half-Life/Counter-Strike fan for sure!

Any thoughts? Just more Valve trolling? I hope a side benefit is improved graphics drivers. Valve says that they have been working with Intel, NVIDIA and AMD on drivers.

 

[cl-scott]

This time it sounds like they actually have something to show for it in the form of porting the two L4D titles. It very well could have been that they underestimated how much effort it would be to do the port, or things happened and they had to divert resources to other areas for a time, or one of a number of other possibilities.

It is probably prudent to take kind of a watch and see or cautiously optimistic approach. Linux has been getting a lot of attention from companies whose interests are in server performance, and while some of that will involve making sure all the SMP code is very finely tuned.... Servers don't really need video acceleration, let alone the demands of gaming. There are several other areas where server and gaming interests will diverge, so it may well take a while before all the necessary infrastructure is in place on Linux, and until that infrastructure is in place, you can't really do much else... If you tried, you'd probably just have to go back and do it over again later.

However, unlike the rumors from way back when, this time there are some specifics to point to. The L4D ports, there was the story that got a number of headlines about how the Linux ports were faster than Windows, and also comments about how Valve was working with nVidia and had managed to fix a lot of bugs in the driver package for Linux. That is more than you'll probably find from any previous time, and again I would say enough for some cautious optimism.

 

[TobiSGD]

For some information directly from the source, Valve has an extra blog for Linux: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/