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> As a Desktop Linux user myself I am not too concerned > with "market share" , to an extent I couldn't care less > if I am the only the person that uses it

by apl 14y ago

> As a Desktop Linux user myself I am not too concerned > with "market share" , to an extent I couldn't care less > if I am the only the person that uses it. That's rather shortsighted. After all, you being able to "just apt-get" depends on a large number of people sacrificing a lot of time. > Will "Steam for Linux" be something that you can just > apt-get into your free as in freedom Distro and start > running AAA games Obviously not going to happen.

antihero 14y ago
I don't see why Steam couldn't be distributed as a .deb package (and put in the repos), much as is existing proprietary software. I mean it probably isn't going to happen for the games, but Steam is pretty decent at managing them anyway.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I'd actually rather keep apt-get out of my games installation process. Obviously it would make sense for steam to call apt-get etc to install core libraries required etc. I'd rather not have some sort of dependency jungle whereby I have my system dependencies overwritten by some steam specific version. The reason apt-get scares me for games is that it can sometimes get very carried away and start doing things like installing mailservers + alternative Windows managers + different java versions when I try and install a relatively small program.
  - antihero 14y ago
    Aye, and I wouldn't expect games companies to have the first clue about decent linux packaging. I say keep the games installed in Steam, but Steam installed with the package manager.
  - jrabone 14y ago
    apt-get --no-install-recommends is quite helpful in that respect, as is aptitude why | why-not if you have aptitude installed.
jiggy2011 14y ago
That's rather shortsighted. After all, you being able to "just apt-get" depends on a large number of people sacrificing a lot of time. Of course it does, I do not deny this. My point is that I don't think in terms of "Great, now there is X for Linux this will cause 1000 people to switch over" I only really care if it helps me in someway. Of course I understand that there are network effects at work. Obviously not going to happen. Why not? This is obviously going to incur some significant cost to Valve, I doubt they would do it just so they can run a store with a handful of $5 indie games or free games. Either they imagine there will be a significant enough untapped market for Linux games now/in the near future or they have some other plan (such as a Linux based Steam Console). If the latter is the case, then what will this mean for "traditional" Linux users? Will they be locked out of Steam or will they be able to ride the bandwagon and get access to all/most/some of the games that the console does?
- LeafStorm 14y ago
  >> Obviously not going to happen. > Why not? This is obviously going to incur some significant cost to Valve, I doubt they would do it just so they can run a store with a handful of $5 indie games or free games. No, they will definitely have AAA games. (Or at least AA games...not sure how many A's Left 4 Dead rates.) The thing that's obviously not going to happen is sudo apt-get install steam -- at least, not from the official repositories. They'll probably provide their own debs and rpms, or maybe a straight binary download like they do for the Steam dedicated server.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    I didn't necessarily mean to suggest that it would necessarily be available directly from official repos (although perhaps it could be, being able to easily install steam would be a good selling point of a distro that was not intended to be 100% free software). I wonder how ubuntu would feel as this could be competition for their own app store. What I meant was will this be targeting the traditional distributions (Fedora/Ubuntu) and be installed in a relatively normal "Linux way" (like dropbox or spotify). They could of course create their own Distro which would essentially be minimal WM + Steam + Other basic apps (Chrome,thunderbird,openoffice).

by apl 14y ago

antihero 14y ago

I don't see why Steam couldn't be distributed as a .deb package (and put in the repos), much as is existing proprietary software. I mean it probably isn't going to happen for the games, but Steam is pretty decent at managing them anyway.

jiggy2011 14y ago
I'd actually rather keep apt-get out of my games installation process. Obviously it would make sense for steam to call apt-get etc to install core libraries required etc. I'd rather not have some sort of dependency jungle whereby I have my system dependencies overwritten by some steam specific version. The reason apt-get scares me for games is that it can sometimes get very carried away and start doing things like installing mailservers + alternative Windows managers + different java versions when I try and install a relatively small program.
- antihero 14y ago
  Aye, and I wouldn't expect games companies to have the first clue about decent linux packaging. I say keep the games installed in Steam, but Steam installed with the package manager.
- jrabone 14y ago
  apt-get --no-install-recommends is quite helpful in that respect, as is aptitude why | why-not if you have aptitude installed.

jiggy2011 14y ago

That's rather shortsighted. After all, you being able to "just apt-get" depends on a large number of people sacrificing a lot of time. Of course it does, I do not deny this. My point is that I don't think in terms of "Great, now there is X for Linux this will cause 1000 people to switch over" I only really care if it helps me in someway. Of course I understand that there are network effects at work. Obviously not going to happen. Why not? This is obviously going to incur some significant cost to Valve, I doubt they would do it just so they can run a store with a handful of $5 indie games or free games. Either they imagine there will be a significant enough untapped market for Linux games now/in the near future or they have some other plan (such as a Linux based Steam Console). If the latter is the case, then what will this mean for "traditional" Linux users? Will they be locked out of Steam or will they be able to ride the bandwagon and get access to all/most/some of the games that the console does?

LeafStorm 14y ago
>> Obviously not going to happen. > Why not? This is obviously going to incur some significant cost to Valve, I doubt they would do it just so they can run a store with a handful of $5 indie games or free games. No, they will definitely have AAA games. (Or at least AA games...not sure how many A's Left 4 Dead rates.) The thing that's obviously not going to happen is sudo apt-get install steam -- at least, not from the official repositories. They'll probably provide their own debs and rpms, or maybe a straight binary download like they do for the Steam dedicated server.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I didn't necessarily mean to suggest that it would necessarily be available directly from official repos (although perhaps it could be, being able to easily install steam would be a good selling point of a distro that was not intended to be 100% free software). I wonder how ubuntu would feel as this could be competition for their own app store. What I meant was will this be targeting the traditional distributions (Fedora/Ubuntu) and be installed in a relatively normal "Linux way" (like dropbox or spotify). They could of course create their own Distro which would essentially be minimal WM + Steam + Other basic apps (Chrome,thunderbird,openoffice).