Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTExMDM

by shazow • 14 years ago

216 87 14 years ago

Great news! Honestly, the only software that will be holding people back from switching fully to linux now will be creative tools (audio, 3d + 2d design, video editing). I think this can be solved by us. If we show them that there is a demand for these tools on linux someone will move to supply. Open operating systems provide too many advantages to ignore.

truncate3• 14 years ago

I think presence of mainstream CAD software is very important as well. I have seen many people not willing or not being able to shift to Linux only because of CAD.

moistgorilla4• 14 years ago

I meant that too. Basically when adobe and autodesk make their software linux compatible we will see a huge shift to linux. The amount of money saved by businesses on a whole would be huge if switching to linux was an option.

petermonsson• 14 years ago

I think that you need to specify which type of CAD software you have in mind. CAD software for Semiconductor designers have an incredibly strong presence on Linux.

shazow3• 14 years ago

Some of the best tools in the industry (Audacity, Blender, Inkscape, others?) are already free, open source, and native on Linux.

moistgorilla4• 14 years ago

Sadly, some people refuse to work if they aren't using photoshop/illustrator/autocad/etc. But yeah, I'm with you, I use gimp and inkscape but I'm no professional.

VMG• 14 years ago

None of these you mention qualify as being "the best in the industry". Neither do Gimp and Kdenlive or any other video editing software on Linux.

pjmlp• 14 years ago

> Some of the best tools in the industry (Audacity, Blender, Inkscape, others?) are already free, open source, and native on Linux.

Best to whom? None of the listed ones are used at all by professional game studios.

james4k4• 14 years ago

Agreed, and with Adobe and Autodesk monopolizing creative software, I think we'll see more and more of this. Blender has been doing spectacularly with 3D to the point that Autodesk must be incredibly worried, and I expect we'll see more Photoshop contenders as projects like GIMP start to answer the pleas of its on-the-fence users. See the GIMP roadmap: http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap

Edit: And I expect as browser technologies continue to expand, we'll see more web-based competitors. In particular, with WebGL, I'm surprised we haven't seen things like all-GPU image editors to compete with the slow giants we have to deal with now.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

In the mid-2000s, Macromedia started an experimental port of Dreamweaver (I think) to Linux using Wine. The project was abandoned because the market for commercial Linux applications was seen to be too limited for the difficulty of maintaining the port.

mladenkovacevic• 14 years ago

Also in the video editing space Lightworks might prove to be an acceptable (if not even better) alternative to Avid and FCP.

gillianseed2• 14 years ago

Well when it comes to 3D Linux is actually well off due to it's strong position in SFX, you have the latest Maya, XSI, Mudbox, Renderman, Houdini, Lightwave, 3D-Coat etc available in native Linux form.

And as others have stated there's also great free solutions like Blender.

moistgorilla4• 14 years ago

Thanks for informing me of this, I honestly didn't know they worked in native linux.

dman• 14 years ago

This is what XSI has to say about Linux - "Softimage 2013 is also capable of running on other configurations, such as boutique distributions of Linux. However, enumerating systems that are not tested and cannot be supported or that fall below the requirements for a productive user experience is beyond the scope of the online certification charts.".

Lightwave isnt available for Linux either.

dedosk• 14 years ago

Krita (www.krita.org) is also very great piece of software recently, sometimes called "best-kept secrets among Linux applications". See this blog-post from professional illustrator http://www.davidrevoy.com/index.php?article98/krita-2-4-beta...

prezjordan2• 14 years ago

Sort of off-topic, is there a reason Steam on windows is so unresponsive? Mac, too, but I think that's because it's a port.

It seems to me that Steam is not written in native windows code and that's why it runs so sluggishly. Some say they have no idea what I'm talking about, while others agree. What does HN think?

fsckin• 14 years ago

Parts of it are served from the internets.

derefr• 14 years ago

As far as I know, it uses Webkit for the entire UI--and possibly a rather old version of it.

james4k4• 14 years ago

Yes, that is true to an extent. For the web portions of the UI like the Steam store, it uses the Chromium Embedded Framework: http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/

ineedtosleep• 14 years ago

Define "so unresponsive".

Recently (less than a year ago), I had a switch in hardware from a Athlon X2 3200+, 4GB RAM machine to an i5-2500K, 8GB RAM and 2 SSDs. Sure there was a noticeable difference in responsiveness, but never on either machine would I consider Steam "so unresponsive".

barrkel4• 14 years ago

My last machine was an i7 920 with 12GB and Intel 80GB SSD; I now have an i7-3770K with 16GB and Samsung 256GB SSD; and Steam has always been fairly unresponsive.

Specifically, it's most unresponsive on the "preparing disk space" page when installing games. It takes multiple seconds for no apparent reason. There's no high CPU usage and no high I/O usage. It's also very slow to start, and very slow to let me play a game.

My theory is it's due to some degree of online activity, that it's gated on my internet bandwidth. Since I only play single-player games, that's a huge annoyance to me, and I often don't start playing games because I know I'll have to sit through Steam startup for several seconds.

mike-cardwell• 14 years ago

Steam works beautifully under Wine on my Ubuntu laptop (A Thinkpad T420).

hammersend• 14 years ago

I've never ran Steam under Wine but I have played quite a few games with varying degrees of success. My question is since Steam runs beautifully for you under Wine, does that translate into the games themselves running beautifully as well or is it still hit and miss?

james4k4• 14 years ago

They use their own UI toolkit called VGUI, the same one they use in HL2 and their other games (https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VGUI_Documentation). So, there is a layer on top, but in terms of rendering it should be all native. In their games, it uses Direct3D calls, and in Windows I would guess it uses GDI+ or something in the DirectX family.

Edit: Just to be clear, I would consider the VGUI layer to be pretty lightweight. There is no virtual machine for any language runtimes. It is purely a layout engine, with some very basic styling defined mainly by the rendering of images and gradients.

Outside of rendering, from my own experience with using it, there's nothing in particular about it that makes it slow, except that it has no built-in asynchronous facilities in place for you to use. You have to make sure you never block the UI thread.

This is really just a guess of course, but I would pin the slowness on too much IO waiting (ie. poor thread design). To be fair though, Steam in most cases has stayed pretty responsive.

binarycrusader• 14 years ago

Steam itself works great; the only time I see problems with it is when the flashplayer plugin is involved.

They desperately need to drop their reliance on flash.

Once they do that, I think it would vastly improve.

mitchty• 14 years ago

Agreed, I nuked the flash player on all my osx/linux/windows machines (chrome deals with that decently enough) and now I can't view videos in steam.

koko775• 14 years ago

I would rather put my money on not threaded well. The application thread seems to get blocked whenever it's chugging on something important, which locks up the UI.

ghc• 14 years ago

Oh, thank Gabe! I've been waiting for this for a decade now!

integricho• 14 years ago

At first I read valve FIRED their first wave of linux developers...

jiggy20117• 14 years ago

This will be welcome by me, steam on Linux that is.

I've bought a number of games from steam when they have been on sale, games that have a Linux port available.

Of course I am unable to run them without buying the Linux copy separately at present but once this is implemented I will already be able to play a fair cross-section of my games on Windows and Linux.

Of course this could be a net negative for my productivity.

icebraining• 14 years ago

Linux developers doesn't necessarily imply there'll be Steam for Linux Desktop™. It may be that Valve is looking to finally build their Steam Console and base it on Linux.

stevengg• 14 years ago

steam for linux is coming http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve...

jiggy20117• 14 years ago

That's true, but this article seems to indicate that it will be there for the regular "desktop".

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve...

It is of course possible that they are planning a console and that this is why they are focusing their efforts.

If they do develop a Linux based console then hopefully it will still make sense for them to support "proper" Linux as part of that.

mackal• 14 years ago

No, I this is Steam for Linux. The Steam Console was just a rumor, and that's all.

I've had an employee (friend) verify these facts to me.

AJ007• 14 years ago

I'm going to take a guess that Valve is hedging their bets on a Windows 8 flop. I think it is very possible that Linux and OS X will become the two dominant desktop platforms over the next 5 years.

Valve can not really enter the mobile marketplace in a meaningful way. Both Microsoft and Apple will likely try to put the squeeze on Valve with their own respective OS marketplaces. (I think neither will successfully be able reproduce Steam's high quality user experience and extras.)

sjwright• 14 years ago

There's a lot of overlap between Steam/Linux and Steam/LinuxConsole so it wouldn't surprise me if both strategies were being run in parallel.

loboman• 14 years ago

For some games, you can just run Steam in Wine, and the game in Wine, and everything runs out of the box. Check the Wine documentation for each game before buying to ensure it works.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

Yup, Portal ran perfectly for me on Ubuntu ( 9.10 or 10.04 iirc) that way a few years ago. Was brilliant.

Even though I don't game anymore, this still makes me very happy. A big step for Linux on the way to becoming a first class citizen in gaming, one of the last big moats to its general acceptance.

Keyframe2• 14 years ago

I don't use linux as my desktop OS for quite some time (now it's windows and osx, used to have Redhat and later fedora workstations). My question is, is it possible to target 'linux' in general as a single platform at all? I thought heterogeneous nature of linux distros is what would hinder that effort. Something like when you buy certain graphics programs, you get to have only this and that linux variant with this and that software on it in order to run it.

jlgreco2• 14 years ago

In the 'enterprise' market, targeting 'Linux' means targeting RHEL. I don't think that would be the way for Valve to go though. If they are really going to release anything to the public for Linux I imagine they will just officially target Ubuntu.

jebblue2• 14 years ago

Ubuntu is focused on delivering a great desktop. I'm not a fan of Unity and find that to get the same performance I used to have, I have to run my games on Unity 2D. Regular Unity (3D) eats a lot of my games's FPS.

If Steam picks Ubuntu then I hope they work with Canonical to get Unity to perform as fast for games as Unity 2D (and Gnome 2).

shazow3• 14 years ago

You don't need to ship distro-specific packages. You could ship a tarball with a statically linked executable. Take a look at the Humble Bundle, for example. Every game published in the bundles is cross-platform, and work great Linux regardless of distro choice.

Keyframe2• 14 years ago

Ah, never thought about that. As good old DOS games were, everything contained within program/directory itself. Interesting, makes using some of the external code a bit harder due to licenses though.

bfrog• 14 years ago

Will this finally mean linux becomes more and more mainstream for commercial games and applications? I actually hope so!

Thank you Gabe and Valve, for bringing things a step ever closer.

pixie_• 14 years ago

Does anyone else think this has little to do with 'bringing Steam to linux' and a lot to do with SteamBox, the rumored console Valve is working on.

shinratdr• 14 years ago

So that thing that this very same site has insisted is in full development and is near ready to go... is going through a hiring round for devs to build the thing? Right.

I'm so sick of these articles. Ever since the Mac version came out this site and other Linux focused blogs have insisted Steam for Linux is minutes away. Every single time they've been proven wrong or miss their timeframe.

It probably is being built, but the last person who has legitimate up to date info on the project is Phoronix. They seem to just be making things up.

JDShu• 14 years ago

Phoronix seems to be playing a kind of Pascal's wager here. There is no way that it can be definitively proven that Steam will never arrive for the Linux desktop, but if it does then they can feel smug satisfaction that they knew all along and nobody believed them.

jiggy20117• 14 years ago

IIRC they actually went to valve's office and showed screenshots of source engined games running under Ubuntu natively.

I wouldn't be surprised if they have it "90%" ready-to-go and just need some serious domains experts to do the last 90%. Not to mention for bugfixing , updates down the line as well as maybe porting some of their new tech (HL3 engine?) to Linux.

shmerl• 14 years ago

The problem of Valve is their usage of DRM. I won't use them just because of that, whether they release Linux client or not. I.e. it's better to run a non DRM-ed Windows game (let's say from GOG) on Linux using Wine, rather than native one from Valve but with DRM.

But their entering to the Linux scene in general is good, since it might encourage others to do it as well, and eventually non DRMed distributors like GOG will push for more Linux games too.

sandGorgon• 14 years ago

I have a Dell Vostro with an ATI 6600m card running ubuntu 12.04.

Putting "echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch" effectively boosts my battery time from 1 hour to 3 hours.

What I'm seriously hoping from Valve is not a game per se, but a linux distro (or a standard) that is compatible with my drivers, multimedia devices (dual hdmi monitors - I'm looking at you) and audio/video.

I would pay serious money for that kind of a distro.

jiggy20117• 14 years ago

I don't think Yet Another Desktop Distro is really the answer to our prayers.

If fixing your laptop battery is as simple as that one liner , perhaps your can write a script that detects hardware at startup and runs that line if appropriate and then submit it back to Ubuntu?

helmut_hed• 14 years ago

a linux distro (or a standard) that is compatible with my drivers, multimedia devices (dual hdmi monitors - I'm looking at you) and audio/video

yes, that would be great! Major distros (I use Kubuntu) are understaffed and concentrate on getting the new features from their upstreams integrated, not on making sure fancy hardware is supported. It's a question of resources. Although I think Valve is less likely than a hardware vendor to have a business reason for doing this work.

Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more

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