Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

http://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1747660173332716773

by Nathandim • 14 years ago

206 74 14 years ago

avolcano• 14 years ago

Interesting that they're using GitHub for issue tracking, although there's no actual code in the repo: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues

breckenedge• 14 years ago

Yea, i was a bit interested by that too. Probably already use it internally for other projects, and if they've integrated their internal tools with the GitHub API, it's a no-brainier.

udp• 14 years ago

It's actually a pretty nice idea. Since the wiki and issues tabs are already optional features, perhaps the "Code" tab should be optional too.

basil• 14 years ago

I've seen this quite a bit recently. It's a hack but it's a quick way to get a public-facing issue tracker out there.

Are there any better solutions for getting a tracker set up easily where non-contributors can raise bugs and discuss feature requests?

jcastro• 14 years ago

http://launchpad.net has a bug tracker and a blueprints function.

csense• 14 years ago

What black magic do they use to make the games run under Linux? Wine?

Are all Steam games now compatible with Linux, or only a few titles that the developers are willing to support Linux? Is there a list anywhere?

clauretano• 14 years ago

There's a list, found here: http://store.steampowered.com/search/?os=linux

Very few games are compatible, but Team Fortress 2 is one of them.

mylittlepony• 14 years ago

And Amnesia, which was already supported -.-

Left4Dead was also going to be available, not sure what happened.

MattDL• 14 years ago

Hopefully id get all their old games up on that list soon, they put in a lot of effort over the years when not many others were, a shame that changed recently though.

jebblue• 14 years ago

I'm interested in TF2 and Red Orchestra but look forward to my old favs...HL and HL2! I might even buy a new system so I can play the whole L4D series too!

untog• 14 years ago

The latter. I suspect the list will be similar to the list of games that work on Mac. It's a small subset, but it's growing.

w1ntermute7• 14 years ago

The games are native ports, according to their Linux blog.

Maakuth2• 14 years ago

So far. Nothing stops game publishers from shipping a Windows game with Wine strapped on the side if it results in a working game.

jneen• 14 years ago

Holy EULA, Batman.

drivebyacct27• 14 years ago

I'm not 100% sure why they have a "repo" for an "installer". It sort of rather defeats the purpose. If they're going to do that, just put the client in a DEB and put that in the repo. At this point I see no reason in adding the repo to apt.

Either way, it'll get sorted, Steam for Linux is already quite great. Still can't get over that TF2 runs better in a window in Linux than I've ever had it run in Windows.

w1ntermute7• 14 years ago

> I'm not 100% sure why they have a "repo" for an "installer". It sort of rather defeats the purpose.

It's because they don't really grasp yet how these things work on Linux. Which is understandable, since they're coming from a Windows world, where package management has to be done manually. So the Steam executable you download is an installer that downloads/installs the Steam package manager, which then downloads/maintains the games.

Ideally, all the Steam Linux games would be maintained in APT repositories and you would update them through APT, but I don't know if that will ever happen. At least this is better than nothing at all.

ceronman• 14 years ago

That "ideal" solution would only work on deb based distros.

stephen_g• 14 years ago

They'd have issues with their DRM doing that.

They should ship the Steam binaries properly through apt and yum repositories, but I doubt that they'll ever ship the games that way.

fsniper• 14 years ago

So if they "do not grasp yet how things work on Linux", Why they are not meeting Canonical guys and get some help? I believe they do things as they do now is they are looking forward for interoperability with other distros in their own way.

Angostura• 14 years ago

I remember when Steam was first launched for Mac; Valve decided to pop all the games' assets and support files into a folder in ~/Documents. It took a few days to explain to them that this probably wasn't the best place to dump a few GB of files.

A lot of people's backups suddenly grew rather large.

AdrianRossouw• 14 years ago

it's best to think of steam as a new package manager for games, the same way you would have ruby gems or npm packages.

sandGorgon• 14 years ago

that is because they are keeping themselves open to have a Steam packaging format.

It is something I have always bet that they will eventually do - once they see the number of support questions by people who have some sort of dependency problems (e.g [1], [2] and [3]).

I wonder how long will it take for them to latch on to something like Zeroinstall or nix.

[1] http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/846940247... [2] http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/1/846940247... [3] http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/882965118...

drivebyacct27• 14 years ago

No, I understand not distributing the games in DEB form, but what's the point of versioning an installer that then goes and downloads the latest version of the client? Just put the client in the repo...

scottlu2• 14 years ago

The Steam executable, libraries, data files, and games install with user permissions. This way games can install and update, and Steam itself can auto-update, without privledge escalation. Windows and Mac versions behave this way.

There is a launcher script that is installed in /usr/bin/steam. There was strong feedback from users that updating this script should belong to the system package manager. This is why the repo exists - so this script can be updated and managed by the system package manager.

drivebyacct27• 14 years ago

This isn't directed at you, but that sounds like exactly what I'd expect of someone who doesn't understand the point of package managers.

throwaway646• 14 years ago

Steam has a package so dependancies can be satisfied easily without resorting to "install xyz beforehand", and it runs an installer into your home folder because the user has to be able to modify the games directory for many, many games on steam, because stuff like configuration, custom maps, custom models etc, is stored alongside everything else.

Also steam has diff based patching (which requires accress from whoever is running the steam binary) which makes a lot more sense than how package managers operate for large packages, imagine downloading an entire 20 gig game every time there was a minor bugfix, it would be very obnoxious.

Unless the design of both package managers, and how steam games store settings/etc both change radically, this really is the only workable solution.

Luckily, you will still be able to share steam folders cross user, just simply give both users read/write access to the folder.

StavrosK4• 14 years ago

This is irrelevant. They can add the Steam binary to their own PPA and update it as they update the client now. Steam will be able to do all those thing, like every single program in Linux can, while being installed as a system package.

The way they're doing it now is plain unclean.

drivebyacct27• 14 years ago

>Steam has a package so dependancies can be satisfied easily without resorting to "install xyz beforehand",

This isn't even true. The deb has dependencies just like any other DEB you'd get through apt-get. That's... kinda the point of package management...

pbhjpbhj• 14 years ago

So I thought I'd try and see what the score is:

TF2 is 12.0 GB ... damn, that's hefty.

This had better be the richest, smoothest, highest quality game; feature rich and expansive. That is about 11GB bigger than any [single] thing I've ever downloaded before. Estimated download completion time ... Christmas.

mariuolo2• 14 years ago

It doesn't work for me. Still saying it's a closed beta.

Tuna-Fish• 14 years ago

You need to update the client to fix that. Easiest way to do this is to evade the beta check (start steam with "steam steam://store"), then choose "steam/check for steam client updates" from the title menu.

mariuolo2• 14 years ago

I did that. For some reason I also had to delete ~.steam and ~.local/share/Steam and start from scratch to be able to log in.

Shorel2• 14 years ago

Just in time for my new Ubuntu install.

jhealy• 14 years ago

I'm not much of a gamer, but I thought I'd give this a go on my Debian amd64 system. However the package is i386 only, so it won't install.

Are they planning to support amd64 too?

Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

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