Today is the 10th year anniversary of Steam being officially out for Linux | Hacker News Reader

Today is the 10th year anniversary of Steam being officially out for Linux

store.steampowered.com

155 pointsevasb50 comments

I started using Linux around 2002. I evaluated and quickly dismissed it as a desktop OS largely because it didn't allow me to play the games I wanted to play. In 2021 or 2022 I finally switched, thanks entirely to Steam on Linux (more specifically, thanks to the Proton/WINE integration). I haven't looked back. I'm on Arch, if anyone is curious.

Not sure if you are mentioning Arch because of the meme or not, but it is funny how Arch users do love mentioning the fact they use Arch lol

Would be curious to know if parent chose Arch because Valve chose it for the Steam Deck.

Actually, I chose LFS. I was building out a systemd-based LFS system, and I had fucked up on GPT vs MBR or something like that, so I binned it. That was like ten hours down the drain, and I felt discouraged, so I didn't retry LFS.

I wanted to avoid the monolithic desktop environments and build one out of individual components that I would then customize to my liking. I had some experience with two 'highly customizable' distributions: Gentoo and Arch. I picked the one that was less likely to get me made fun of /s

It has worked out pretty well. My desktop has some quirks and I want to re-do it, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Current desktop works and is 'good enough'

Another consideration was the Arch wiki. There are few better resources for getting Linux desktop software to work the way you want it, IMO

Reasons I _want_ to use Arch:

- Almost always up to date software

- Little to no patching/changing upstream

- Follows upstream defaults/best practices

Reasons I shy away from Arch:

- Too much churn on keeping things up to date

- Package maintainers are hit or miss, don't seem as engaged as Debian

I'd like to use Arch on my servers and devices, but it seems like it requires more responsibility than using Debian vs the benefit of using.

IMO using Arch on servers is pointless. It's good for devices you use daily and can take care of regularly - updates are mostly painless then, but once you stop you're simply asking for a lot of additional maintenance burden when you get back to it.

I found Nix to be a great mix of always up-to-date and stable/always a single command away from rolling back. But there is a learning curve.

Valve chose SteamOS for the Steam Deck. It is (currently) based on a snapshot of Arch, but deviates so much that it's a huge stretch to still call it Arch. You could just as well say that a device runs Debian when it actually runs Ubuntu.

I can't add much to the conversation other that I also do use Archlinux

I started around the same time (Debian Woody), it's certainly come a long way from SuperTux and Battle for Wesnoth.

Windows is still on my gaming PC, mostly due to anticheat issues with games like Hunt, Destiny, and Battlefield. I'm finally able to play games like Crusader Kings 3 on my Linux laptop without any issues though.

I also want to pay my gratitude to Valve. My primary computer has been Linux for 20 years, but I've always had a Windows gaming computer. I made the switch to all-Linux last week. Much thanks to Steam and OnShape (mechanical CAD in a web browser.)

While I've been using Linux/FreeBSD on servers for years, I stuck with Windows for desktop/gaming use. Last year I finally switched though to a combination of Fedora for gaming and ChromeOS for everyday use. There's a few games that I've run into that don't work but most of the ones I want to play do. It's not quite to the level of just working out of the box but the experience is much better than the last time that I had tried it, and enough to fully switch.

What Steam did for Linux is very similar to what Ubuntu did for Linux: made the actual work to make sure there's something for non-nerds to use.

No one cared about the "non-nerd" until these two came along. Because sure "you can alway select <one of thousands distributions> and <build/compile/config your own stuff>", but this doesn't scale.

Even if this started as a way to keep being relevant in the world of competing OS-level stores and shenanigans (IIRC Steam for Linux started shortly after Windows Store was announced), the achievement is still nothing short of miracle: there are actually games you can play on Linux now.

I think this downplays some of the work Valve/Steam has done for Linux, especially recently.

For a long time, playing games on Linux wasn't a "nerd" thing, it was a "nobody" thing. Getting AAA games to run on Linux was a pipe dream.

Valve has put in the work (and in some cases, hired the people putting in the work) to get us to today, where most games work with decent performance (the major exception being anti-cheat, but Valve is slowly working on those as well).

> I think this downplays some of the work Valve/Steam has done for Linux

Quoting myself: "the achievement is still nothing short of miracle" ;)

Most people probably don’t realise that Valve has actual kernel devs. I bought a Logitech racing wheel a while ago and force feedback wasn’t working. After some research I found a mailing list where someone with a valve email has submitted a patch that fixed it.

I play Counterstrike GO, and it was the thing holding me back from abandoning windows.

I (use to) play daily so there was no point ever booting up into linux.

As soon as linux support came out, I started playing under it immediately, and quickly realised that there was no point booting up into windows anymore.

This tbh. I got Elder Scrolls Oblivion running the other day on Pop!_OS and I have been absolutely eating up the nostalgia. In 2016 I tried getting it running with plain old WINE and for some reason people were missing their heads and speech options were missing. On Proton it works perfectly, and I haven't noticed any glitches(that are out of the ordinary for a Bethesda title anyway)

Did you do any modding or use a list?

Thats probably the reason, or at least part of it. On Windows I heavily modded it with tons of new items and sidequests, so that might have interfered with how it ran on Linux. However, I never installed any visual mods because I was playing the game on a toaster of a Windows PC and didn't want to risk lag. Its 7 years after the fact so its too late to troubleshoot, but I think it was probably a combination of the game not knowing what to do without my mods and WINE being weird.

My installation was also bit weird because I was new to Linux and didn't understand how things were supposed to work. I installed the Windows version of Steam through Play on Linux and installed everything through that client, rather than running individual games through POL. Then again, the installation option wasn't even available for the game on the Linux client so at the time I felt that the weird setup was the only way to play it

Proton is great.

I have played some games on it and mostly it is parasite apps like EA App or whatever that is a problem.

It Takes Two worked great when running but lunching was always 5-20 minutes of restarts. And two times out of like 8 EA bricked their launcher app with updates and the game stopped working for some days.

The next gaming rig will surely be Linux only for me.

Honestly, nonsense like this happens with Windows gaming too. I can't count the number of times one of my friends has had a networking issue with steam or the windows store, problems with anticheat or other "extra" services like uplay/origin, issues with graphics drivers, and probably most commonly, Audio devices. I'm a game developer, as are the group of people I play with and we still stumble on these issues regularly, it's honestly why consoles are so great.

You blame an app not built to run on Proton to be the issue? EA desktop / origin works just fine on Windows, I use it since 2013 without any issues.

Yes I do. The game, It Takes Two, works fine, but the EA App does not render so you have to guess where the buttons are, and it also brings nothing of value other than being an annoying launcher. Also the networking in the EA App seems flaky.

I am not accusing EA of caring about my Linux gaming experience. But I still blame their app for making it worse for their games they distribute.

Plenty of “these apps” fail to properly work even on the platform they were designed for. Games are not famous for their reliability/correctness.

Man, I got confused why the steam Linux sale wasn't on the front page when I noticed that this is a ten year old post. I thought it was a celebration for 10 years of Linux support lol. Also got excited for the Tux TF2 item and I feel a little let down that I am 10 years too late

This post should have (2013) in the title.

I've switched over my main desktop to PopOS and while I'm missing out on some games which require anticheat, I'm constantly surprised as to how much I can actually play. It also seems like newer games have better proton support.

i am using kde neon and have a similar impression

It has been a fun adventure. We used a lot of RHEL at work, so I set out to get it to work on my Centos workstation and was shocked how well it worked. Gave the SteamOS distribution a try, which worked great for Steam... but really made me work harder than expected to get a terminal so did not expand on that, beyond seeing how it got the hardware right. Current workstation is Ubuntu, which also matches up with how work is done today. Proton is amazing.

The jump from https://i.imgur.com/dGOw1G4.jpg

to steam (2019!) https://i.imgur.com/H5QYFbz.png

was incredible. My Linux box has the 'good' CPU/Video card these days.

As a coincidence other day I resized my desktop's win10 partition, installed PopOS taking care to make my own partitions instead of the default clean install, and found a guide for steam, protonup and lutris. I think a lot of the steps would trouble folks that haven't used Linux extensively before. Dualbooting, pip as a user not root, flatpak vs deb, saving some Nvidia settings elsewhere, and I still can't figure out why my identical second monitor doesn't display anything until I change the resolution once after boot (Nvidia, working one is dp, other one is HDMI if anyone has ideas)... but overall I'm impressed with the few games I fired up and they just worked. Good stuff Valve. That was not the case last time I tried.

But still only as a 32-bit binary, in 2023.

Does it need to be 64-bit?

There is pressure to drop support for running 32 bit binaries and to stop packaging 32 bit libraries. Steam is pretty much the main force holding this transition off. Ubuntu proposed it a while ago and valve said they just wouldn’t support Ubuntu any more.

Apple did it way back and valve just updated to support 64bit for macOS.

FWIW we've been waiting for a native M1 Steam app on macOS for more than 2 years since launch, I guess we need to wait for Apple to drop Intel support.

Valve does some outstanding work on things like Proton and the Steamdeck, but the main client is incredibly bad. It's slow and clunky on every platform including windows. Its _just_ good enough to be usable but still leaves you feeling disappointed.

IIRC its essentially build on same concept as electron but an entirely custom thing since electron presumably didn't exist when they created it.

Many games are still 32-bit and will never be updated. This idea of killing off distro-level 32-bit support is pretty silly overall, especially since there's never much of an excuse for doing so (beyond "but it's old so it must be bad!").

For games, they should probably be wrapped in some kind of emulation layer like dosbox. For still supported software, there is really no reason to continue supporting 32 bit binaries at the OS level.

Or proton … not all are dos.

It's there, it works, and there will always be legacy software. What is there to gain from killing it?

Clearly Apple and Canonical felt there was a lot to be gained. The obvious one being that you don’t have to build and host a second set of packages for 32 bit.

When I tried installing it via apt on ubuntu 2204, it wanted to install an entire 32-bit GPU driver chain. Couldn't ctrl-c fast enough

It's still 32-bit on Windows too, for some reason. I have it installed via Flatpak to avoid the pile of 32-bit libraries.

Ah okay yeah that's a huge issue.

Thank you for that. I found 2012 gaming computer in the garbage room three years ago. Now I am 2-star General in GS:GO.

I have never had Windows computer. Moved right from DOS to Linux around 1992. And I gave up gaming after DOOM/MYST in 1990's because there was nothing new happening and hardware requirements were excessive.

With a hoping 2% market share.

is it just me or is it just Unusable on macOS? for a few years now

Steam works fine on my M1.

On my M1 MBA, it's sluggish but still usable. Definitely worse than on Windows. It's probably the worst out of the few Rosetta apps I have. It's a little funny. The Steam client performs worse than any of my Mac games that are also using Rosetta. A simple client falls over more than a game which is (visually at least) doing much more complicated things.

IIRC Steam client uses Chromium Embedded Framework. I imagine it'll be as slow as other Chromium (or Electron) apps running under Rosetta.

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