Valve starts promoting Steam for Linux to Windows users
geek.com
geek.com
Really? This is at least slightly exaggerated. First thing I see is a big green button with a download link to the Windows installer. Then a invite to join a Beta program. That's not exactly urging anything. More like letting people now it's available.
Usually Linux gets so sidelined that you have to hunt about for any details regarding compatibility/support, where as here Tux takes more screen real estate than the Windows download link. This is very unusual, so I can't blame a few Linux enthusiasts getting excited.
Also, the article does also raise a valid point about Valve's long term interest in Linux; their Steam Box is powered by it. So it's not a huge leap of faith to see this as the first of many gentle nudges away from Windows.
Though obviously there's also the chance that this might just end up as flat as the "year of the Linux desktop" predictions that happens every year.
Let's just say that my standard response to "Hey, there's this awesome game out, have you tried it" is "I use Linux".
I can't remember the last time I opened it.
Also did you notice -> "Not running on Linux yet? Grab Ubuntu 12.04 LTS"
I don't quite agree on the 'learn' part though, because it may sound frightening when for most purposes it is a direct C#+.Net port, so there's basically nothing to learn on the language/library front. It mostly revolves around the tooling (MonoDevelop is different from VS, mcs is different from the MS C# compiler, xbuild is different from msbuild, but source code is the same, assemblies are the same, sln/csproj files are the same). You will mostly lack WPF if you ever used it, and learn to use Path.Combine instead of hardcoded string concats and backslashes in paths (i.e write portable code), but you will benefit from having many Mono-only or Mono-bundled tools (csharp REPL[1}, ) and libs[0].
Miguel de Icaza regularly (re)tweets and promotes various community activities and achievements, so I recommend to follow him to get a feeling of what happens.
If you're daring enough, you can get on board and use emacs, which seems to be what the non-IDE Mono developer community revolves around, so emacs modes should be quite good (apparently, F# support is coming up nicely[2])
[1]: http://www.mono-project.com/CsharpRepl
[2]: https://twitter.com/simontcousins/status/293329223597297664
Mono is awesome. I haven't used linux in years, but I managed to install linuxmint and setup Mono + Nginx + ServiceStack over the weekend. It's a bit difficult at first, but when it works it's nice. You can even build in visual studio and copy the files over to your linux box.
What's with the comments that start with "This."? What is "This." suppose to mean as an introduction?
All you need is an USB stick of 2GB. Instructions can be found here: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/create-a-usb-stick-on-wi...
After that you just insert it before booting, go to your BIOS, pick boot from USB, wait for it to load and then pick "Try Ubuntu". You'll get the full blown experience of the Ubuntu operating system, and can snoop around and get a general idea of how it works. Should your interests not be met, you can just shut down the session and computer, remove the USB stick and it'll boot Windows like it always did. That's all there is to it.
Should you however want to get your feet wet, I'd say install it as a Dual Boot, or install it on an older machine you have lying around. You'll get to see it come to life after using it for a more lengthy period of time.
Don't worry about C#, Mono can suit you if that need must be met, and if you're proficient in C#, Java will be very easy to master. A year ago, I wrote my Master's thesis in C#, using a Microsoft Surface (tabletop). But I've shifted my attention to Ubuntu 12.10 and Android since, and that transition went very smoothly.
As a rule of thumb: A computer should make my work easier, at the first glance that there has been a sacrifice in workflow or efficiency, I'm out.
We've started to roll it out to power users in various companies (i.e. people that ask for it), and I have yet to have anyone say anything negative about it.
You read a tech blog though and they act like it's the apocalypse.
I find that shutting it down and even putting it on standby requires too many actions.
Metro app's don't fit in with the desktop version, they should run as a desktop app. Running a metro app breaks the Windows key which instead of bouncing you between desktop and the start screen will bounce you between the metro app and start screen..
Multiple monitors. Windows 8 corners become iffy on the join between monitors. (Why not just remove these hover areas?) The start screen seems to randomly choose a monitor to appear in. For some reason my right monitor doesn't have the clock. On the desktop, both monitors have my application icons at the bottom yet the program opens on the last monitor it was opened on instead of the monitor in which you press the button.
I love the start screen. I think its so much better than the Windows 7 start button. I think Windows8 is alright in the same way Vista was alright. It was better than XP but had a bunch of annoyances. I can see why people like Windows 8 but I can't see why anyone would say they love it.
For the taskbar issue, you can change that. Right-click on the taskbar, choose "Properties." Under "Show taskbar buttons on:" select another option. I personally prefer "Main taskbar and taskbar where window is open." But to each his own.
Good luck!
Full disclosure: I am a Microsoft employee.
I wouldn't call that "force". It's more like "constantly remind".
Says it all, doesn't it?
Which is what finally got me to start using the power button, which is still just one action.
Start screen appears on the last monitor you launched the modern app or charms.
For switching Start screen between multiple monitors, try Windows + PageUp (or Windows + PageDown).
You can change the taskbar settings. Right click on taskbar -> properties -> Taskbar where window is open (under show taskbar buttons on).
Make sure no windows have focus (i.e., click on the background) and hit ALT+F4. This also works in vmconnect and remote desktop windows, where hitting the corners is near impossible.
Switching to linux is a great idea, but I suggest you make the switch gradually: use a VM (ie Virtualbox) and install a popular distro (Ubuntu seems good for newer linux users). Try it in fullscreen mode for a while and if you get stuck/frustrated, Windows is always there to welcome you back with open arms.
Then again, there's something to be said for just diving in and figuring it out...depends on what your goals are.
Also, as mentioned, check out Mono. It's a very good framework if you use C#.
So you see, we can play the i-like-this-so-should-you game until our Sun explodes. We won't have accomplished much though.
Another option is to learn how to develop mobile apps for iOS and/or Android. Those skills are in strong demand and your skills with an IDE and debugger will transfer easily.
I switched from C# 3 years ago and haven't touched Windows even for personal use in almost a year. If you need any other tips or guidance feel free to reach out to me (email is in my HN profile).
But then I found Scala... heh... screw C#.
The best way to start is using a dual-boot configuration, you cannot do much wrong with Ubuntu 12.10. And then, slowly but surely you can switch to Linux. This process took me about 5 years. (It finished when XP didn't boot anymore because of a blue screen.)
Regarding C#... Learn Mono, then you'll be at the spearhead of Cross-Platform C# usage. ;-) (Or add another language to your experience portfolio.) And checkout VMWare and VirtualBox...
When you need a car for getting places and a truck for moving things, and you can afford both, you don't need to choose between one or the other. You can have both, and use each for what you need it for. Operating systems are not a life-choice; they do not demand exclusive relationships.
* my cheap TV card only worked on Windows reliably
* most cool games did not work on WINE (and Unreal Tournament can become boring after some time)
* Webcam did not work on Linux (in fact until 2 or 3 years this was still a big issue)
* One word: MS Office
* many websites did only work on Windows
Yes and that's when you dual boot. So when listening to music and web surfing on Linux, I couldn't write a letter on Linux. Because StarOffice/OpenOffice had significantly lower quality than MS Office during that time. I couldn't play a video game and afterwards browse through my MP3 collection.
In such a situation you will almost naturally stay with the system that has most features for you, i.e. Windows here.
Today's "migrators" are lucky because emulator technology has evolved a lot and modern consumer (multi-core!) CPUs have some serious virtualization support. Moreover many applications moved to the Web. 10 years ago the only thing genuinly cross platform where some super ugly Java apps.
By the way, I am a Linux, OS X and Windows user. However the stuff I use works (luckily) on all 3 OSs. (Ok, I'm honest, not on Windows. ;)) Nowadays I enjoy switching computers and OSs, however this is only possible because I use Unix stuff and that just works almost everywhere.
Very happy with this poly-OS setup.
While I love the initial Metro start screen experience, two things really drive me crazy:
1. Metro just seems tacked on. Why can't I stay within that experience all the time? Instead I'm ejected to the normal Windows desktop that is essentially what I was using on Windows XP years ago. It's like they didn't have the balls to go all the way, and coming from Apple that drives me crazy.
2. It's very easy to get lost in Metro once you start clicking around. There is generally never an obvious way to get back to where you were previously due to the absence of any depth, breadcrumbs, or even just a "back" button. Hell, you can't even right click and go back.
Python is an awesome language, but don't mistake the fact that C# is also a very good language and often times a perfectly valid language to use.
Linux gets my work done, and Windows for designing & entertainment. Dual boot and you won't miss anything (Ubuntu can read/write to NTFS)
It just works.
How many games I have in my steam library: 100+
How many games in my steam library that has already been ported to Linux (as of yesterday): 6
I will make the switch when they have at least 1/3 of my steam library ported over to Linux.
Give it a few years though; I think there'll be a slow trickle of games for a while, but it'll start to ramp up as some of the bigger studios realise there's a market there.
Just for rough specs; both my Windows 7 64-bit & Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit installs have their own SSD (Samsung 830), on an i5 2500k/8GB RAM/nVidia 560TI machine. TF2 is installed on both the SSDs.
Sadly, there still are a few dealbreaker apps that prevent me to switching to Linux.
There's also the massive back catalogue Windows has, my girlfriend loves playing random PopCap games and other casual-friendly stuff that are not yet click-and-play in Linux - was going to say "not available" but Google has an installation guide for Wine, but not yet available to mainstream users.
I expect they'll probably arrive soon, since all the Humble Bundles have been Linux-friendly for ages, but they don't have the games available now. They're probably trying to get the client more stable, I guess.
Seeing mainstream support (Steam and others), and 62 titles shows Linux has gone a long way, and of course the rise of web gaming is a huge boon.
Just not on Linux Steam, yet.
Probably still the best games on Linux imho...
I don't like First Person Shooters (even the original Wolfenstein gave me motion sickness, and I don't have great motor skills), that's why I forgot about those.
I've always liked turn-based strategy games, or real time strategy games (at medium or slow speeds, I get destroyed on online matches), puzzle games, point-and-click graphic adventure games, etc... and I distinctly remember searching for those and not finding much back then.
I definitely need to give Linux another try, but I don't manage to convince myself to set aside the time (it might be a good investment, though :) )
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a favourite of mine, not sure how easy it is to get a copy of these days though.
DEFCON, Darwinia: http://introversion.co.uk/
Wesnoth is a great turn-based strategy game and has an unusual amount of polish for a FOSS game.
SpringRTS is a really fun RTS, if you can look past the many bugs in the launcher/lobby: http://springrts.com/
As a mac user, I don't see a good reason to get a Linux box for steam as most the Linux games are also for OSX. This is important to me as I am completely open to the next generation of consoles. Nintendo is automatically out but I have been considering going back to windows if the next generation of playstation and Xbox do not excite me. If the Linux steam catalog was at least in the ball park of the windows catalog I would consider it.
I just rebuilt my desktop yesterday, and downloaded Steam for it. The above is what you get when you click the "Install Steam" button on their homepage, and it definitely caught my eye.
I believe most of the Steam Linux games available are native ports and don't use Wine. Maybe there are some that do use Wine, but I don't imagine that they will make them available through Steam unless they are confident that they will actually work.
So the real question here is, "what is the real value of this assuming you already have a dedicated Windows PC or a dual boot for gaming?"
For myself it is nice to have a few good quality indie games available to play if I fancy a short break from coding on my Linux box without having to power cycle my PC. For serious gaming sessions Windows is still king for now.
The real question is about future games. There seems to be increasing interest in cross platform toolkits for game development, this is probably most because people want to target iOS and Android rather than Linux however.
However if it gets to the point where Linux just becomes another output format for a cross platform game engine (like unity3d) then perhaps you can expect future game titles to become available on Linux simply because the friction to launch on the platform is so low.
How do you know ports will be free? It removes most of the incentive that developers would have to make a good port: money (unless Valve pays for the ports, which would be very expensive).
I guess in terms of incentives to do ports, if Valve plans to launch a Linux based Steam box they can tempt developers with more prominent placing of games with Linux ports, a larger audience (assuming Steambox has good sales) or even flat out make it a requirement to get onto Steam.
There are also current Linux users like myself who are just more tempted to buy a game if it has a Linux port.
Let's hope not.
why not? i think if steam flex its muscle (of which it still doesn't have enough), it might jerk studios to put in the effort!
If Valve are serious about launching their own platform , they're likely to apply as much muscle as they can in order to get games on there.
Some developers still occasionally port to linux as is without any incentive other then a wider (albeit minor) possible audience.
Although given gabes apparent hate for windows, i wouldn't put it past value to pay for ports.
It's also the same version that's up on the Mac App Store which has limited multi player functionality.
Beside the Call of Duty port for Mac mentioned below, I know of no other game that has required multiple purchases for multiple platforms.
Games ported using Wine are native ports. Wine's design goal was as a library that developers would use it to port their applications to run natively on any platform Wine supported. Remember, wine is not an emulator.
That's probably why Valve wants to push Linux through a specific Steam Box hardware: that will drive a larger user base running Linux to play games. Not sure if that strategy will work, however, since it will rely heavily on third party publishers to support the platform.
http://www.playonlinux.com/en/
Just install WINE, Python, WineTricks and then download and install PlayonLinux to configure virtual drives.
Civilization V for example has no native Linux port, but the Windows version works fine in WINE.
There are 62 games ported to Linux so far in the Steam library.
Have fun
Having a "work boot" has done wonders for my productivity.
This may be isolated to my experience, but the PCs that I've installed Ubuntu on suffer huge performance drops when using Unity. Most of these PCs were running XP, one them is running Win 7. I even had one machine running like a dream on Ubuntu 11.04 then upgraded to 11.10, now it's nearly unusable.
I've drank the Ubuntu kool-aid in the past, but now it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
*edit for clarification, I'm referring to Ubuntu's new default UI: Unity.
Also it would be worth checking if there is a proprietary video card driver and using that if so e.g. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia
I run Steam on it as well, but it's lacking in the number of games that run on Linux. We're definitely moving in the right direction though!
Have trouble leaving Windows 7 when everything works fine.
I haven't delved deep into it, so I couldn't tell you how easily you can find the settings or whatnot, or if there are issues that aren't in another window manager. Given that you can install it with just an "apt-get install lubuntu", though, it'll probably be faster if you tried it yourself!
For what it's worth I asked Mark Shuttleworth about the overlapping trademark and he said all 3 companies were fine with it.
Connecting to servers in TF2 takes an eternity, too.
I am not an expert on the matter, but it seems that most Linux distributions used to lack this, unless you had a specific Card that had drivers for it under yer distro ..
Please feel free to correct me. This is one of the issues which prevents me from 'jumping' completely onto Ubuntu.
Thanks
Most Intel gpus just have open source drivers.
1. Install Bumblebee (requires a PPA) and possibly x-swat PPA as well. [1]
2. Launch video programs through optirun. For example:
java -Xmx1024m -jar minecraft.jar # non-Bumblebee users
optirun java -Xmx1024m -jar minecraft.jar # Bumblebee users
Hopefully the Steam client will make it easy for people to use Bumblebee by giving a GUI to install the PPA and automatically invoking 3D games with optirun.
If you are using Windows and aren't looking to switch otherwise, there's no reason to do it, since all games work fine there. This is for people who've wanted to switch (or have already switched) to Linux and miss Steam, or dual-boot (like me).
So, basically, you're not the target market, and nobody cares what you do!
Depends on what you mean by 'not looking to switch'. Permanent, set in stone decision? Then sure, no point in proving that 1 == 1. But decisions drift and change (which is nice), and so does software (which in some cases is excellent). So I wouldn't be that categorical.
I'd agree that for some folks Steam not running on Linux may be the only reason to stay with Windows (though I don't think they miss Steam, as you put that; I think what they miss are their games - owned ones and not yet released - and venomsnake says just that, actually), but I'm pretty sure there's quite a large number of people who consider many different general-purpose sides of switching platforms (gaming, music, video, paper/docs work, some development), and for them Linux version of Steam as a provider of games may be an important signal.
Now that I typed that, it's obvious that we're feeding the troll.
Giving up on the most of the games will be easy, not so much on vampire the masquerade, deus ex, painkiller, icewind dale, jedi outcast,skyrim, psychonauts or heroes 3. These are games I tend to play a lot.
But you don't have much chance with compatibility - if you make any of these games work, there is strong chance you will be able to make most of the games of this generation also playable. And then comes the thing that everyone has some games that are dearly loved but they are different for each person.
So yeah - all is not what I meant. So if Gabe wants the linux users to play from now on - that is amazing. If they want to get people to switch the comparability is important. And for old games too - because for some they are beloved classics that have stood the test of time.
The main point is that Valve is trying to push for something different from Windows for gaming, and they're progressing nicely, which i think is commendable. Next time i get tired of waiting for my Windows 7 desktop to boot, I'll probably install some Linux distribution instead; Steam for linux can now satisfy most, if not all, of my gaming needs.
But sure, it'd be nice to have _all_ of my steam games working natively on linux, but why stop there? I demand that someone makes _every game ever developed_ natively compatible with linux.
If my 7970 makes sure bioshock runs as well it did on GTX 7900 6 years back that is fine for me.
And the truth is I want to switch. But my 200 games are holding me back. If Gabe is serious about the platform - he has smart people, they can produce something.
There's no practical way to provide a software layer except for what Wine does, and it too is riddled with issues here and there and some are fatal while others simply make usability a pain. And it's been under development for years.
Cool.
And no mention of the momentum that will be caused by the Steam box?