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Comment by darxius | Hacker News Reader

I see this as a very big "win" for Linux. I can't wait to game tonight, thanks Steam.

This is a big win for Ubuntu+Nvidia; the other distros received a well placed "go fuck yourselves". This is like gaming on Macos being a win for BSDs. :-)

It's running great on my Arch Linux + AMD setup.

AMD can fix their drivers whenever they want.

Why only Nvidia? Intel improved their open source drivers thanks to Valve, and AMD pushed some updates related to Steam as well.

And, while Steam officially support only Ubuntu (at least for now), Valve doesn't do anything for stopping it to run on other distro. They even modified the license to explicitly allow repacking, so that others could put the client in their repo.

They host on their site a .tar.gz with the Steam installer for distro that don't support .deb too.

Oh, if that's the case then I'll withdraw my hatred. Thanks. :-)

There are already packages for Arch, and as per the new licensing terms for the client there's no reason it can't or won't be packaged for other distros. AMD also improved their drivers with Valve. Not sure where the hate is coming from.

Fedora, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, Arch: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux#N...

Steam runs great on Arch. Unfortunately TF2 does not, at least for me. Freezes my entire system while loading any map, to the point I have to ssh in and kill "hl2".

I'd report it, but I'm not certain I should due to Arch being an unsupported platform.

The browser/installer frontend runs fine for me - TF2 doesn't even start though, I'm on Ubuntu 12.10 (with KDE).

I've an older Nvidia card and the game installer can't tell your system doesn't meet the opengl requirements before you download [for TF2 12GB of] game files [FWIW that took a couple of days].

Is there some way to tell the minimum requirements or a HCL or something? My issue is the glColorMaskIndexedEXT one; looking at fixes now. There's a ½GB upgrade downloading now. If that doesn't work then it looks like one can compile a shim, http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/846938351...).

So, I normally have issues with fullscreen applications - in Windows and Wine. Fullscreen in Linux hasn't been an issue, but I'm pretty sure that's because the Valve/Source games run in "Windowed Fullscreen" so the window manager still gets to control it when you've released the mouse (ie, pressed Esc and are at the menu).

tl;dr: Try adding '-windowed' to the launch options for TF2 and see if that helps at all. (Steam -> Games -> Right Click "Team Fortress 2" -> Launcher Options and add "-windowed" minus the quotes obviously.

(edit: For the original thread, it also works decently well on my Macbook Air with Intel graphics)

13.04 on both of machines, though it was working last week on 12.10 before I rebuilt my machines.

Thanks for the tl;dr.

Arch here, works fine. I had this issue for a 2 day period and did report it but it seems to have been fixed since then. You might want to try again.

There are many bug reports from non-Ubuntu users on GitHub and they all seem to get first-class support. Valve is pretty good about helping with that kind of stuff, they've even helped debug a few WINE bugs.

For me, TF2 runs but is unfortunately too laggy to be playable. It didn't run at all until AMD released an update for Catalyst.

How much time are you giving it? Loading maps in TF2 is a notoriously bad experience; it is normal for the main thread to block for a long time (sometimes this is on the order of 20 seconds, sometimes 3 or 4 minutes in some cases).

Working nicely (from cursory testing of non-graphics-demanding games, anyway) on Arch + Intel graphics.

There is absolutely no reason you cannot run these games on a distro other than Ubuntu.

Working pretty great for me on my Ubuntu+AMD desktop. Laptop is a clusterfuck of drivers though, Linux switchable graphics support sucks :(

Edit: Though I haven't tried anything too fancy yet, just FTL and Bastion. So maybe 3D gaming might not be as good as Windows but that's mostly fine for me for now. I'm fine booting into Windows to get my Starcraft 2 fix.

I have AMD Radeon+Arch, and it works perfectly.

Different Linux distributions are more binary compatible than BSD/OSX is.

Besides Steam has been repackaged for other distros but their official support is only for Ubuntu currently.

If they did start supporting other distributions it is difficult to know where that should end. Perhaps there is a case for supporting Fedora and perhaps Debian, but what about Slackware,Gentoo,Mint,Arch etc?

It would be impossible to guarantee it would work on every wacky distro out there.

A week or two ago, Valve gave distros the licensing go-ahead to repackage Steam in their own repositories.

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