Valve: Steam for Linux Not In Immediate Future
Valve's isn't working on a Linux client for Steam.
Valve Software's Marketing VP Doug Lombardi has squashed previous rumors that a Linux version of Steam is in the works.
During a recent interview, Lombardi confirmed that the company is not currently working on the Linux-based client "right now." With that said, it's possible that Steam could come to Linux later on down the road--just not in the immediate future.
Rumors of a Linux client started to percolate back in April. Support for Linux was found in the bash launcher used by Valve's Steam client for Mac OS X. Additional references to Linux were discovered when using the strings command to find printable characters within the then-closed beta Mac client. Other evidence even pointed to components for an incomplete Linux-native client located on Valve's web servers.
Later an indication of an actual Linux release surfaced once the Mac client went live. According to The Telegraph, Valve supposedly confirmed plans to launch Steam on Linux "in the coming months." But with September easing into the middle of next week, the so-called launch has yet to take place.
As it stands now, the official word is that Valve isn’t working on Steam for Linux at this time. It's possible that Valve began development and then abandoned the project. It's also possible that the Linux client was set aside so that Valve could focus on fine-tuning the Mac platform.
Either way, Linux gamers should stay tuned for further news.
- Justin 'Mac' Long Messes With Bieber-aware Teen
- Woman Marries R2-D2 (Droid She's Looking For)
- They Could be Making a Google Movie
- Snag a 250GB PS3 for $299 While You Can
- PlayStation 3 Finally Hacked With a USB Stick?
- App Store Director May Have Violated Store Rules
- VIDEO: Fighting Invisible Baddies on Xbox Kinect
- Facebook Reveals Location-based 'Places' Service
- DIY Airsoft Minigun Shoots 10,000 Rounds/Minute
- Texting World Record Broken Using Swype
- Motorola Revises its Android Upgrade Roadmap
- Halo: Reach Stolen from Xbox Live, Leaked Online
- Cleveland Smart Bins to Rat Out the Non-Recycler
- Motorola Blocks Unofficial Froyo ROM for DROID X
- Malware Could Have Played Part in Plane Crash
- Apple Patent Filing is About Tracking, ID'ing Users
- Some People Are Protesting New Medal of Honor
- George Lucas Sues Peripheral Maker Jedi Mind
- Microsoft Re-Confirms Voice Support for Kinect
Yeah stay tuned...
In a way, it's better if software like Steam stay out of Linux. After all, Linux is open source and that's its great strength. Closed source software really shouldn't be welcomed in Linux. On the other hand, there are little alternatives for certain pieces of software, so that idealistic point of view isn't realistic - yet.
I'll believe it when I see it....
*sigh*
They were so close ;-; opengl support in all valve games and then bam.. sad face..
Well thats not completely true, valve lends support to wine unofficially so you still can use it with linux
That's no surprise. I'm not a Linux fan but Apple doesn't have that much of a "Gaming" market for them to make a version for their OS. Just another reason to keep competitive non-MS or non-Apple OS's from ever becoming challenging in the consumer market.
It is that kind of sentiment that is always going to keep Linux as nothing more then it is right now. Without Commercial development for an OS there is really no point in using it beyond simple activities like web browsing or text editing.
Steam would bring gaming to Linux, and not that terrible emulation experience; but a slick easy to use interface. But then that would mean Linux would move beyond being an OS for really boring nerds.
well gaming is what really is keeping me from switching all the way to linux. So kudos to Valve for not porting their mac code to linux.
So that should free up some time for them to work on Half-Life 2 Episode 3, or half-Life 3, right?
RIGHT?
In a way, it's better if software like Steam stay out of Linux. After all, Linux is open source and that's its great strength. Closed source software really shouldn't be welcomed in Linux. On the other hand, there are little alternatives for certain pieces of software, so that idealistic point of view isn't realistic - yet.
I've worked for multiple software companies, even one that released their software on Unix and Linux, and never once did I hear anyone ever say "Gee, it sure would be better if we weren't getting paid to write and sell this".
Free software advocates always talk about making money from support and services, yeah, but supporting and servicing what? Someone has to create the software first, and there's no gaurantee that same person or company will be the one hired to support it. How many people take their car back to the dealer, as opposed to Midas or working on it themselves? I'm sure Ford would like to hear your proposal for the new "free, open-source" Taurus.
well, it would have been a smart move on their part... if valve did make a client for linux, they would be the first super multi-plat gaming program out there... hell they're even moving steam cloud on to the ps3
They were so close ;-; opengl support in all valve games and then bam.. sad face..
I think the gaming industry wants something easy to write for everything, Audio, 3D, rendering, networking, etc... like DirectX. I know OpenGL has gotten a lot better and grown over the years, but I guess they don't want to have to write a lot of specific code for various video/audio/net libraries.
Also, keep in mind they have a lot of codebase invested in DirectX. DirectX itself has parts that are "broken" in specific ways, which is why there are problems in developing for WINE (you kinda have to break your code the same way to get things to appear the same).
I figure if some unified Linux code library was developed to include all these, work with development teams to bring their code up to spec, there might be some headway able to be made in Linux gaming.
Screw you Valve. And I was just starting to like you guys.
Linux just like OSX is useless for gaming.
No money. No play. No way will Valve release the source, there would be no financial benefit for them to do so. It is not in Valve's interest to release their code into the wild as would be required for Valve delivered content to work on the myriad of linux distros.
Who said anything about releasing the code? They wouldnt be required to release the source unless they used GPL'd code afaik.
It is that kind of sentiment that is always going to keep Linux as nothing more then it is right now. Without Commercial development for an OS there is really no point in using it beyond simple activities like web browsing or text editing. Steam would bring gaming to Linux, and not that terrible emulation experience; but a slick easy to use interface. But then that would mean Linux would move beyond being an OS for really boring nerds.
It is that kind of sentiment that is always going to keep Linux as nothing more then it is right now. Without Commercial development for an OS there is really no point in using it beyond simple activities like web browsing or text editing. Steam would bring gaming to Linux, and not that terrible emulation experience; but a slick easy to use interface. But then that would mean Linux would move beyond being an OS for really boring nerds.
Face it, Linux is for really boring nerds and that's unlikely to change.
Few people are willing to switch to a new OS because of the learning curve. Even though OS'es like Ubuntu have a minimal one, it's still too steep for casual users.
Linux developers can't strong arm their way into mainstream either. They don't have the funding to finance fancy advertising campaigns, nor do they have the enormous amount of money a company like MS can pour into OEM's, marketing and god knows what other things that it does to keep in top position.
Today's mainstream market is a hostile environment for an OS. Having Steam won't change that.
Apple prides itself in a huge, almost blind consumer loyalty. MS has a huge market share and as such a vast amount of software and trained users. Both have massive advertising budgets. A small Linux dev company can't force itself into such a market.
And then there's the problems that Linux created itself. There are a myriad of distros and most of them are great in one way or another. However, for a computer novice that's plain scary. How can someone unable to distinguish Office and Windows choose from the vast array of Linux distros? And such a number of distros doesn't simplify writing software either.
Linux is too small, too late and too divided internally to conquer to market, no matter how great it is.
So please, leave Linux to geeks, professionals, scientists and server users. I'd rather have an OS that succeeds in appealing to a niche - or an elite, depending on perspective - than one that aims at mass market but fails.
why should valve support a niche market any way
there are 50000 flavors of linux and all the fanboys will start crying when steam doesn't work on their distro
It is that kind of sentiment that is always going to keep Linux as nothing more then it is right now. Without Commercial development for an OS there is really no point in using it beyond simple activities like web browsing or text editing.
455 out of the top 500 supercomputers use Linux. Over 40% of web servers use Linux or FreeBSD. Apache is the most common web server software. I wonder how they managed that without commercial development.
And if Microsoft or Apple collapse tomorrow in some huge financial crisis their software ecosystems might go down with them. What would happen to Microsoft or Apple if they lost 2/3 of their market share? Linux and open source software on the other hand don't need mass acceptance or commercial success.
That said, it costs a lot of money to make quality games nowadays and I can totally understand why developers are reluctant to port the game to a niche OS.
455 out of the top 500 supercomputers use Linux. Over 40% of web servers use Linux or FreeBSD. Apache is the most common web server software. I wonder how they managed that without commercial development.And if Microsoft or Apple collapse tomorrow in some huge financial crisis their software ecosystems might go down with them. What would happen to Microsoft or Apple if they lost 2/3 of their market share? Linux and open source software on the other hand don't need mass acceptance or commercial success.That said, it costs a lot of money to make quality games nowadays and I can totally understand why developers are reluctant to port the game to a niche OS.
valve has to pay someone to develop steam on linux
/thread
Who? They already did all the work to get it onto Linux, the only problem is getting steam to be protected. Linux Users tend to have an above average understanding of computers and have full access to everything on their machine. They can probably bypass their anti-theft programs.
To those saying Linux is too small, can't afford this or that, needs commercial support to survive, you do realize that Linux has a larger PAID development staff than any other OS out there. The commercial support is massive. In fact, the reason why Linux isn't migrated to the latest version of the GPL is because it would kill commercial support and effectively kill the OS.
I know this because my company does massive dev work for Linux, along with our competitors, as well as our partners. And I promise you this, all of us are paid to do it. And this is only the people working on the real time version of Linux. The thing is, no one company is developing Linux, so since you can't peg a single company to it, it seems a lot smaller.
The problem holding wide spread deployment of Linux in the public eye back is that everybody is doing development work on it to aid in infastructure rollout. From our standpoint, we're spending our money on how to minimize context switching overhead and developing self managing high availablity load sharing and not on developing a pretty GUI. But the statement that nobody is developing for it is a MASSIVE misconception.
Who? They already did all the work to get it onto Linux, the only problem is getting steam to be protected. Linux Users tend to have an above average understanding of computers and have full access to everything on their machine. They can probably bypass their anti-theft programs.
and we all know linux users are cheap bastards because they can't afford a real OS when they won't pay for an OS why do you think they'll pay for a game
why should valve support a niche market any way there are 50000 flavors of linux and all the fanboys will start crying when steam doesn't work on their distro
That's why you release tarballs or source code. So you can compile it on any Linux machine.
That's why you release tarballs or source code. So you can compile it on any Linux machine.
why the hell would i want to do that when windows makes it easy
come on Vavle! it would be so easy now you have the OSX version. soo like linux, just remove the gay and your done!
Why the hell would Valve give away their source code? Open source advocates need to accept that the Red Hat model will not work for all software, especially games. They can't sell support contracts for Left 4 Dead. People would just play without paying. The whole Linux movement is based on the false premise that volunteer programmers can make up for companies like Valve.
Linux has commercial support but it is mostly on the server side. On the desktop it is a pain for software developers due to all the different distros and windowing systems. There isn't even a standard audio API.
That's why you release tarballs or source code. So you can compile it on any Linux machine.
WTF? if you seriously believe then then you should get the hell off this site as you obviously dont know sh!t about anything to do with computers
Hopefully they'll get around to it eventually, games are the only thing keeping me on Windows.
In a way, it's better if software like Steam stay out of Linux. After all, Linux is open source and that's its great strength. Closed source software really shouldn't be welcomed in Linux. On the other hand, there are little alternatives for certain pieces of software, so that idealistic point of view isn't realistic - yet.
successful troll is successful...