Valve Announcement - Steam client coming to Ubuntu

[Carborundum]

Quoting you!

But if you are right, this would be a massive leap forwards- imagine if any game designed for ******* could (relatively) easily be ported to Linux. Is it native? No. Will performance suffer? Probably. But it will open the door to a Linux gaming community and market, and once that happens devs will start giving a native linux port of their titles a serious look.

Hopefully this is a first step in the right direction. At worst we can add L4D2 to the list of games that run on linux.

It would be fantastic if this actually happened, but I am very doubtful it will. Remember, CodeWeavers (the company behind Wine) has been working on this for years. Could Valve build something significantly better in a matter of months? Until I see some evidence to the contrary, I'm guessing "no".

[ELD]

http://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.p...-quickly.1000/

new info

[Dlambert]

http://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.p...-quickly.1000/

new info

Yeah! So excited!

[R33D3M33R]

I think part of the idea, and don't quote me on this, is that they're designing the abstraction layer so they can give it to other game developers and have them bring their games over to Linux.

That is very likely. Source engine is greatly optimized and should run perfectly well even with this layer underneath ... but what about AAA games that are console => windows ports? There is no way that they will run nicely . Thats why I was hoping for them to work on native port instead.

[Dr.Paneas]

L4D2 would be the first step in the ladder, while Dota2, Counter Strike Global Offensive, Team Fortress would be the next steps.

I don't know if we could be able to experience the latest features such as TXAA but we could play a decent game at last That's the goal.

If Linux users act like gamers and open their wallets as they open their source code, then more advantages are about to come, since game makers will spot another profitable market. Meaning a lot for pressure to nVIDIA, AMD and Intel to improve their ****** drivers for Linux.

In the meantime Windows 8 will be the ghost operating system of the year. No one seeing this, no one using this

Time will tell, until then sit back and relax waiting

[MikeCyber]

If Counter Strike Global Offensive will be native, not with a Wine fork, I might buy it. First linux game buy for years...

PS: Nvidia drivers are as good as on Windows, usually they are only a month behind or so! Only AMD and Intel need to catch up.

[Sslaxx]

If Counter Strike Global Offensive will be native, not with a Wine fork, I might buy it. First linux game buy for years...

PS: Nvidia drivers are as good as on Windows, usually they are only a month behind or so! Only AMD and Intel need to catch up.

Seeing as it is increasingly turning out "Linux" Steam is actually going to be running on a fork of WINE with a specially coded D3D<>OpenGL dynamic translation layer, it's unlikely it'll be native.

Hopefully Linux Steam will support actual native apps too, but I guess it's a wait-and-see on that one.

[Dr.Paneas]

Seeing as it is increasingly turning out "Linux" Steam is actually going to be running on a fork of WINE with a specially coded D3D<>OpenGL dynamic translation layer, it's unlikely it'll be native.

Hopefully Linux Steam will support actual native apps too, but I guess it's a wait-and-see on that one.

Not exactly, but I've got your point. Wine has nothing to do with Steam. Steam is a content distribution framework. Wine is a Unix implementation of various Microsoft APIs. Meaning that Steam performance is x10 better than Wine

[Zeven]

I may be a gamer and I actually own a good deal of Valve titles, but have not yet played them. Might as well wait till they come out on Linux now!

[synaptix]

Only AMD and Intel need to catch up.

To be honest, AMD has caught up. Intel is the one that needs to catch up with their Linux graphics drivers.

Both Catalyst and OS Radeon drivers have come a LONG way from where they used to be, especially the OS Radeon drivers in the 3.5 kernel series has made some pretty astounding performance boosts from what I've read on Phoronix.