Steam - It's Not Just for Windows and Macs Anymore

Something I think is going to be interesting to see first is a better viewing of the picture that is linux gaming.

Up to now in my mind it's been "PC gaming = windows gaming", a bunch of people who say they would like to be on linux (and talk is cheap) and a bunch of actual linux gamers either playing whatever they can get wine to run acceptably (even if it means they need to beat it into shape with various hacks and a wing and a prayer) or supported native versions. Occasionally you would get a few stats out of someone, or a humble bundle (which is ticking a box).

Now comes along steam, pretty much the biggest and broadest PC gaming platform (and there are others), so hopefully valve can get some real world numbers for the OS. It would be quite something if they could say a year after release that X% of accounts are regularly logging on and playing on linux, Y% were buying games, a developer put out a linux port of their game and saw Z thousand sales.

I don't think Steam needs to be the caretaker. It creates a demand. And hopefully some companies will fulfill those demands.
That's how I think that Steam can push things.

Via Reddit:

TFC2 Downloading with Steam. AFAIK I am not in Steam Beta.

It also shows up for me. But for one reason or another, Ubuntu doesn't see the free space I do have on my hd.
So sorting that issue out first. (resizing or something bla bla and otherwise a full reinstall).
Let me know about your experiences!

More via Reddit:
TF2 Benchmarks (Windows 8 vs Ubuntu 12.04)

Final Thoughts

It's incredible how good it runs on Linux. It runs significantly better on Linux than it does OSX (Mac). I am sure it can still be optimized further. One thing I noticed is that even though the framerate is high, there still feels to be some kind of display lag. It's not as bad or as annoying as screen tearing or micro stuttering, it's hard to explain. Hopefully they'll fix that. Another concern for linux converts will be to get your sensitivities sorted by making the switch. It's nearly on par with Windows performance now other than the quirk I mentioned above. I'm sure within a few months it will be on par or even outdo the performance you get on Windows.

One thing I noticed is that even though the framerate is high, there still feels to be some kind of display lag. It's not as bad or as annoying as screen tearing or micro stuttering, it's hard to explain.

Sounds like there might be a latency issue there; the rendering queue might be an extra frame or two longer on Linux than on OS X or Windows. The XFree86 code base is ancient beyond imagining, and was originally designed to be run over network links, so some extra latency in that gnarled mess would not shock me, even a little.

Honestly, as old as a lot of that code is, I'm amazed the whole mess is still in service.

I reinstalled Ubuntu and dedicated my other HD fully to it. First it had some data on it accessed by Windows mostly.
Not sure why Steam couldn't see the free space, but it didn't and I couldn't even start installing TF2.

So, reinstalled it all and installed Steam again...and I can click all I want on the icon. It will glow a bit and that is that.
Any tips?

Also, I don't have the 'additional drivers' option anymore, that I did have before.

If you installed in 64-bit mode, make sure to install the libc6 library for 32-bit programs. On Debian, it's called 'libc6-i386', but I think Ubuntu changed the name a little, and I don't have a current Ubuntu VM to check.

By default, a 64-bit machine cannot run 32-bit apps. Doing it from the command line, you get back a 'NO YUO' error message, complaining that the file doesn't exist or something like that. Install the right libc library, and wham, it's all good.

Sparhawk wrote:

So, reinstalled it all and installed Steam again...and I can click all I want on the icon. It will glow a bit and that is that.
Any tips?

Open a terminal and try simply running "steam". It should have some error messages spew out that you can use to diagnose the situation.

Combined both tips and found the solution
Installed the missing library with this: sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-glx:i386
Thanks! And installing TF2. Finally lol

Sparhawk wrote:

Combined both tips and found the solution
Installed the missing library with this: sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-glx:i386
Thanks! And installing TF2. Finally lol

It's an ARG! Half Life 3 exists!!!

Aha, the libgl might be why it wouldn't run on my Xubuntu partition. I may try that, too.

Another article with a bit of backgroud story:

It seems this is a mistake from Valve, which fixed a bug that prevented Ubuntu Developer Summit participants from playing Team Fortress 2 and in the process, somehow the game ended up as being available for everyone. This might mean that Team Fortress 2 won't be available after Valve fixes the glitch, but considering they haven't fixed the bug that allows non-beta accounts to use Steam for Linux, they might allow this as well.

Click on the link for the full article.

Malor wrote:
One thing I noticed is that even though the framerate is high, there still feels to be some kind of display lag. It's not as bad or as annoying as screen tearing or micro stuttering, it's hard to explain.

Sounds like there might be a latency issue there; the rendering queue might be an extra frame or two longer on Linux than on OS X or Windows. The XFree86 code base is ancient beyond imagining, and was originally designed to be run over network links, so some extra latency in that gnarled mess would not shock me, even a little.

Honestly, as old as a lot of that code is, I'm amazed the whole mess is still in service.

Local OpenGL apps don't use the X protocol at all for OpenGL calls -- libgl essentially talks to the hardware directly, with access arbitrated by the kernel modules that the various drivers use. You can run OpenGL apps via the X protocol if you need to (running an app on one machine but displaying it on another, for example) -- this is usually referred to as indirect rendering, to differentiate it from the direct rendering described above -- but you take a substantial performance hit for doing so. You can read about how this all works for the open-source DRI drivers here; the NVIDIA and AMD drivers don't use DRI, but they do work in much the same way, using their own implementations of the same ideas.

If there's latency, it might have some other video-related cause, but it's more likely to be in the input layer. Either way, it should definitely be fixable.

Yeah, that's one of the nicer things about open source; demonstrate a problem like that, with some measurements, and a fix will likely show up.

Incoming THQ humble bundle/fire sale, which means some THQ games on linux, on steam:
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming...
http://cdr.thebronasium.com/sub/18207

Probably wrapped instead of native, but it could be some big titles, and pay what you want.

That's cool. Especially for titles already owned

Yeah, I can't imagine them doing native ports, but sh*t, I'd pay for some of those again, just to get them running on Linux.

Tried to play...but it crashes on me and framerate is really really too low. But that is me playing on a laptop. On win7 I play just fine though.
Maybe I should check my display drivers again.

Sparhawk wrote:

Tried to play...but it crashes on me and framerate is really really too low. But that is me playing on a laptop. On win7 I play just fine though.
Maybe I should check my display drivers again.

Yes, make sure you're using the binary drivers from NVIDIA/ATI.

If you're using the open source drivers, you won't get very good 3D performance.

Steam Client update for Linux:

Steam for Linux Client Update
posted by Frank @ 05:29AM on November 21, 2012
We've just updated the Steam for Linux client. Your client will update automatically but if you wish to force the update, click Check for Steam Client Updates..., from the top-level Steam menu.

The following fixes are included in this release:
added support for detecting kmod: video driver packages to the video driver detection code
fixed the video driver version check bootstrapper and added X API error handling
corrected top level window titles
fixed truncated text in Steam settings dialog
fixed low download speed problem
fixed overlay occasionally not exiting if game crashed
added support for keypad Enter button messages
improved the tracking of game windows by the overlay
fixed how the Steam client waits for child process exits
added support for using xdg-user-dir-lookup to find the DESKTOP directory
fixed bug with maximize button not working
made the Steam install directory relocatable
steam install now properly updates the /usr/bin/steam directory
added support for proper reinstallation if the Steam install bootstrap fails
fixed a glyph rendering bug that resulted in heap corruption
the locale is now set to generate proper character input

Well, I finally got it going, only to find that I'm not authorized. (which I knew, but I thought they'd lifted the restriction.)

So, well, I can see a list of games, and then it shuts down. Sigh.

Malor wrote:

Well, I finally got it going, only to find that I'm not authorized. (which I knew, but I thought they'd lifted the restriction.)

So, well, I can see a list of games, and then it shuts down. Sigh.

Did you try this?

*Legion* wrote:

From the command line, run "steam steam://open/games".

This will open Steam directly to the Games window, bypassing the beta account check.

Valve games themselves still won't work without a beta account - and, in fact, a lot of games that may appear in your account won't work - but some do.

No, because I want to try TF2. I don't care too much about the other stuff.... none of the Linux-compatible stuff I have on my account is particularly graphically challenging, except maybe Trine.

Then you probably want "steam steam://run/440"

But what about:

Valve games themselves still won't work without a beta account

Hmmm, I thought that worked, but apparently they 'fixed' it.

Hmmm, TF2 is crashing rather than explicitly saying I'm denied. Beta is beta.

Well, that actually worked for awhile. I was able to play for a few minutes, but then it segfaulted.

It does seem laggy, I'm guessing at least two frames, maybe three. It feels kind of like vsync is on, even though I explicitly turned it off.

It does work though and I found that already pretty cool.
Today Valve announced that the beta has been expanded (by 5000 accounts I thought - checked it).
So things seem to go well

I finally grabbed a copy of the beta today and used the workarounds to get it working. I didn't have any issues getting TF2 running and playing a game (just against bots) once I'd upgraded to the NVIDIA 310 drivers, but there's definitely a jerkyness to it -- it's mostly smooth but maybe once or twice a second on average it'll pause for several frames. It also took ages to load; this system isn't exactly state-of-the-art (Athlon II and an 8800GT) but I do have 12GB of RAM, so I was surprised when it took several minutes to get in to the menus.

Definitely beats running it under Wine, though

Yeah, it was really slow loading for me, too, but I think that may have been because the main Steam settings were defaulted to 56K. Now that I think about it, I didn't check my /rate commands, either, so that may have been part of the laggy feeling.

Definitely wasn't getting jerkiness, though. It was pretty steady, it just felt lagged by a few frames.