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

I got TF2 working with my Radeon 7850 on Quantal. (Details in the TF2 thread.) What a giant PITA. I didn't get sound running; I'll probably try, because I love pain.

I think installing Q3 back in the day may actually have been easier. If there's ever going to be serious AAA gaming on Linux in the near- to medium-term, at least one of the major distributions is going to have to get cozier with the driver manufacturers. Layering the graphics card manufacturers' hangups on top of Linux's hangups and the distributors' hangups is just not going to fly.

It's a problem money can solve, though. I hear Valve has money. I live in hope.

Spent several hours this weekend trying to setup a dual boot on my custom Clevo P170HM (i7, GTX 580M, Intel SSD). Tried Ubuntu 12.10. Then tried 12.04. Then Linux Mint. Nothing seemed to work. Always had problems with getting the display drivers to install correctly. Had to put nomodeset to even get to the desktop.

All of this for a penguin.

I like Linux and enjoyed it on my lesser machines but this is why I laugh in the face of those who suggest Linux is ready for the masses and is "easy to use".

I'm stubbornly refusing to jump through any more hoops for a virtual penguin. I may also go out and buy a copy of Win8 that I'll never use because screw Linux.

Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but why not just use VirtualBox to set up a virtual install of Ubuntu and delete it when you have said penguin?

Virtualbox can't do 3D very well. I'm pretty sure TF2 would bail out before getting to the menu.

My laptop's video card can't run TF2, but can launch it. You just need to launch the game to get the penguin, which I got.

My laptop is now 100% with unbutu 12.10 as its OS.

Scratched wrote:

Virtualbox can't do 3D very well. I'm pretty sure TF2 would bail out before getting to the menu.

That's all I'm going for; just launching it is enough.

FSeven wrote:

Spent several hours this weekend trying to setup a dual boot on my custom Clevo P170HM (i7, GTX 580M, Intel SSD). Tried Ubuntu 12.10. Then tried 12.04. Then Linux Mint. Nothing seemed to work. Always had problems with getting the display drivers to install correctly. Had to put nomodeset to even get to the desktop.

All of this for a penguin.

I like Linux and enjoyed it on my lesser machines but this is why I laugh in the face of those who suggest Linux is ready for the masses and is "easy to use".

I'm stubbornly refusing to jump through any more hoops for a virtual penguin. I may also go out and buy a copy of Win8 that I'll never use because screw Linux.

Truthfully, it's very recent that any Nvidia support has really started happening for Linux. Most of what's been provided so far has really been stuff that has had to be reverse engineered.

New kernel update that's been released (3.8) is supposed to have better native drivers (although I believe they're still 3rd party), so yeah. You wanna blame Linux? Just blame the company that's responsible, Torvalds did. Note: NSFW video

I did a Dual boot (actually, triple with GRUB [XP, WIN7, Ubuntu]) this weekend.

12.04 64bit worked great a few times with TF2 and my GTX 560. The next day I went to boot up and Purple death. Stuck on the ubuntu screen.

I finially think I found the issue.

My motherboard does not have onboard video and I read that many people running my combo with the current kernal from 12.04 have the same issue where it is trying to look for the onboard video.

I deleted ubuntu and installed 12.04 32bit and so far so good. I think I have to wait for the next kernal update before I will try 64 bit again.

When I do NOMODESET and such, there are no errors at all and it boots to the logon prompt.

I think the problem is more from the developer point of view, which is why Torvalds commented. I believe when something goes wrong with whatever you're coding (app or kernel) it's difficult to debug and find the problem when part of the puzzle is a black box.

Another perspective is something Valve said when talking about getting intel integrated drivers better, they made a comparison with AMD who make their debugging symbols readily available so you could just figure it out yourself and were trying to steer intel in the same direction, while with nvidia you had a big back-and-forth discussion with them that might get some information out of them, eventually, or get something fixed in a few driver revisions if it was on their end.

I know they've got proprietary stuff to protect, but I can't see how it isn't mutually beneficial to open up more. Going by how it's been a binary blob for many years and many hardware/driver revisions I can only assume it's deeply rooted policy.

Scratched wrote:

I know they've got proprietary stuff to protect, but I can't see how it isn't mutually beneficial to open up more. Going by how it's been a binary blob for many years and many hardware/driver revisions I can only assume it's deeply rooted policy.

Yep, I think it mush be policy. NVIDIA is the only company I know of off-hand that thought their Ethernet driver, of all things (for the built-in Ethernet on nForce-chipset motherboards) had to be closed-source, too. To their credit, once the community thoroughly reverse-enginneered those devices and released an open-source driver for them, NVIDIA devs dropped their own driver and just started sending in patches for the reverse-engineered one instead, but their insistence on a binary-only driver before that was just ridiculous.

As for the bigger picture, I've found that Ubuntu works out-of-the-box most of the time -- well enough to give you a working system that you can then (fairly easily) install the necessary proprietary video driver on to. The problem is that when it doesn't work out-of-the-box, it's not particularly easy to sort out, since it usually comes down to an obscure bug or a weird interaction between different bits of hardware. Unfortunately, this seems to happen more often than not to new users, since they're the ones exposing Linux to new hardware combinations most often.

I don't know what the solution is, but I do think that hardware support is generally getting better. Occasionally some substantial roadblock will come along -- NVIDIA's Optimus is an excellent recent example -- but on the whole Linux today has far greater hardware support, and hence a far greater chance of running out-of-the-box on a given PC, than it did even a few years back.

my custom Clevo P170HM

There's your problem. Linux is often troublesome on laptops, especially new laptops, unless you buy one explicitly to run it. Different laptop manufacturers do all kinds of totally bizarre crap with their hardware and BIOSes that's often very difficult for the Linux kernel to puzzle out.

That said, if you bought it with NVidia graphics, it may work okay with the next Ubuntu, and it will probably work well by the time 13.10 ships. I can't absolutely promise this, but typically, laptop mfrs do weird stuff, and then the kernel and driver teams have to reverse-engineer what they did. You don't see the problems very often with Windows, because part of the development process is making sure Windows will run. That doesn't mean that Windows is 'better', just that they take the time to make sure it works.

The Nvidia closed-source drivers are really the only option if you want to game on Linux. The Intel drivers are stable and featureful enough, but the actual hardware is much too weak. Basically, NVidia writes their drivers for Windows, and then supplies a shim layer that makes the X drivers and Linux kernel make the correct calls into the Windows binaries.

This really pisses off the Linux kernel devs (as you can see in that video), because they don't like having to use a binary blob like that, but NVidia is not interested in opening their source. They see the quality and speed of their drivers as being a major competitive advantage, and given the absolute sh*t quality of the AMD drivers, they're probably right.

awwww yyyeaahhh

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/ZT4yAsq.jpg)

trueheart78 wrote:
FSeven wrote:

Spent several hours this weekend trying to setup a dual boot on my custom Clevo P170HM (i7, GTX 580M, Intel SSD). Tried Ubuntu 12.10. Then tried 12.04. Then Linux Mint. Nothing seemed to work. Always had problems with getting the display drivers to install correctly. Had to put nomodeset to even get to the desktop.

All of this for a penguin.

I like Linux and enjoyed it on my lesser machines but this is why I laugh in the face of those who suggest Linux is ready for the masses and is "easy to use".

I'm stubbornly refusing to jump through any more hoops for a virtual penguin. I may also go out and buy a copy of Win8 that I'll never use because screw Linux.

Truthfully, it's very recent that any Nvidia support has really started happening for Linux. Most of what's been provided so far has really been stuff that has had to be reverse engineered.

New kernel update that's been released (3.8) is supposed to have better native drivers (although I believe they're still 3rd party), so yeah. You wanna blame Linux? Just blame the company that's responsible, Torvalds did. Note: NSFW video

Nvidia has long provided binary drivers for Linux that are feature complete and roughly comparable to their Windows drivers. Even though these drivers are proprietary and cannot be freely distributed, most modern distributions make it really easy to get them working at this point (and if not, that's a distribution issue, not a "Linux" issue generally).

The OSS reverse engineered nvidia driver (Nouveau) is usable for basic things, but if you're thinking about using Steam to actually play modern video games it's probably not going to cut it.

It's certainly annoying for end users that Nvidia won't open source its drivers, but it should be a minor annoyance at worst given how easy it is to grab the binaries with most distributions.

Congrats! Nothing like a lil' trophy as a reward for figuring that out.

Tagging for the future. I think I'm finally able to make the jump to Linux completely. Photoshop is humming along in a Virtualbox VM of Win7, and that was basically my last necessity from Windows. That, and games...

But Steam on Linux is awesome. And for the record, I have a Clevo P151HM1 with a 560m, and I don't have any compatibility issues with Ubuntu or any other distros I've tried. I guess that's directed at FSeven. As if people don't have driver issues with Windows...

BTW, anyone going to Scale this weekend? I wasn't planning on it, but they have quite a bit about web development, so I'm taking the wife and baby and I'm going to be there Friday and Saturday

Citizen86 wrote:

But Steam on Linux is awesome.

The thing that's awesome is that it's just steam, pretty much full feature parity with the other two platforms. The platform is there for games to use now.

Citizen86 wrote:

Tagging for the future. I think I'm finally able to make the jump to Linux completely. Photoshop is humming along in a Virtualbox VM of Win7, and that was basically my last necessity from Windows. That, and games...

Photoshop may actually run OK in Wine (if you're willing to mess around a little bit to get it working).

gore wrote:
Citizen86 wrote:

Tagging for the future. I think I'm finally able to make the jump to Linux completely. Photoshop is humming along in a Virtualbox VM of Win7, and that was basically my last necessity from Windows. That, and games...

Photoshop may actually run OK in Wine (if you're willing to mess around a little bit to get it working).

I wasn't, haha. I've tried. I started working in PlayOnLinux (to keep a separate Wine installation for it), but even their auto-installer of necessary packages was erroring out. Winetricks wasn't much help either.

I'm sure it could have worked, but I didn't have hours to dedicate to it. Also, VirtualBox Seamless mode is almost as good. The laptop is also a quad-core i7 with 16gb of ram, so I have the resources available for a few VM's

Citizen86 wrote:

I wasn't, haha. I've tried. I started working in PlayOnLinux (to keep a separate Wine installation for it), but even their auto-installer of necessary packages was erroring out. Winetricks wasn't much help either.

I'm sure it could have worked, but I didn't have hours to dedicate to it. Also, VirtualBox Seamless mode is almost as good. The laptop is also a quad-core i7 with 16gb of ram, so I have the resources available for a few VM's :)

Yeah, I hear ya. A pretty healthy percentage of video games can actually be made to run in wine as well, but after a certain point it's time I'd rather not be pissing away. Dual booting into Windows when it's game time isn't that bad (still, at times I'll find myself playing Linux games just because I don't want to touch Windows).

I made good use of the Steam Linux sale (even though I already owned a decent number of the games already on Linux), so yeah I agree, I might not have to boot back into Linux for a while.

Also, I'm pretty sure XCom and Skyrim play almost perfectly in Wine, so if I can get those set up, I should be good to go

So Steam on Linux has been an absolute boon for me. While I've moved away from some of the bigger budget PC games onto the console versions, Prison Architect & the Humble Bundle games have made those off-hours, not-really-wanting-to-play-the-console times fantastic.

It was really nice that I could replay HL2: Ep1 under Linux, too. I'd been wanting to replay it ever since finishing Bioshock infinite, so I could refresh my memory of how good an AI character Alyx was, and it was great that I didn't have to boot in to Windows to do that. I did have to turn off one monitor to get good performance, though, but that's probably because of the age of my video card (512MB 8800GT).

TheGameguru wrote:

I can't see the developer community supporting this in any meaningful shape or form.. I still can't get a Linux distro to reliably detect monitor resolutions and god forbid I try and switch my video card out.. yikes.

I love how (relatively) quickly we went from this skepticism to Steam on Linux existing to Valve building a whole console around it.

Well, to be fair, it has been most of a year.

Looking back already at the bold predictions 2013....I did quite well lol

parallaxview wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:

A Steambox makes no sense. Would it have to run EVERY game on Steam?

A target spec machine (which is very different from a Steam machine) would require sign off by major developers to actually target that spec, which would be incredibly difficult to pull off since there's really not a lot of upside to it and it requires competing companies to work together.

Either way, I didn't say it wasn't outside the realm of possibility. I was responding to the idea that there isn't even the SLIGHTEST doubt. You basically flipped the hyperbole.

Edit: Let me put this way. Big Picture mode and Steam on Ubuntu are evidence that Valve is NOT making a console or anything similar. They're taking what they already do and expanding into new markets. They're not creating anything new.

Think what you will but with the rise of app stores in both Windows and Mac Valve knows that it needs another option where it is still the walled garden. I doubt they will call it a console, but I am sure they will have a Valve rig of some sort and would not be surprised if they set it up android style to allow manufacturers to get in the game.

I can see the golden path, bow before mua'dib!

Slightly related:

Linux 3.12 Brings Big AMD Radeon Improvements

For many Linux games tested the Radeon Gallium3D OpenGL frame-rates were making double-digit gains through upgrading the Linux kernel.

Crossposting from the Steam thread in the Games forum.

SteamOS will be available to download on December 13th

While the company suggests that the new operating system won't necessarily be easy to install — "unless you're an intrepid Linux hacker already, we're going to recommend that you wait until later in 2014 to try it out," says Valve — it means that we should get a deeper look at how it works and how it performs ahead of the company's CES announcements.

Ooooooh

Guess I know what I'll be mucking about with soon