Valve porting Steam and the Source Engine to Linux

**Garteal** · 04-26-2012, 03:15 AM #1

Valve’s digital distribution service Steam has been offering up games for almost 9 years now, and yet until May last year it remained a Windows-only service.
Then Valve made Mac gamers happy by porting not only the service, but its back catalog of games to Apple’s platform. Now, it looks as though the long rumored Linux port is finally going to happen.

Michael Larabel, the man behind the well-known Linux website Phoronix, was invited out to Valve’s offices in Bellevue, Washington. He has now returned and started sharing the details of what they showed him.

Apparently Valve has been working towards a Linux port of both the Steam service and Source engine for quite a while. The reason it has taken so long is there has been no real direction and focus on the project:
developers there just work on it when they can and when they want to. That has now changed, with Gabe Newell taking the lead on pushing the project forward.

While at Valve, Larabel got to load up Ubuntu and launch a working version of the Steam client without need of Wine (used for running Windows apps on Linux).
He has also confirmed that Left 4 Dead 2 is the game being used to test development/porting because it offers both a stable and up-to-date implementation of the Source engine.
Once that is ported other games from Valve’s back catalog will follow, meaning Half-Life and Portal on Linux will be released eventually.

Based on Larabel’s account of what he saw and what he talked about with Newell, Linux users are likely to see a release at some point this year.
It may be beta, and it may be limited to one Valve game, but that’s a great start. Larabel also believes Valve is going above and beyond what other services and games companies are doing on Linux,
and that they will become the “most Linux-friendly game company.”

Source: geek.com

**ExtremeDude2** · 04-26-2012, 03:30 AM #2

O nice

~~Duke Nukem~~ · 04-26-2012, 03:42 AM #3

Personally I'm glad I have left Steam and the PC Gaming scene altogether, can't really stand all these clients and activations with todays games.
PS3 FTW!

It's still nice that they're porting it nevertheless.

***Shonumi*** · 04-26-2012, 03:51 AM #4

This is certainly interesting. It's good to see Linux getting some attention is terms of games. Steam on Linux has certainly been a long time coming.

I can't say I'm excited, personally. I have neither the money nor the interest to play PC games. At least it's an option now.

**Garteal** · (This post was last modified: 04-26-2012, 04:10 AM by Garteal.)

It took them quite some time to finally give the Linux users some attention.
The only thing left to do is for the game developers to create a OpenGL, cross-platform version of their games now.
Would be awesome to not have to switch to Windows to play some Steam games.

Quote:Personally I'm glad I have left Steam and the PC Gaming scene altogether, can't really stand all these clients and activations with todays games.

You don't have to use Steam you know. You could always purchase a retail copy of the game. (provided that they arn't origin/steam download code vessels)
What clients and activations? The only two notable clients to day are Origin and Steam.
Besides, why would you quit PC gaming if you have build such a great rig?

Quote:I can't say I'm excited, personally. I have neither the money nor the interest to play PC games. At least it's an option now.

Hmm... have you had bad experiences with PC games or something? Or are there perhaps no PC games that you would like to play?

**ExtremeDude2** · 04-26-2012, 04:09 AM #6

Here is from "another source" :3

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/na...oming_soon

**neobrain** · 04-26-2012, 04:17 AM #7

(04-26-2012, 04:09 AM)ExtremeDude2 Wrote: Here is from "another source" :3

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/na...oming_soon

Thanks for linking to an article that rephrases the main source :p

**NaturalViolence** · 04-26-2012, 04:20 AM #8

Quote:Personally I'm glad I have left Steam and the PC Gaming scene altogether, can't really stand all these clients and activations with todays games.
PS3 FTW!

I'm not sure what you're talking about. 99% of games are available on steam these days, the activation process is as simple as clicking "download and install", and it takes seconds to install after the game is done downloading. Compare that to the constant slow mandatory updates you get with ps3 games these days and you often spend about the same amount of time getting the game ready to play either way.

~~Duke Nukem~~ · (This post was last modified: 04-26-2012, 04:35 AM by Duke Nukem.)

(04-26-2012, 03:52 AM)Garteal Wrote: You don't have to use Steam you know. You could always purchase a retail copy of the game. (provided that they arn't origin/steam download code vessels)
What clients and activations? The only two notable clients to day are Origin and Steam.
Besides, why would you quit PC gaming if you have build such a great rig?

I have retail copies of the games but got tired of playing them on PC.

I took the easy way out and bought every single one of the PC games I had for the PS3 instead.
Also there is a lot of games for the PS3 that I love that have never seen the light of day for PC and it's better having everything collected on one platform then 10 games on PC and just 5-6 on PS3.

And besides I have never used my emulation rig for PC games, I used my Q9650 + GTX 460 Media Center rig for that.

Anyway I'll probably sell that rig and most of the PC games that isn't tied to a Steam account soon. No need to keep these things.

(04-26-2012, 04:20 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote:
Quote:Personally I'm glad I have left Steam and the PC Gaming scene altogether, can't really stand all these clients and activations with todays games.
PS3 FTW!

I'm not sure what you're talking about. 99% of games are available on steam these days, the activation process is as simple as clicking "download and install", and it takes seconds to install after the game is done downloading. Compare that to the constant slow mandatory updates you get with ps3 games these days and you often spend about the same amount of time getting the game ready to play either way.

And I'm different and does everything my own way, but we already knew this and have been through this before.

***Shonumi*** · (This post was last modified: 04-26-2012, 04:47 AM by Shonumi.)

(04-26-2012, 03:52 AM)Garteal Wrote:
Quote:I can't say I'm excited, personally. I have neither the money nor the interest to play PC games. At least it's an option now.

Hmm... have you had bad experiences with PC games or something? Or are there perhaps no PC games that you would like to play?

I used to be into PC gaming, right when my friends introduced me to Counter-Strike and Star/Warcraft. I was even subscribed to Computer Gaming World for something close to 3 years. But nothing interests me nowadays. I like indie titles for their originality and OSS games for their simplicity. I emulate a lot because, to this day, there are console games I own but have not beaten (Shinobi for the Genesis :p).

It's mostly that nothing looks to be up my alley. I'm not a huge fan of FPS games anymore. I like JRPGs and SRPGs more than WRPGs (by a lot I might add) so I've stuck to consoles for a long time. I dunno, I just look at a lot of PC titles and go "meh".