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reboot said:
Could this be the push Linux needs to become just a little more popular among the "average" computer user/gamer?

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...their hiring isn't limited to that and are looking for those with kernel, file-system, device driver experience, etc.

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K!r4 said:
Well, let's put things in the right order:

- Valve releases Steam on Linux

- All games who had a Linux version elsewhere are available to Linux users through Steam and devs make big money

- Enjoying its new found popularity through games, Linux indeed needs better sound libraries/hardware vendor support

- Devs and programmers do the right thing and make things go forward with those aspects

- Linux becomes more and more popular and more games are ported to Linux. DirectX is progressively forgotten and OpenGL evolves faster

- We are in 2024. Windows' shares have gone under the floor and Bill Gates is now a guru in Africa

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K!r4 said:
@Jodwin: you can count everything that has been sold in Humble Bundles and virtually any OpenGL title whom authors may be willing to make a conversion, over time.

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Jonathan said:
Step two, produce a fully integrated version of Linux that combines a stripped down version of the OS with Steam at a deep level. In essence, a Steam OS, which is given away free to hardware vendors, who pre-install it on commodity PC hardware to produce what are essentially Steam consoles.

Mark my words, I wager we'll see a Steam OS shipping by 2014 at least.

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Phml said:
Anyone who believes Linux and average user can go together is utterly out of touch with reality,

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Phml said:
and anyone who interprets this as implying I dislike Linux is part of the problem.

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Jodwin said:

Assuming that would happen, and I really doubt it, then so what? Is it somehow magically going to make Linux a popular gamers' OS just because there's a few indie games available there?

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So why hasn't it happened so far?
[...]
The only situation I can imagine is if some huge company (think Google) starts pushing Linux by having some standard components developed that would help overcome these issues

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Csonicgo said:

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Graf Zahl said:
So why hasn't it happened so far? The problems have been known for years, yet we still got an incredibly fractured platform where the only way to make software work reliably is to compile directly from source on the system it's supposed to run on.

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Phml said:
Anyone who believes Linux and average user can go together is utterly out of touch with reality, and anyone who interprets this as implying I dislike Linux is part of the problem.

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Jonathan said:
Their response? Step one, make Linux a supported Steam platform. Start porting Valve games to it, and encouraging other vendors to do the same.

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Jonathan said:
Step two, produce a fully integrated version of Linux that combines a stripped down version of the OS with Steam at a deep level. In essence, a Steam OS, which is given away free to hardware vendors, who pre-install it on commodity PC hardware to produce what are essentially Steam consoles.

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Blzut3 said:

This isn't true at all. For the most part you can compile an x86 or x86-64 binary that will work on most Linux systems with the proper libraries installed.

Why most instead of all? The problem is that we keep looking at Linux as the operating system. It is merely the kernel. An x86 Android probably doesn't run your standard ELF binaries, and yet it is still Linux. We will always have this problem as long as we continue to confuse the kernel for the operating system.

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Graf Zahl said:
Thanks for confirming my point. 'Most' means that it isn't reliable. Period. What if your system is the oddball exception?

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Blzut3 said:
That said I must reiterate that binary only programs work for a long time across many Linux based operating systems.

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Maes said:
with exceptions being, well, exceptions, rather than the norm.

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Maes said:
No current Linux version can do that, for reasons that others have already cited but I'll gladly repeat: poor cross-distro binary compatibility and library dependency hell, which makes end-user-machine-specific compilation from source the preferred, if not the only practical way of distributing software, which in turn is incompatible with the way commercial videogames have been marketed until nowadays.

Windows and Mac OS software was so easy to sell on a disk because everything comes statically linked and precompiled, on OSes with a predictable API, ABI, and any required libraries are either statically linked or provided during game installation from disk. In particular, game developers develops against those libraries (DirectX, Direct3D, PhysX etc.)

The problem with the Linux world? The statically-linked, precompiled executable is pretty much excommunicated like the Devil from most of the Linux community. No sane company would bother maintaining a dozen of slightly different executables in order to tackle distro- or window-manager specific bugs, and those that tried didn't exactly strike it rich.

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This would work, but it would essentially create their own version of the "walled garden" model which triggered (hypothetically) this whole thing to begin with. So Steam would be the demons, and become a zombie themselves ;-) That is, unless they were far more liberal about licensing it and had a team of developers making sure that it works exactly the same on the various possible future hardware platforms (ARM is expected to gain momentum, though Intel will still be King, either in the old IBM PC-compatible BIOS flavor, or the newfangled UEFI or even MacIntel).

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chungy said:
BTW Maes, thanks for claiming that someone using a different window manager is somehow magically going to make binaries stop working. Nearly lost my soda from laughing ;-)

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chungy said:
I like how Maes and Graf both seem to love pretending Linux is still like it was 14 years ago and hasn't evolved since.

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• DOS: the past
  
• Windows: the OS for the rest of us, that brought computers to many people
  
• Mac: well known in certain circles (DTP, art, etc.) and to a close-knit community of aficionados.
  
• UNIX: the OS that "runs the internet". Only for the experts! Keep out! Very demanding! Very hard to run (it WAS much more taxing on the hardware than any other OS, too, at least on IBM PCs)!
  
• Solaris, Nextstep, etc.: exotic stuff you're not very likely to see.
  
• Amiga workbench, Atari GEM etc.: you only dealt with those if you worked in TV production and MIDI composing, accordingly, though that had started to change by 1998.