Steam For Linux Will Launch In 2012

An anonymous reader writes "Gabe Newell has responded to an email asking if Steam for Linux will be released this year with the simple answer 'Yes.' That means at some point in the next 7 months anyone running Linux will be able to download Steam and start playing a number of games, including at least one Valve title (most likely Left 4 Dead 2). After that the emphasis will be on game developers to start porting their Steam games over to Linux. 2012 could be a great year for gaming on Linux. The news follows the revelation in April that Valve was indeed working on a Linux port of its digital games service. At the time though, and as with all Valve software, we had no idea when it would get released."

Humble Indie Bundle

[De Lemming]

Great!
Remember that all games from the current and previous Humble Indie Bundles [humblebundle.com] (overview of all games [wikipedia.org]) have a Linux version, and most of them are on Steam too. So that's already a nice range of games to start.

Re:Developers, developers, developers

[The MAZZTer]

Thanks to efforts like the Humble Indie Bundle, there are already a bunch of games on Steam that have Linux ports, in addition to whatever Valve ports.

2012 Valve Time?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

Re:This is great news!

[Deorus]

They lock my games to a single account and that's about it. In exchange, they backup my saves, backup my games, allow me to install my games wherever I wish, provide me with free voice chat services that I would otherwise have to host or pay for, provide me with awesome deals, etc.

Thanks to Steam promotions alone, my game library there has 273 games that cost me an average of $6 each, so I don't know about you, but $6 per game in addition to all the other advantages is quite a bargain in exchange for their "DRM" that is more permissive than what you can usually find in the retail versions of the same games.

Re:Developers, developers, developers

[DragonTHC]

I have stuck with windows for the past 10 years for specifically this reason. I'm a Linux admin by trade. I see no reason after steam games are stable on Linux to stick around. (except the crap feast which is origin.)

Re:Developers, developers, developers

[h4rr4r]

bzzt wrong.

Very few of them are using any form of wine. Many were ported by icculus.

Re:This is great news!

[Terrasque]

Actually, it does store your save games in the cloud, for the games that support it.

Either that, or my desktop and laptop have some weird data quantum entanglement going on.

Re:This is great news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Evidently you haven't used Steam in quite a while. Files are stored locally (because not doing that is a dumb idea), but they're also synced across Steam's servers. I uninstalled HL2 a while back to save room, then reinstalled it the other day on my new computer, and all my old saves came with it.

Re:Developers, developers, developers

[Bonobo_Unknown]

Except that most of the games on steam won't be available on Linux (as they aren't on os x either).

Re:No probably not

[jedidiah]

...so it acts like apt-get for games.

Re:Developers, developers, developers

[VGPowerlord]

As long as developers are willing to statically link in libraries - that's not the Linux way, but it's done all the time on Windows anyway

No, actually what's done all the time on Windows is far stupider than that.

Developers dynamically link, then include a private copy of the DLLs they linked against with their program that no other program on the system uses.

Re:2012 the year of the Linux desktop

[nschubach]

To suggest that Uncle Larry will switch to Linux because she doesn't like the tile interface is absurd!

They'll just do what my Dad does and run Windows XP on the 900Mhz machine with 256MB RAM I'm not allowed to upgrade because "it works the way he wants it to, even if it's a bit slow" while the new machine I transferred all his data to collects dust.

Re:2012 the year of the Linux desktop

[Baloroth]

I know a lot of not-terribly computer savvy people who avoided Vista and stuck with XP because of the bad press it got, so yes, people can and will avoid the current version of Windows if it gets bad press (from the nerds). As far as switching to Linux go: again, I know a lot of less-than-nerdy types who have strongly considered and/or used Linux (generally Ubuntu). Linux really has progressed a great deal in public image. No where near Windows-level of adaptation, yet, but it is progressing, which is all you can really ask for.