Valve Blog Announces Dates For Steam Linux External Beta

An anonymous reader writes "In the third post to the new Valve Linux Blog, the Linux team has announced that starting next week they will begin their internal beta, with an external beta of 1000 users to begin mid 'some time in October.' There will be an external beta sign up page made available 'soon' according to the blog."

Re:Anyone else first read "External" as "Eternal"?

[pecosdave]

As someone who's used Linux nearly exclusively for more than a decade I'll proudly say:

Most of it. The better stuff anyways.

There's a lot of Alpha and cobbled together feeling stuff on there also. Still, when I go to work and use my Windows 7 machine I look at it and wonder how my coworkers could possibly go home and continue using that crap.

You won't have to use Steam to benefit from this.

[Jartan]

The intent is more to get Steam users off Windows and onto Linux than to take advantage of the current Linux market.

With Windows 8 announcing an app shop and scaring the hell out of small time developers we could finally see a real push for Linux adoption.

Re:I've got a vague idea of what Steam is -

[crafty.munchkin]

iTunes wishes it was as good as Steam!!! This should be awesome, it'll be good to have some L4D2 games with the guys at work on our lunch break. We're running a mix of linux and mac systems here, so everyone should be able to play :)

Re:I've got a vague idea of what Steam is -

[NemosomeN]

The simplest way to explain Steam is that it is DRM done right. If you pirate the game, you get the game for free. But, you lose auto updates, chat client, steam trading, access to servers with anti-cheat features, etc.

It deters piracy by adding value to legally purchased games.

Re:I've got a vague idea of what Steam is -

[guises]

There are certainly people who see value in Steam's added services, but it is most certainly not "DRM done right." Every game purchased through Steam requires online activation, every single one. A stark contrast to the iTunes comparison - even when iTunes was DRMing their media, an internet connection was never required.

I'm not sure what "DRM done right" would be, DRM is after all a limitation on what you can do with your purchased media. For me however, any form of DRM that requires me to ask permission before I can read or watch or play with my stuff, that will never fall into the "acceptable DRM" category.

Re:How many games?

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends. Some games are going to be trivial, some are going to be neigh impossible to port. An example of a trivial port will be most of the old games that were originally made for DOS. Steam plays those games by simply running an instance of dosbox, so these should be able to be ported by doing the same method in Linux. Some of the games already have linux versions (see the humble indie bundle games a good chunk of them are also on steam)

Re:You won't have to use Steam to benefit from thi

[atomicxblue]

This is something we have needed for a long time. Reducing overhead in OpenGL could trickle down to Windows users as well and may give other development houses an incentive to drop Direct3D. The fact that Valve was able to get AMD, Nvidia and Intel to work towards better graphic drivers is almost Herculean.

Re:I've got a vague idea of what Steam is -

[rwise2112]

I've never had this problem. It's always asked me if I want to go to offline mode when there's no connection.