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Valve Gives A Crowbar To The Penguins...

post #1 of 8
4/25/12 at 5:29am
Thread Starter 
I'm sure most, if not all, of you missed the news yesterday but Valve officially announced their intentions and progress so far, to bring all Source engine games (using OpenGL rendering of course) to Linux via their Steam service and so far it looks pretty promising. I know what you're thinking, "Why the **** do I care?", and you should care because it means you can throw together a cheaper gaming/media system, especially in the near future as Intel, AMD, and Nvidia all have pretty decent Linux drivers and Valve also appears to be working on a PC-esque gaming hardware platform using Linux.
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post #2 of 8
4/25/12 at 8:48am
Why would it be cheaper? Nothing about Linux magically makes CPUs and GPUs faster than when running under Windows. As we've already seen, Source titles on OSX run about the same as the same hardware under Windows.

In addition, Valve is not going to release a hardware platform that they can't run the vast majority of Steam titles on. That would be unbelievably dumb, and Valve is not known for being particularly dumb.
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post #3 of 8
4/25/12 at 9:53am
A Linux machine would be cheaper because you wouldn't be giving money to M$ and Bill Gate$ for the evil Windoz O$. You know the company and man who donate all that money to charity and to help produce those PBS shows that Linux users watch ota for free.
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post #4 of 8
4/25/12 at 9:57am
Thread Starter 
Most Linux software is free. Hence, it's cheaper and the performance is probably going to be better than under Windows and definitely better than OSX, which is a horrible OS to develop for as far as games go. As for compatibility, many of the popular game engines like Unreal and Cryengine either already have Linux compatibility or are attaining it right now or they have open-source alternatives. Valve plans to have more than just their Source games on Steam and there are many Linux users who use Steam and WINE to play Steam games, so I don't think there's a big hurdle as far as getting users attracted to Linux goes, especially with AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all on board with bringing better drivers for their latest and upcoming graphics hardware to Linux.
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post #5 of 8
4/25/12 at 12:47pm
I'm not leaving Windows anytime soon, but I'm happy for the diehard Linux users. This is just another example of why Valve is one of the very best companies out there.
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post #6 of 8
4/25/12 at 9:10pm
Alright then Lex. Have fun playing half of the games that you would actually want to play, for the sake of not spending $50 on Windows.

In addition, you are vastly overselling Wine. As cool as it is, Wine does not deliver nearly the level of consumer experience that Valve demands. It works well is some cases, but still requires far too much end user tweaking and oly half-works far too often.

Also too, "most Linux software is free"? Yeah. You know what else has tons of free software? Windows. Essentially anything you can get on Linux that is worth using also has a free Windows port. I pay for the OS, and I pay for games. It was pre-2005 the last time I paid for a piece of desktop software, and not because I pirated it instead.

Your expectations are extremely unrealistic, and your sales pitch is deeply flawed.
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post #7 of 8
4/26/12 at 6:52am
What I read is this support for Linux could be because "Valve isn’t confident about the future of gaming on Windows" due to what they see in Win 8.
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/12...-for-windows-8
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post #8 of 8
4/26/12 at 7:43am
What you read is poorly conceptualized conjecture based on out of context hearsay.
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