Not amazingly on topic anymore, but I guess that if there's one negative here it is for the Steam-haters. There exists the potential that future games don't support "linux" but do support "SteamOS". At that point, the developer is only distributing his game through Steam and not really making it natively available to all distros.

I mean, yeah, it's available to all distros, but only "supported" on Ubuntu and only via Steam.

But given what Valve have brought to the table here, I'm happy with the situation.

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Quoting: Quote from edgley

Quoting: Quote from scaineMust have been a closed beta you heard about there - it's still not available generally (unlocks tomorrow 3pm GMT), and it's listed as Windows only right now (edit : sorry, I missed that you'd already mentioned that!). Hopefully that will change in the remaining 17 hours...

Erm... Just brought, installed and played.

Still locked here. Still Windows only, so I won't touch it.

Quoting: Quote from mongrolSteam only. No sale.

Another steam-hater, eh? And why not. I was like that once.
Then I started using linux and realised that you didn't have to visit each driver-site to download their updates, one at a time as you did in Windows. You didn't have to visit each shareware site you downloaded each utility from to update to the latest version. You didn't have to visit getfirefox.com or whatever every couple of of weeks to see if there was new version. You just "apt-get upgrade" and off it went. Amazing.
Steam's like that for games. So now I have Desura, Steam and absolutely not a single locally installed game. Excellent.

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Must have been a closed beta you heard about there - it's still not available generally (unlocks tomorrow 3pm GMT), and it's listed as Windows only right now (edit : sorry, I missed that you'd already mentioned that!). Hopefully that will change in the remaining 17 hours...

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Quoting: Quote from Hamish

Quoting: Quote from liamdaweDisrespectful to who exactly? This is an editorial so it all comes from my personal experience and personal observations, It's not disrespectful to know how bad AMD's drivers can be from experience, my rig has an APU in it remember, I tried using it before I finally got an NVIDIA card, it was god damned awful.

AMD is a large and varied company, so it can seem disrespectful to paint it all with one big brush - I would say that the likes of Marek Olšák, Tom Stellard, and John Bridgman are actually quite popular with the Linux community (in the case of Olšák one is even tempted to say amazingly popular).

And as I said, you are fully within your rights to say what you said, but AMD has been making huge contributions to the Linux community, and not just in the graphics space. And Nvidia is far from universally loved in the Linux community, as Linus Torvalds has theatrically shown on at least one occasion.

Ah, Linus. Not sure you should ever rely on him to back up your well reasoned views. He did no one a favour when he flipped Nvidia a finger. Not him, not linux, and certainly not Ubuntu or Valve when they have to ask Nvidia to support technologies like Mir. I'd love to be a fly on the wall of that negotiation.

Mantle? I think Liam summed it up nicely via XKCD. I'd love to proven wrong, but I can't see it.

As for Hamish pointing out AMD's "huge contributions", I'd have to see examples. All I had was an HD7950 PCI-Express card and even under Windows, the bugs and bluescreens were painful - maybe "two crashes a week" doesn't sound that bad, but when I replaced it with an Nvidia GTX670 about a year ago, I've yet to see a crash (although I very rarely use Windows any more).

And as for the HD6750M in this laptop. Goddam. I have to hold back an xorg version permanently or I lose my desktop. No one should have to jump through such ridiculous hoops (http://askubuntu.com/questions/205112/how-do-i-get-amd-intel-hybrid-graphics-drivers-to-work, just to make their laptop work under linux. Nobody.

AMD might be making huge strides, and I genuinely would like to know more about that, but for me, it's almost certainly too little too late. They've cost me money, they've lost my confidence and I won't likely buy anything from them again.

There you go, mirv. Now THAT was a rant. You're welcome!

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I'd quite like to be sitting 4 feet away from my big 40" TV playing driving games, so this is great. A decent gamepad on a dedicated SteamBox. Magic.

I'll likely be keeping my PC for proper FPS games though, although as I said in another thread here on GoL, I have no real problem playing FPS on a gamepad - but if you gave me a choice, I'd probably choose keyboard/mouse.

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I spent a lot of years running up to 2012 playing PS3 shooters and to this day, I have no memory of one particular control system standing out over the other. If asked, I'd say, "gimme keyboard/mouse", but if I'd been hardcore on that stance, I'd have missed... shit, well about half of the top-ten-best-shooters-ever.

Things like Gears of War 2 (back in the day when I briefly owned a 360), Uncharted 2, Last of Us, Killzone2, Resistance 2 Multiplayer, Vanquish. And in my memory, I have no particular feeling that "urgh, I hated playing that on a gamepad".

And I'm using a controller in Steam for Linux at the moment for games like Hammerwatch, Fez, Bastion, Cave Story, Mark of the Ninja, and various others.

So, Steam Controller = Good. Will it get me playing on a big screen? Maybe. For driving games and casual games definitely. For FPS... we'll see.

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Well, I'm drunk and optimistic, so I'm very hopeful that Friday's announcement will involve HL3 and it being exclusive on SteamOS/Linux. Cos that would rock.

In fact, in a little epithany : I wonder if there will be a Half Life 3 / Portal 3 tie in. Players on full HL3 Steam for Linux will be playing a full FPS kill-fest, while players on Portal 3 / SteamOS will be playing a more cerebral, puzzle-based adventure that influences the online adventures of your Freeman-based friends?

Yeah. Maybe not. But a sweet idea while I'm wallowing in my alcoholic fuzz.

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Great video, sadly puts me off ever being bothered to try wine. Some of those games were from 2006/2007 and they're still unplayable/unrunnable in wine. It's just a bit depressing.

Reckon I'll stick to not buying Windows games and snapping up everything under the sun that has a native linux client!

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Quoting: liamdaweI actually had a game very similar in style to this on Amiga, can't for the life of me remember the name though.

Looks exactly like Qix :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qix

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Succinctly put. I agree completely - particularly on the irony of bemoaning closed apps stores when you are, in fact, a closed app store. Well, games store. Games and Apps. Ach, you know what I mean.

Still. Loving their work at the moment. Between Valve and Humble, we have some real momentum building.

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