Steam and Source engine (L4D2) on Linux

[saja]

I hope I'm not the only one here who's been waiting for this for ages. But here it is, officially:

 

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/

 

Discuss. Advantages, disadvantages of the increasing popularity of using linux based operating systems for gaming, etc.

(Also there is a big performance difference in DirectX and OpenGL based source according to the newest post which is very good news.)

[jamie]

I hope I'm not the only one here who's been waiting for this for ages. But here it is, officially:

 

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/

 

Discuss. Advantages, disadvantages of the increasing popularity of using linux based operating systems for gaming, etc.

(Also there is a big performance difference in DirectX and OpenGL based source according to the newest post which is very good news.)

 

Since I run Linux on most of my computers, I am really excited about this.

 

In other forums (reddit), I often see "yeah, but I've been running Valve/Steam games under Wine for years, etc...", but my experiences with Wine and even the commercial version (Cedega was it?) have been poor. It required a lot of tweaking, some texture functions just didn't work right - I wanted to play Wizard 101 with my daughter, but my character model was solid black, audio was choppy (when it worked at all), and the frame rate of the few games I tried sucked.

 

So now Valve is working with Intel, AMD, and NVidia on improving the native OpenGL drivers, which the Wine/Crossover/Cedega people would never get the opportunity to do, and even though Valve is using a D3D->GL translation later, it is their *own* code, so they can debug the stack from top to bottom without any guesswork or reverse engineering.

 

Just awesome.

 

As far as advantages/disadvantages, I only see good things - we can run great games on a solid platform that is largely free of malware, and doesn't consume ridiculous amounts of resources running anti-virus and DRM.

 

* edit Value -> Valve

[BTGBullseye]

Just thought I'd update this with the info that Steam FINALLY runs perfectly on Fedora 20 after updating, installing RPMfusion as a repository, and installing Steam. Half-life 2 works perfectly, and I get about double the framerates that I did on the same system running a fresh clean (and stripped down) install of Windows 7.