Steam for Linux Now Available

[Fredz]

Not really S3D related, but I think it's still an interesting news for gamers.

Press blurb :

Best experienced on Ubuntu

Feb 14, 2013–Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the release of its Steam for Linux client. In celebration of the release, over 50 Linux titles are now 50-75% off until Thursday, February 21st at 10 AM PST.

If you're using Debian have a look at this thread to install the client :
http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/di ... 613928324/

I got it installed on Debian/sid 64 bits, now I'm waiting for Team Fortress 2 to finish downloading...

[cybereality]

Awesome news. I am really looking forward to Linux becoming a better gaming platform.

Hopefully this is the beginning of something big.

[Likay]

Ditto that!

[Fredz]

Downloaded everything but unfortunately TF2 and Amnesia crashed at launch, CS:Source worked great though. Probably because I'm running Debian and not Ubuntu, but I hope they'll iron out the bugs shortly, it's not as if it's been in beta for 6 months...

[cirk2]

Downloaded everything but unfortunately TF2 and Amnesia crashed at launch, CS:Source worked great though. Probably because I'm running Debian and not Ubuntu, but I hope they'll iron out the bugs shortly, it's not as if it's been in beta for 6 months...

Start steam from a terminal and observe the output when you try to start the crashing games. you're most likely lacking some libaries steam can't pull in because youre not on ubuntu. (remember steam and its games are 32bit, so you need 32bit libaries).

Steam is working really great, and combined with the improvements made by the wine project I was able to ditch my windows install completely last October.
I hope the big guys jump on, it would be really awesome if gaming on linux becomes mainstream.

[Fredz]

I did use the script linked in my first post to install all the dependencies in a multiarch Debian environment. It showed a segfault in the console so I guess there are still incompatibilities with Debian, I hope Valve intend to support other versions of Linux than Ubuntu in the future.

At this time it's still not a replacement for my Wine install of Steam. Aside from the compatibility problems, the library of games is quite lacking with its 63 games which are mostly indies. But it's still great news that it does exist, and it can only be better in the future.