A welcome, if expected surprise, Valve opened up their Linux beta of their Steam gaming platform, along with the Linux version of Team Fortress 2 in time for the end of the long count of the Mayan calendar (sorry, I know everyone’s made and heard enough Mayan calendar jokes already, and I’m even late to the apocalypse, but with it being the busy-busy holiday season I didn’t have time to get by the joke store to restock).
It takes a little administrating to install if you’re not on their preferred platform of Ubuntu. On Debian it’s mostly down to version number discrepancies between Ubuntu and Debian (eg, Ubuntu might have a specialized version number for a package that’s based on Debian’s, but different). The biggest pain is that you basically have to either rely on a private repository or disable apt-based updating (typically by commenting out the repository in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/[specific list]) to avoid complaints every time their package changes.
This is okay for the short term, but will need to be fixed if they intend to support multiple distros in the long term, possibly by looser depends specifications, or maybe by working with distros to have a steam metapackage that their package can depend upon.
So I finally played some Team Fortress 2 again. I’ve played it a bit under WINE, but had stopped some time back (I believe around the time of the release of the Pyrovision update) for various reasons. This was the first time I saw the Man v. Machine game mode (or MvM/Cooperative as it might be referred). It seemed fun except for having to return and upgrade after every wave of machines had been rendered nonfunctional.
That has to be my biggest peeve about the direction Team Fortress 2 took, or any game for that matter: don’t make me weigh so many options. Do I want to spend that much time deciding what weapons I scrap and which ones I add nametags? It just gets silly, having to manage hundreds of items, or not wanting to switch classes during MvM because I bought upgrades for a different class.
Maybe it’s just the gaming generation I came from, but it used to be you got random upgrades, and you liked them, dammit!
The Steam service runs well so far, as does Team Fortress 2. It will probably take a few months before other Source games are available, and the roadmap for non-Valve games isn’t clear yet, but the first piece of the puzzle is just about there.
No discussion of Linux gaming is complete without another look at graphics drivers. In any general thread about Steam on Linux, you’ll see them brought up, with people lamenting performance, stability, and closedness of the drivers. My experience with nVidia has been decent performance with near-satisfactory stability. That is to say, I do have some stability issues with the graphics driver, including things like my virtual terminals occasionally being rendered as artifacts in X (little 10-20 pixel squares), and sometimes my browser (Iceweasel, which is GPU-accelerated) will flicker all-black while playing games.
I’d imagine the troubles are at least this bad for AMD-based graphics, as in the past I used their cards/drivers and had problems as well.
Intel graphics and drivers are probably the smoothest except for performance. I say probably, as I don’t have any direct experience there.
It is the hope of the community that Steam will push all the graphics vendors to fix their problems, but even if that happens, that’s short of the true best outcome: completely open, performant drivers.