Gamer Rewrites Valve's Steam Installer For Debian 158
An anonymous reader writes "Gaming on Linux is growing fast right now, and most of that is thanks to Steam. Initially, Steam committed only to the most popular desktop distribution, Ubuntu, but more recently has opened the door to others. So what do you do when you want to game in Linux and you're using something a little less popular — at least, on the desktop? If you're a programmer called GhostSquad57, you rewrite the installer for Debian. GhostSquad57 uploaded his efforts to Github yesterday, and has since reached out to the Linux community."
Re:Wow Slashdot! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:big deal (Score:5, Informative)
Seeing as Ubuntu is debian for those scared of terms.
Even less of a big deal when you check out NEW [debian.org].
Re:Ubuntu is NOT the most popular Linux OS. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's the chance of a slackpkg installer? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ubuntu is NOT the most popular Linux OS. (Score:3, Informative)
Because Linux distros typically don't phone home at any point during installation or operation,
Bullshit excuse. They do request updates, don't they? Its not hard to tell who's using your Linux distro when they come to you for patches.
If a company with 1000 seats downloads Ubuntu once and uses that single download to install it on all 1000 PCs, while the business next door has all ten of its users download Mint to install on their own desktops then Mint appears to be ten times as popular as Ubuntu.
Yes, if you picked a particular 5 millisecond period and just used that as a basis for all of your extrapolation, but when you look at it on average, that sort of thing doesn't matter.
Re:big deal (Score:2, Informative)
Debian Stable is certainly not up to date, and I've always had problems with lots of random bugs whose fixes haven't been backported. Sid is the only way to get modern packages, but it's an absolute clusterfuck. Ubuntu/Mint are nearly as bad, but they do clearly put work into making sure the desktop experience is relatively smooth.
Arch linux on the other hand has bleeding edge STABLE packages. I almost never have any issues. Arch packaging are typically very vanilla. Heavy patching like Debian does introduces a lot of problems (ie in urxvt [pod.tst.eu]). Upstream generally knows best. They wrote it.
Re:big deal (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Debian 'testing' as a desktop (and a netbook for that matter) for many years now. I used Ubuntu for about 4 years at home and with my business clients (I'm a network engineer), roughly from v6.10 -> 10.04 but switched back because of the "will not fix" developer mentality to those who wanted functional packages from an LTS release. There was always something major that was broken, always with the carrot-on-a-stick, "Just upgrade to the latest release and use PPA from JoeSchmoe" answer when you just wanted to use your computer. It kept me for a while, but it got reeeeal tiring.
Debian has always "just worked" on my desktop. It's also a great LTSP sever, serving my kitchen and livingroom thin clients. With all of the good stuff that the Ubuntu/Canonical folks do getting backported to Debian, I feel like Debian testing is "Ubuntu Stable".
Re:big deal (Score:4, Informative)
You should remember that there is also debian testing, which currently is debian wheezy. As stable becomes too old, testing become more of a viable alternative. I ran into more problems with kubuntu than sid, and testing is way better than sid for normal users, because upgrades are less radical.
I also had a smooth experience with debian stable, if you want to run newer software too you could make a chroot with sid or testing, or consider the LD_LIBRARY_PATH option: at home I am running wheezy, plus the fglrx-legacy driver from experimental, using a closed source client with libraries gotten from ubuntu, and the resulting frankenstein has not had one hiccup.