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."
big deal (Score:4, Insightful)
Seeing as Ubuntu is debian for those scared of terms.
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Ubuntu is Debian for people who actually want to use their systems. Debian used to be pretty nice, but once Ubuntu came along the developers sort of gave up on having a working Debian and decided to become framework guys for Ubuntu. Debian in its current state is nearly unusable as a desktop, at least with KDE.
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Isn't it the other way around?
Debian is what you use when you want to actually use the system, since, unlike Ubuntu, it actually has up-to-date and reliable packages.
The only advantage of Ubuntu is packaging restricted drivers better. Ubuntu also packages some weird desktop experiences (such as Unity), if you're into that sort of thing.
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Even here in the future, stable is fine for pretty much any normal home and office use. And if it isn't, the upgrade to unstable is almost trivial to perform and isn't likely to cause any problems.
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You should always use testing on your desktop, laptop or workstation, especially if you work in IT.
stable is for production environments.
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I use testing also, but I've heard that unstable is safer because testing doesn't get bug fixes applied the way that stable does, and is slower to get them applied than unstable.
Not sure if that's true, of if it was true still current. And, as I said, I use testing myself. But I'd be careful about that "always".
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Debian has had constant driver issues for me, not just SSH. I'll be cruising along using stable not testing, not experimental, but stable, do a "security update" and all of the sudden have hardware that has worked for years quit working.
Not just one system, not just one type of hardware, but random crap on every system I have at different times.
I moved to Ubuntu because I got tired of having to constantly fight and troubleshoot to keep stable running. I might run a server on Debian, one that doesn't need
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Debian has had constant driver issues for me, not just SSH. I'll be cruising along using stable not testing, not experimental, but stable, do a "security update" and all of the sudden have hardware that has worked for years quit working.
Not just one system, not just one type of hardware, but random crap on every system I have at different times.
I moved to Ubuntu because I got tired of having to constantly fight and troubleshoot to keep stable running. I might run a server on Debian, one that doesn't need the use of anything outside of the traditional base hardware, but never for a desktop again.
I don't know what you're doing to your systems to have these problems, but my experience has been the complete opposite. I've run Debian since 2000 or 2001, and that's never been my experience. I started on Stable, and later moved to Testing, which is what I currently run. I'm still using the same install, in fact, and it's still working great after migrating it across multiple motherboards, processors, and hard disks.
I've had no random hardware compatibility issues, not even between upgrades. It didn't
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Don't bother, Unity sucks ass no matter how much they try and tout it. I tried to install and run KDE on Ubuntu, that was a nightmare I don't want to repeat.
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There has been a lot of mumbling of this type that is not tied to reality (such as the "worst interface ever" losers that pop up every time something on linux with a GUI is mentioned), and the above post is so vague it looks like it belongs with them.
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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 introduc
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Arch is fine on a single machine, but I've yet to see a site with 100+ machines running it as well as Debian stable, Ubuntu LTS or any of the RHEL clones.
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We're running a couple hundred CentOS 6, Fedora 13/16/18 machines. Do we count?
IGNORE PARENT (Score:1)
I am teh dumb. Misread what grandparent was saying.
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It's really different use cases. In practice, Arch seems to give a smoother desktop experience with minimal screwing around. It's pretty rare to have any sort of breakages, as long as you keep an eye on the website for any big changes. Security fixes are available immediately from upstream as part of normal updates, of course. Perhaps it is just my experience, but I just see more rando bugs with Debian than most other distros.
RHEL or Debian stable is probably better for an actual production environment. Th
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.
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Mint is king.
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Mmmm! Minty fresh!
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Mint is king.
Mostly.
Installing software using the GUI is still a little broken though as if you search for stuff it tries to reissue your search every time you type a character. That gets annoying if you type 3 or 4 chars, then change your mind and hit backspace 4 times, then type another 5 or so you have locked your machine up until it does 15 searches of the application repositories you have installed, some of which return a lot of results (ie, the ones where 0,1 or 2 chars were in the search box).
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A little over a year ago I had plenty of people agreeing with me [slashdot.org], I've even had actual Debian developers agree with me in the past.
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And Mint is for people who want more packages but dislike the direction that Canonical has been taking with Gnome3 etc...
(it also works with the stock Steam installer)
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".
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No no, it's the other way around. Debian is Ubuntu for people who don't want to go to the hassle of configuring privacy settings or uninstalling bloat.
Re:big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, actually they do [wikipedia.org]. Debian, Mozilla and Apache are the ones run by shadowy not-for-profit legal foundations (aka "charities"), but Canonical, on the other hand is a a for-profit corporation is actually selling your demographic info to advertisers just like Facebook and Apple.
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Canonical, on the other hand is a a for-profit corporation is actually selling your demographic info to advertisers just like Facebook and Apple.
"My demographics" ?!? Besides my IP for when I downloaded Ubuntu 6.4 and every time I run "aptitude full-upgrade", I really wonder what kind of "demographics" they have on me...
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How about your search history [slashdot.org]?
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Unless they're surreptitiously recording/sending my searches done via Firefox and Opera on google, duckduckgo, wikipedia, half-dozen others, or doing the same with local machine from the dash or from withing the file manager, after I set the privacy doodad, _what search history_, exactly?
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Of course we do. The problem is that this "feature" is forced down on us by default requiring effort (Even if fairly small) to get rid of. Especially since there are so many other great distributions to choose from where you don't have to worry about someone data mining for your usage information.
This breaks good will of the distribution to the open source community. And that is why we are bitching.
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Part of the reason I stuck with Debian as long as I did despite the "just break it" attitude from the developers, especially near a "going stable" cram is the fact it was easier to make my own choices and decisions. Over time it's gotten easier to do that with Kubuntu, though I will say part of the reason I avoided Kubuntu for so long was at one time in history it was a lot harder to chose what software you wanted to run on it. /don't know why I'm troll feeding.
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FWIW, every distro has its drawbacks Debian has a couple.
1) Stable tends to be too stale. I always seem to need some feature that won't install with that set of libraries. (Well, not right after release time, but not long, either.)
2) Testing usually breaks badly at least once during a development cycle.
The way I deal with that is to have two different install partitions. Occasionally I'll swtich off of testing for a week while they sort out a bad problem.
OTOH, many distros have too much magic smoke and
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Maybe on the main Ubuntu - those of us who aren't Gnome Boys or Unity Users don't seem to have that problem.
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].
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Done that. Boring, next!
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Re:big deal (Score:5, Funny)
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Debian is a Klingon word that means "I'm scared of Slackware"
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Oh Please. Gentoo is for children fascinated by the freedom and possibility of compiling everything where there is no need. Adults use Slackware or Arch.
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first belly-laugh of the day
thanks!
Re:big deal (Score:5, Interesting)
Ubuntu is an African word that means "I can't configure Debian"
It's funny because it's true. As a windows user who wanted to learn how to use linux (15 years ago or so) I had the catch-22 issue of installing and configuring system I knew very little about. So it was crucial for me that the installation "just worked" to get a working machine to learn on. I tried Debian first and got no where, then tried Ubuntu and it "just worked".
Ubunutu is far from perfect, but it works good enough for new users that they can learn what they need to in order to abandon it once they tire of Canonical's shenanigans.
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As a windows user who wanted to learn how to use linux (15 years ago or so) I had the catch-22 issue of installing and configuring system I knew very little about. [...] I tried Debian first and got no where, then tried Ubuntu and it "just worked".
Soooo.. you installed Ubuntu, which came out first in 2004, '15 years ago or so'?
Can I have access to your time machine?
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Too bad the phrase doesn't hold up to time, because Debian has been getting incredibly easy to install, with pretty much everything except "non-free" drivers working at first boot... but yeah, it is a good phrase that historically has some truth to it.
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Too bad the phrase doesn't hold up to time, because Debian has been getting incredibly easy to install, with pretty much everything except "non-free" drivers working at first boot... but yeah, it is a good phrase that historically has some truth to it.
Well, Debian's easy to install if you want it to be. If you're a masochist, you can still do network based installs and menu driven installs if you want to. There's also still the option of downloading 51 disc images if you want to.
Not GNU/Steam (Score:5, Funny)
Ubuntu is NOT the most popular Linux OS. (Score:2, Insightful)
Really. It's not. It hasn't been in a year or more, so can we stop this "Ubuntu it the big best Linux" crap already?
Ubuntu started to tank shortly after Shuttleworth sold his soul to the devil. The most popular distros are now Mint (by far), and probably also Mageia by now.
I personally don't see why Valve doesn't just aim for Debian support. If that works, Ubuntu, Mint and many more should be minimal effort.
Re:Ubuntu is NOT the most popular Linux OS. (Score:4, Insightful)
It depends on how you determine popularity. Because Linux distros typically don't phone home at any point during installation or operation, it's impossible to know how many installs of a given distro are out there. Mint may have the most pageviews or the most downloads in the last X months, but it doesn't mean it's the most widely installed.
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.
I'm not saying this is the case, just that it's almost impossible to figure out the most popular Linux distro. It's also important to point out that Mint is to Ubuntu what Ubuntu is to Debian... if Debian stopped, Ubuntu would die and if Ubuntu stopped then Mint would die.
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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.
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The company I work for has around 500 clients. We only have about a dozen servers that connect to Microsoft for updates, one of those servers is responsible for distributing the updates too all of the other clients.
The truth is that the largest groupings of users are corporate, and the larger a corporate userbase is then the more likely they will just have a few servers that grab the updates and distribute them for everyone else.
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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.
Not all of the companies log who's been using their apt or rpm update servers. Also, much like WSUS on Windows, a company using Linux desktops might very well decide to mirror its updates to save on bandwidth. That is, have one server check for updates, have the clients all download updates from said server.
It's also worth noting ChromeOS is Linux based and considering the Chromebook has been a best seller on Amazon, I wonder if we count that as a Linux distro. Not to mention android.
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If a company with 1000 seats downloads Ubuntu once and uses that single download to install it on all 1000 PCs...
....it is a locked down tight enterprise-wide distribution that doesn't include Steam, and, in that environment. more likely to be Red Hat than Ubuntu.
It is not the user's choice and not a popularity contest either.
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They might have all of the sources, but they probably don't have enough developers. They might be able to afford enough developers to pick up the slack, but they might not be able to. Either way, development of Debian would be dead in the water for some period of time until someone (if anyone) stepped in to pick up the slack. It's also possible Ubuntu would shift to be based on some other distro or they find they can't adapt and die out.
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I'm not a Linux nerd. I've messed around with Red Hat a long time ago, and Ubuntu recently, but I do not follow Linux trends at all.
That said, all of the guys at work that try to talk me into using Linux are using Ubuntu and recommend Ubuntu. I've not heard anyone else anywhere claim that Ubuntu isn't the most popular flavor of Linux right now.
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Mint is the most popular GNU/Linux distribution in the DistroWatch niche. And as with all vocal minorities, they try to claim that their anecdotal evidence is generisable.
If asked to estimate, I'd say Ubuntu has roughly two orders of magnitude the install base of Mint. Similar to C vs Objective C, the latter is more popular ("hip", "in", ...) but will need a very long time to reach the amount of distribution of the former, if ever. There is no noticeable corporate pick up on Mint (if you go by the quite num
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I personally don't see why Valve doesn't just aim for Debian support. If that works, Ubuntu, Mint and many more should be minimal effort.
Just a guess: Maybe they really think Ubuntu is better, they think with Ubuntu's popularity they'll have a better chance of succeeding (supporting everything would be a bad business decision and not feasible, plus they gotta start somewhere), or Canonical has a deal ($$$) with them. Never know... Ubuntu would be fine on a Steam/gaming-only machine, but I agree that it sucks these days for regular use.
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Ubuntu has Canonical and a business plan.
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You may want to try Ubuntu's official site next time.
I had to scroll down quite a ways before Ubuntu's download page mentioned money... and that was only if I wanted it on DVD. CentOS's download link takes me to their sponsor page before I can proceed to their list of mirrors... and it's not shy about asking for donations before you click on the mirrors link.
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That is the official site. When you click download it comes up with some sliders saying support for features etc. there is a click through at the bottom but it's not immediately obvious you don't have to pay.
Re:Ubuntu is NOT the most popular Linux OS. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hate to break it to you, but most downloads on Steam are going to ask you to pay for them too.
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I wanted to try Ubuntu at one point. The download page asked me to pay money to Canonical.
You don't have to pay. But Ubuntu is like Wikipedia: if you would like to see something like that in the future, and help it become even more awesome, you can throw some coins in the guitar case.
Wow Slashdot! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow Slashdot! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow Slashdot! (Score:5, Insightful)
But how else can "anonymous reader" engage Dice Holdings' genius marketing team to promote thepowerbase.com's awesome news aggregator?
I think you are missing the point of these slashdot stories. They are pure SEO spam, designed to uprank whatever shitty site is giving us a synopsis of what is happening at another site.
It's really too bad the internet took off and was noticed by business and advertising types. We need a modern day digital Jesus to upset the money changers' tables.
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We have Stallman... Errrr... wait nevermind...
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I don't even know what that means! We need laws outlawing this sort of thing, NOW.
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To be fair to him the editor he was using was probably really hard to use. So he's lucky he didn't end up with an script file that was all fubar with ^H^H^H characters all over it.
Whoop-dee-do for Debian (Score:4, Insightful)
# layman -a gamerlay
# layman -S
# emerge steam-meta
Done. Been working since the middle of the beta for Gentoo users, and that distro doesn't even use .deb files natively. So... um... congrats, Debian? Nice to see you're still old and slow to react? I guess?
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In case that was actually serious - Gentoo does rolling updates. The install media is updated anywhere from weekly (when things are going well) to every few months (when things aren't). Gentoo doesn't really have releases, so it never really gets into the press. While it doesn't have quite as much activity as it did back in 2004, I'd say things are a whole lot more stable. I've never found anything I actually use to be out of date, though - if a little-known application isn't supported I just package it
Sounds like he's job hunting... (Score:1)
Good way to get noticed by Valve.
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I'm sure they really need kids who can trivially edit shell scripts!
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He could have been using Textpad ;-) A lot of developers have problems editing text files with command line Unix tools... Most of them know the "save as Unix" option in textpad although...
Not Very Impressive (Score:1)
Since Ubuntu uses Debian's package manager, this isn't much of a change. And people have had it working on Arch for over a month, it's even in their official repos now.
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I don't know what this installer does in particular, but there's a lot of things different between Debian and Ubuntu. They are not at all the same system just because they share the same package manager. Ubuntu is no longer Debian with a fancy installer. Most Ubuntu packages are just recompiled Debian packages, they don't even necessarily work on Ubuntu.
For comparison, apt has been ported to Mac OS X as well. That doesn't mean that getting the Linux version of Steam to run on Mac OS X is easy just because a
What's the chance of a slackpkg installer? (Score:2)
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fedora repo (Score:1)
Someone has been maintaining a fedora people repo for #steam for @fedora but he never becom popular! :|
How About an Uninstaller? (Score:1)
Removing DRM rather than adding it seems like the better way to go.
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Typical Linux geek (Score:5, Funny)
would rather be hacking the game than playing it.
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generally most games are more fun to hack than to play. My favorite games were always the ones with construction sets.
It's on Arch linux too (Score:2)
It's in the Arch Linux main repositories, I just checked
Don't know if I'm impressed or disappointed.. There's lots of other S/W in the user repositories that I would rather have in the main one before Steam. But great job, whoever did it
I thought Steam would be an Ubuntu-only thing, but I stand corrected, this is pretty good
Turns out that it crashes before the client even starts on my system, but my GPU driver is dodgy, so it's maybe not Steam's fault
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Works fine on Gentoo as well.
Sometimes you need to remove a bundled library to get a few games to work right, but I doubt that you'll ever get around issues like that on linux when people distribute binary-only applications without shims.
Might Matter -IF- (Score:2)
This might matter IF he had made it possible to install Steam on ANY major Linux distro. This just makea "Steam for Ubuntu" into "Steam for Debian", so . . .
meh
News!!! Make something and be bashed!!!! (Score:1)
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It's really not about diminishing his accomplishment. It's about why is this on the Slashdot front page, there must be something nerdier and more interesting in the firehose. Not that I've looked, sometimes there ain't.
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> I don't have time to tinker with everything in my PC.
Then there's no problem.
Clearly you have no times for games either.
Steam is specifically meant to waste a lot of your time. That's what it was built for. If you don't have time to install it, then you don't have the time to use it either.
So you see the situation solves itself.
Spending hours and hours playing TF2 versus futzing with the installer for a bit. No comparison really.
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If you are > 40, you should now Time [lyrics007.com] is relative. I have kids. Playing is something I share with them, tinkering (sadly) not. I didn't want to buy them a game console. I like to share with them other values.
Steam doesn't "waste" my time. I decide to waste my time with Steam.
That's the kind of reasoning that harms our community. I'll rephrase it to you (in my very primitive English):
For lost of reasons I decide to waste my time playing instead of tinkering so I wellcome those who make this possible.
If Deb
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You choose to be lazy and use the "my time is valuable" excuse.
That is contradictory to the idea of running Steam even under the most ideal conditions.
Playing on Fedora since public beta... no problem (Score:2)
Valve put it out ther on their developer site since day one... https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux [valvesoftware.com]
1 Native Steam on Linux
1.1 Unpackaged
1.2 Arch Linux
1.3 Fedora
1.4 Gentoo
1.5 openSUSE / SUSE
1.6 Ubuntu
So big deal, it only took you 3 months more time then the other distro's
15:56, 16 December 2012 Hanno (Talk | contrib
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This is not news. (Score:2)
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> with the multitude of installers, and having to play around with antiquated X, and a retarded sound system.
The only thing antiquated and retarded her is your argument.
> Fresh install of Linux Mint, installed Steam, installed TF 2...bam.... software rendering
Perhaps Steam doesn't like your video driver. It tends to be really vocal about this sort of thing. Tends to pester you to get current.
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Hmm, Nvidia/AMD/ATI paid MS to include basic drivers.
Suprise suprise.
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> It should just work. Do the same thing on a windows 7 system, ...and you will be lucky if it works.
As always, the propaganda about how well Windows works simply cannot be trusted. When you try this stuff out for yourself you realize that it really isn't all that it is cracked up to be.
Although sometimes Windows just breaks and doesn't tell you. So you don't realize that it's broken. It just acts unpredictably or your performance goes to sh*t.