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Operating Systems Software Windows Linux Entertainment Games

Valve Seems To Be Working On Tools To Get Windows Games Running On Linux (arstechnica.com) 196

Posted by BeauHD from the cross-platform dept.
"Valve appears to be working on a set of 'compatibility tools,' called Steam Play, that would allow at least some Windows-based titles to run on Linux-based SteamOS systems," writes Kyle Orland from Ars Technica. From the report: Yesterday, Reddit users noticed that Steam's GUI files (as captured by SteamDB's Steam Tracker) include a hidden section with unused text related to the unannounced Steam Play system. According to that text, "Steam Play will automatically install compatibility tools that allow you to play games from your library that were built for other operating systems." Other unused text in the that GUI file suggests Steam Play will offer official compatibility with "supported tiles" while also letting users test compatibility for "games in your library that have not been verified with a supported compatibility tool." That latter use comes with a warning that "this may not work as expected, and can cause issues with your games, including crashes and breaking save games."
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Valve Seems To Be Working On Tools To Get Windows Games Running On Linux More

Valve Seems To Be Working On Tools To Get Windows Games Running On Linux

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  • Finally... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tripmine ( 1160123 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @03:48PM (#57133392)
    ...2018 is the Year of Linux on Desktop!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fisted ( 2295862 )

      B-but that was 2005. The year of FreeBSD on the desktop was 2011, if anyone wondered, and the year of NetBSD on the desktop 2013.

      Sucks to be you, pals.

    • Re: Finally... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by batukhan ( 4849151 )
      This is not for linux desktop. This is so valve can build a console for their huge library without paying Microsoft licensing fees

      • And for the Linux desktop. I got Rise of the Tomb Raider, native Linux port, a couple days ago for $17.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 )

      Fuck that, I'm still holding out for OS/2 Transwarp. Any day now, IBM will drop this and the world will be made right again. You just gotta believe, man.

  • Compatibility? Blame Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sanosuke001 ( 640243 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @03:48PM (#57133396)

    Compatibility Mode? It's called OpenGL or Vulkan. Tell Microsoft to ditch DirectX; it's unnecessary and makes crap like this necessary. If people don't like the features of OpenGL or Vulkan you can always hop on the advisory board and get things changed.

    • Ditch it and open source it.
      Would be nice to have some newer features for older games if it were possible.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      Compatibility mode means all those games written to use DirectX and the Windows subsystem will work on a non-Microsoft platform.

      It has fuck all to do with which APIs a new game is developed to use.

      If people don't like the features of OpenGL or Vulkan you can always hop on the advisory board and get things changed.

      That's lovely but entirely fucking irrelevant. I can extend OpenGL and Vulkan to automagically understand what I want players of my game to see and render it using a single line of code and other game developers will still use DirectX.

      Valve recognise that their customers want to play the games those other develope

  • Windows 10 S (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The doom and gloom predictions of the Windows Store inserting itself between users and the internet at large seem more and more prescient every day.

  • Wine (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @03:53PM (#57133434)

    Somebody should send Valve a bottle of Wine.

  • Let's wait and see (Score:5, Informative)

    by doragasu ( 2717547 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @03:55PM (#57133452)

    I have ran and finished on Linux several WIndows only games, using Wine. Wine can be very useful, but in my experience, you lose a big amount of time just testing different wine versions and playing with configuration (Windows version, DLL overrides, runtimes, etc.).

    So, even if it is only something like PlayOnLinux on steroids, managing different Wine versions and with scripts automating its usage, it could be good if Valve uses a decent amount of its resources to testing. This could avoid the end users to waste lots of time.

    BUT, after writing this, I do now think this will be the case. Something like DOSBox, SCUMMVM and that kind of wrappers seem more feasible.

    • You can find some spoilers for making things work at appdb.winehq.org , if you want to cheat at that part of game :P

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rysc ( 136391 ) *

      This. It's pretty much my take, too. Imagine: playonlinux style "what works" compatible configs *maybe even tested by the original developers* and targeting the relative stable steam runtime environment? It's a no-brainer.

      Honestly, I'm waiting for some ambitious desktop environment guy to start shipping a DE package via steam. No reason why you couldn't (or shouldn't). Steam has delivered a stable *end user* environment in a way no single distro or vendor has managed before on Linux. We can all take advant

    • So SteamBox would do well here because it can be optimized for a particular setting. Sort of the CrossOver games for the Mac, which was just Wine with a lot of pre-configured settings of Windows games for the Mac.

    • I hope so, because my plan was to set up an old PC as an XP box, so that I could run a bunch of ancient games in my Steam library which don't run well on Win7 or Win10.
      Of course, given that Steam is apparently dropping support for XP, I guess running them on Linux is the next best* solution.

      *Or rather, the best solution, because ... Windows XP.
    • Given that the last time I had a free afternoon when I actually could do some gaming, I wasted two hours trying to get a natively supported (Linux Steam) game to run, I really don't know what to think about this whole project...

  • They should charge a 15% commission for all games launched on that OS, down from their normal 30%.

  • I wonder if they're starting from scratch, or working from the Wine code base. I'd hope the latter, and I'd hope they'd talk with groups like Codeweavers who've been doing this for a while.

  • If it is successful (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SirAstral ( 1349985 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @04:03PM (#57133512)

    this would be enough to finally get me to stop using Windows.

    I play a lot of PC games, windows is a must for this.

    • Same here.
      This is the only thing really holding me back.

      • Re:If it is successful (Score:4, Informative)

        by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @06:48PM (#57134376)

        Windows under KVM with GPU passthrough is a thing

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Tough Love ( 215404 )

          Windows under KVM with GPU passthrough is a thing [reddit.com]

          Some Microsoftie with mod points doesn't like that post.

        • Windows under KVM with GPU passthrough is a thing

          You still need a windows license for that

          • Right, but at least only games end up running under Windows, not your browser, email, etc, which needs privacy.

        • But then you're not only paying to license an additional operating system every few years, as PixetaledPikachu pointed out, but also paying for more RAM in your PC in order to hold two operating systems at once while a game or Windows Update is running. Recall that DRAM prices have trended upward at times, doubling over the course of 2017. You're also starting the Windows VM in a cron job so that Windows can check for security updates without having to do so during your game.

        • Yeah, but there is still a performance hit
          You are also stuck to one monitor with no way to switch between them. Which suck since I use Windowed FullScreen so I can control movies, music, or FAQs.

  • Should be open source and run on all Linuxes (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Eravnrekaree ( 467752 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @04:11PM (#57133562)

    The big reason people should use Linux is to free themselves from proprietary closed source OS that is designed to take away your freedom. You will notice that while SteamOS claims to be open source, actually the critical parts of it like the client, are closed source. I am all for Windows compatibility as a way for people transition away from windows while taking their apps with them. However the compatibility layer needs to be able to work on fully open source OSs otherwise people would just be giving up one proprietary OS with vendor lock in for another proprietary OS with vendor lock in. You should not have to use a particular Linux distro to be able to benefit from Windows compatibility. Wine is the best solution since it is open source. People need to work on making that better rather than fragmenting with another closed source platform.

    • Re:Should be open source and run on all Linuxes (Score:4, Informative)

      by dissy ( 172727 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @05:15PM (#57133934)

      You will notice that while SteamOS claims to be open source, actually the critical parts of it like the client, are closed source.

      SteamOS is Debian 7 or 8 for x86 and x64. The OS is completely open source.
      100% of the OS source code is available here: https://sources.debian.org/ [debian.org]

      You are confusing the steam client application as being part of the OS, but it is just an application program.

      Having a closed source program running on an open source OS does not ultimately make the OS anything else but open source.

      There are lots of other closed source applications that run on Debian, steam client isn't the only one.
      None of those being installed make Debian any less open source.
      Hell, my wifi and nvidia drivers installed on my Debian system aren't open source, but that doesn't change the license of Debian what so ever.

      If you don't like the steam client license, don't install their debian repo and apt-get it, and don't purchase a computer with that setup preloaded. It's that simple.

      • You are confusing the steam client application as being part of the OS, but it is just an application program.

        From the point of view of Linux proper, which is a kernel, your desktop environment is an application program. X.Org X11 is an application program. Even sysvinit or systemd is an application program. For the purpose of discussion, where do you draw a line between userspace system software and what a user would think of as an application?

    • The big reason people should use Linux is to free themselves from proprietary closed source OS that is designed to take away your freedom. You will notice that while SteamOS claims to be open source, actually the critical parts of it like the client, are closed source. I am all for Windows compatibility as a way for people transition away from windows while taking their apps with them.

      If you're buying games on Steam then you're probably willing to compromise when it comes to proprietary vs open source.

      However the compatibility layer needs to be able to work on fully open source OSs otherwise people would just be giving up one proprietary OS with vendor lock in for another proprietary OS with vendor lock in. You should not have to use a particular Linux distro to be able to benefit from Windows compatibility. Wine is the best solution since it is open source. People need to work on making that better rather than fragmenting with another closed source platform.

      I'm using an Intel graphics card on Fedora so I'm already running Steam on a fully open source stack. I'm not sure why their new layer would change that.

      As for Wine, there could be legal reasons (ie, NDAs, licensing other products, etc), but more likely it's strategic. If they get 95% percent of Windows games working flawlessly on Linux, but only through Steam, then you now own Linux gaming

    • the compatibility layer needs to be able to work on fully open source OSs

      Not sure what you're worried about. Everything Valve puts out for "SteamOS" works just fine on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, others) for me. Actually, SteamOS just seems to be Valve's word for Linux.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      The big reason people should use Linux is to free themselves from proprietary closed source OS that is designed to take away your freedom.

      As opposed to proprietary closed source applications that are designed to take away your freedom? I'd bet not even 2 percent of games on Steam are available under a free software license. As jcnnghm [slashdot.org] and bingoUV [slashdot.org] have pointed out in the past, free software has been successful at producing libraries and other well-defined software, but not producing original software that meets the more nebulous requirements of what makes a game fun.

  • OS/2 was so good with windows that few os/2 apps (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @04:20PM (#57133632)

    OS/2 was so good with windows that few true os/2 apps where made and then MS started to mess up OS/2 With all of the win32/s updates.

    Games need to move away from wrappers in Linux.

    • Linux isn't going away, don't worry. It is very apparent that Valve continues solidly behind Linux gaming. Whatever way a game runs on Linux is fine with me, including running Windows in a VM. If there was a game I really cared about and that was the only way, then I would do it, because better than booting Windows, by far. But there is no such game so I thankfully don't need to have my face rubbed in all the things that made me run screaming away from Windows in the first place.

    • True, but I recall other issues: its hardware compatibility was rather limited, and its marketing absolutely sucked.

      I mean, holy shit. IBM was always so bad at reaching home users. For example, watch these ads touting the same feature, multitasking: OS/2 [youtube.com] and Win95. [youtube.com] What do you get from them? From the visuals, the music, the voiceover -- what do they make you feel? To me, the former makes it seem bureaucratic, unexciting, work stuff. But the latter makes it seem exciting, whimsical, empowering, fun! Whoever

  • I hope for the day seamless linux gaming happens (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    All i want is to run all my games seamlessly without messing around with wrappers or virtual machines or GPU passthrough or having to draw a summoning spell in blood on my monitor.
    I don't to spend 4 hours googling or needing 2 GPUs or a different config file for every single game or losing a huge chunk of FPS from virtualisation (and needing twice the amount of stupidly expensive RAM) or getting banned because the anti-cheat engine got confused.
    I don't want to dual boot, hell half the time i forget what i w

  • I'm still fairly wet-behind-the-ears when it comes to Linux (learning curve, gentoomen) but would the above be a viable path?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kaoshin ( 110328 )
      The last time I checked ReactOS still couldn't run Steam, not sure if it can now. It is possible though to achieve near native performance by running Windows 10 in a VM and using IOMMU and a dedicated video adapter (GPU passthru). I doubt if you would have any luck with a type 2 hypervisor like VirtualBox, but I had a good experience with getting this to run with KVM/QEMU a while back on an Arch box. I will stop short of recommending as it isn't an elegant or ideal solution, but I can testify that it is
      • To expand on what I meant when I said 'partner with ReactOS', is Steam helping them along to develop their product to a full stable release state faster than they would otherwise.. but as the commentor above you pointed out, my idea of running that in a virtual machine would likely experience performance issues that would make it a deal-breaker.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kaoshin ( 110328 )
          I was referring to a different configuration from the above poster which does not share the same significant performance limitations. GPU passthrough in a type 1 hypervisor can approach native performance within a couple of percentage points, which in most cases is an unnoticeable difference: https://www.youtube.com/result... [youtube.com] I see no reason ReactOS couldn't eventually be used as the guest OS to achieve similar graphical performance, but again I am not a fan of this. I would rather play native Linux gam
        • Developing ReactOS to a workable state would require a LOT of money and resources. They're doing a nice job considering the limited resources they have but you can't realistically ever expect to be a good substitute for Windows.
          • I'm certain there were many people who were of that opinion about Linux when it was first being developed. ;-)
            FWIW I think if it reaches the v1p0 release point Microsoft's legal department will probably swat them hard and either buy them out or just plain put them out of business and make sure the source code disappears.

  • Why does nobody know about this?

    Unity engine + game editor for Linux [unity.com]

    Really slick 2D/3D game editor, nice and stable, great tutorials as far as they go (not very far), great demo projects, free asset packs, fair licensing. Not bad at all for $0.00. Current version is in the last blog entry. For some reason, not linked from their ports page, why? This one is really buried deep in the internet, but it's awesome.

    • It could be because last time X11/Linux users heard of the "Unity" brand, it was Ubuntu 11.10 forcing GNOME 2 users to switch to the similarly named yet unrelated Un(usabil)ity desktop environment [wikipedia.org], or Ubuntu 18.04 finally dispensing with it after Canonical realized that users had fled to MATE, Cinnamon, or Xfce.

      • Nobody is confused by the term "Unity engine", one of the most popular engines by number of commercial games released. The reason nobody knows about the Linux port is, Unity just hasn't announced it or linked it except for this highly obscure issue tracker thread. Need to spread the word, this is pure gold. As I see it, this is hands down the best intro to serious game development.

  • DirectX is more then just video!
    how is sound in linux?
    Directx had an network communication library (not really an issue now days)
    How well do joysticks work in Linux?

  • There may have been a few exceptions before that time, but I honestly cannot remember of a single game I'd wanted to try out on Linux via PlayOnLinux in the last 5-10 years and fail to do so. That is not to say that they all worked straight-out-of-the-box; some required extra libraries and playing around (typically installing directx etc). But in general it was easy to figure out (or lookup online) and the game worked perfectly after that.

    Wine (and PlayOnLinux alongside it) really have made huge progress i

  • Sigh. (Score:2)

    by ledow ( 319597 )

    Sorry but the days of me rebooting to go into another OS are over. Long ago.

    If I can't virtualise you, or I can't emulate you, then I'm not going to reboot into you. For a start it's a pain-in-the-arse and needs all kinds of work to stay like that through Windows kernel updates etc. I tired of fighting stuff like that back in the days of Windows not recognising EXT2 partitions.

    Nowadays, virtualisation is here. If I want to run games at the extreme edge of my computer's abilities, I'd run Windows as the

  • Maybe Valve could fix Issue #1040 from 2013 once and for all (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/1040). The client wants to manage all aspects of the window instead of letting the window manager do it. The practical result is that the Steam client fights with the window manager and semi-unpredictably makes itself unusable or infuriating. There's really no excuse for this.

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