valvesoftware.com — Take a look at this job add on Valve's website. Notice one of the bullets in the 'Responsibilities' section?- Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.Looks like Valve may be listening to our demands.
Sep 13, 2007 View in Crawl 4
godshandSep 13, 2007
OSX PLEASE.
soulpatchSep 13, 2007
i'm not talking about being a "yes man". i'm not talking about extreme task differences. i'm not talking about big corp work where you can hide behind the bulls**t. i'm talking about working at a company like valve. you're crazy if you don't think the people that get to work there (and companies of the like) have "above the average" skill-sets. repeat after me DORKino - "would you like fries with that?"
haydreSep 14, 2007
The Wii does not run Linux, despite early rumors that it would. It turns out they were, like many rumors, just wishful thinking.
meneerrSep 14, 2007
Valve has a very specific user base. Half of their customers at one time or another installed a linux server or played with a linux desktop. It's like the whole lambda-sign. If you know what means, you problely more of a math or tech (or both) wizard then most people. So, although games like the Sim's may have only 2-3% users that actually heard of linux, i'm pretty 10-20% of all steam-logins actually happen on Linux + WINE. Another 20-30% of their customers is dual-booting some form of linux.. So even with the current customers, about 30-50% will be very happy with linux support.Then there are these other facts: - EA is going to support Mac OS. Maybe even Linux - Microsoft is going to create their own Steam - EA might be creating their own Steam as well - both ATI and NVidia now have fast drivers for the linux platform They are in the position to be the world's biggest game reseller. But they are going to need to support all PC platforms to make sure they get there.Last point: Most companies don't support Linux, because of all the distro and packaging issues. It might run on Ubuntu, but does it work on Red Hat? The quality control is way more expensive. People don't buy linux games because they have little reassurance it works now, and it keeps working when your favorite distro upgrades in 6 months. Windows doesn't force developpers to fix upgrade-issues every six f**king months. In other words: currently to be viable the price needs to be way higher for the linux version. This is a problem.Steam is like a package-manager. It can bring in its own bunch of default libraries. Its own steam-specific version of SDL, and the like. Now you have one program that needs to work on many distro's. But when it does, all its games will 'just work'. Steam has the power to be _platform_ for games. Sure the games still need to be recompiled (or use wine), but they don't need to recompile it 10 times with different patch sets for every version of libC, SDL, etc. Given the size of the steam-user-base they will also get good cooperation with the distro-developpers. (That is: the actual distro developpers will make sure it works, and if it doesn't notify valve way before launch)Unlike Windows, steam has way more advantages for Linux than it does for windows. It can create a default standard set of libraries.
meneerrSep 14, 2007
They will. Microsoft wants a piece of the graphical market as well. They are developping a CS killer as we speak.Secondly, maintaining both a mac and windows version was very expensive. So they invented AIR. All their new products will be using that. It's like flash for applications.Have you noticed they are now releasing updates to the flash-plugin for all OS-es simultaniously> They are getting there.
meneerrSep 14, 2007
Anohter thing:Linux users don't steal software. We want people to respect _our_ copyright (the GPL: you have to give back).And if we really think its too expensive, we'll make it ourselves. Thank you.
mossblaserDec 23, 2007
Damn straight! I reckon that Photoshop (in terms of money not spent) is the most pirated piece of software ever...