linux gaming pc with steam client?

jason41987 · 08-26-2012, 08:48 AM

hey everyone.. im building a new gaming PC.. and i noticed valves porting their steam client, and then soon after, the games on steam over to the linux platform... so could this be what linux users have been waiting for?.. will this be a real solution to linux gaming making windows obsolete for this purpose?.. its the only reason a lot of people i know are still using windows

so.. im thinking it might soon be time for me to finally toss aside windows as when this happens, i will no longer have a use for it and can begin converting all of my computers over to a linux distro

soppy · 08-26-2012, 08:45 PM

While Valve is for sure bringing Steam over, a lot of games will still be incompatible due to being written in DirectX and not OpenGL. Even then, very little of the games on Steam have Linux clients and the work to port it over to Linux is probably not worth any company's time. Yes, Valve is going to bring their games over (L4D2, probably Half-Life, etc), but as for real vendor support, we are still a ways off. But now that we actually have Steam, it is a large step in the right direction...

To answer your question, no. It's worthwhile to stay with Windows 7 for gaming. Maybe in 2-3 years you can ditch Windows when everyone realizes how crappy it is.

dugan · 08-27-2012, 11:38 AM

Just because Steam is being ported to Linux does not mean that every game currently being sold on Steam will be ported to Linux.

ReaperX7 · 08-30-2012, 09:40 PM

Yes, however Valve did lay the foundation for developers to use both DirectX and SDL with it's update of the Source engine. The abilities to use either library layer are now there. However not all games on Steam use the Source engine.

The only thing lacking severely is the willingness of developers to make ports to Linux. Once that barrier is out of the way, everything will start snowballing.

/dev/random · 08-31-2012, 09:57 AM

I agree with ReaperX7, the problem is (IMHO and experience, if developers don't need to write something twice (even porting) they won't bother at all. This is why were getting all the cookie-cutter games with the xbox-pc ports because instead of rewriting some parts to make them more PC friendly they just recompile it and slap a $70 price tag on it.

If this changes then you will see a lot of Linux games on Steam, but until then, I think things are only going to get worse I'm afraid.