[GLLUG] Valve's Gabe Newell Talks Linux Steam Client, Source Engine

Richard Houser rick at divinesymphony.net
Wed May 9 23:40:29 EDT 2012


I've been thinking that the current status is better than ever.  The
free drivers now share a lot of common code, you don't need X anymore
for a large portion of the features (including OpenGL, I think), you
can use the native display resolution, hardware acceleration, etc.
The only major features I'm missing on several of my machines now is
access to the hardware video acceleration APIs and direct video card
access via KVM.  I'm running free drivers primarily for the stability.


On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 9:38 PM, Charles Ulrich <charles at bityard.net> wrote:
> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Taylor Burke <taylor at zordio.com> wrote:
>> I want to be excited about this. I really do. But the state of Linux video
>> support is, well, abysmal. Xorg contains 40 years of code, and I really
>> don't think anything short of a major rewrite is going to make it more
>> effective.
>
> Since Xorg forked from XFree86, it's been under constant development.
> There was a time where you _had_ to edit the config file and customize
> it to your specific hardware in order to run X at all. (Do you have
> the modelines for your monitor written down somewhere? If not,
> consider yourself lucky.) Now, everything is mostly automatic and you
> don't have to touch Xorg.conf unless you have some unusual setup.
>
> Except for video driver support, which the Xorg developers can't do
> much about, what do you find lacking?
>
>> Hardware acceleration barely works for "supported" distros out of
>> the box, and there really aren't a whole lot of video cards that are
>> supported at the level most games need to be.
>
> It's a chicken and egg problem: the video card manufacturers won't
> bother writing decent drivers for their hardware until a non-trivial
> portion of their target market demands it. But gamers aren't going to
> switch to Linux until there's better video support. Until then, the
> open source drivers get written by geeks in their free time and most
> chipsets end up getting workable support after they've been on the
> market for awhile.
>
> So for the most part, it's not all that bad for most of us with
> middle-tier hardware. My biggest annoyance is that multiple monitor
> support seems to have severely regressed in all of the major desktop
> environments in the past couple years. (Even though X itself has no
> problem with it.)
>
>> Not to mention porting Steam
>> to Linux would probably take quite a while, considering that last I read
>> Gaben was in the stage of "wanting" to hire Linux developers.
>
> The article that Don linked said that they have a team working on it
> already and that some of the games already run...
>
> Charles
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