Ubuntu Needs To Improve OpenGL Drivers For Gaming

When you look at the first "trial" Linux client then it was working like the win32/osx one, i expect the final client will work similar. If you don't remember:

http://store.steampowered.com/public...m_client_linux

That file was used to update/install the client. The win/osx installers are stubs only as well. So i don't see the point why the binaries should be Ubuntu specific, maybe the steam installer will be in the U repository but thats all.

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Originally Posted by airlied

Why would they care about non-Ubuntu distros? everyone knows how they could work around things, but there'll be 50,000 things you have to workaround to cover everyone's insane choice of distro and desktop, etc. I think Valve would at some point care to make some money rather than cater to everybody's private distros, if I was a Linux engineering Valve, I don't think I'd be worrying about any distros except the ones Valve told me to make it work on.

so far I hear they use libappindicator.so which I think is fairly Ubuntu specific.

Dave.

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I don't think Valve just orders their engineers to just make stuff work, well not without a good reason to. There's a interesting blog post by Valve’s Michael Abrash where he says that Valve has no formal management and hierarchey. Given that, it means the engineers working on the linux steam project have to have mad techinical skills as well as some personal stake in getting the project off the ground or else they wouldn't be working on it. This pretty much can explain why Valve sometimes takes forever to get stuff out the door, but also why them make some pretty polished stuff that works pretty damn well.

@airlied

That's what i mean:

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...622#post123622

Can be tested with wine or osx as well:

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...688#post123688

It can be done a bit smarter and somehow something must be differnet than 2 years ago, but that could not be much.

For all of the discussion/wishing on whether or not our preferred distro or drivers will work, this is all I have to say:

I would rather boot into Ubuntu with proprietary drivers to get my gaming fix than boot Windows.

The drivers can not be different when you use the same binary drivers.

I do see it reasonable and possible to have OpenGL 2 and the ES 2 version as minimum baseline for modern development. It's new enough for doing a lot and old enough for older graphics cards to support most of it. Hopefully they can get good drivers (the r300 for some radeon cards could become a very good example once matured a bit more).
And having newer cards using OpenGL 3.x and 4.x.

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Originally Posted by Ancurio

I'm so thirsty already for all the tears of people still using dmix and expecting Valve & co to give one flying shit about them

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Except: DMix, being transparent to the implementation, just works. Right way to do things, perhaps no. But it DOES WORK. Last I checked, Dmix worked with Steam + Wine with no modifications to config necessary. Any time I've tried to use > 1 thing with PulseAudio (not even simultaneously), I've had breakage.

And I'm sure I'm not alone, either.

As for the people "still using dmix" (including myself): PulseAudio put them there. When PulseAudio actually works, I'll switch.

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Originally Posted by kazetsukai

Except: DMix, being transparent to the implementation, just works. Right way to do things, perhaps no. But it DOES WORK. Last I checked, Dmix worked with Steam + Wine with no modifications to config necessary. Any time I've tried to use > 1 thing with PulseAudio (not even simultaneously), I've had breakage.

And I'm sure I'm not alone, either.

As for the people "still using dmix" (including myself): PulseAudio put them there. When PulseAudio actually works, I'll switch.

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That's because there are wine plugins for dmix/alsa audio. If the source engine runs natively,
I doubt they would make the extra work to support two audio APIs.

Unless someone decides to write a PA->dmix/alsa compat layer, it's looking grim for you guys.