Valve's Steam Linux Beta Begins Next Week

[Adarion]

Damn! I wish I had more time. But my PhD work sadly won't leave enough. I did beta testing for commercial games under NDA before but this time it would be an honour to finally have something for Tux.
Even though I dislike the Steam-DRM-ishness I think Steam on Linux is a really good step for Linux but the gaming world as well.

[gamerk2]

You should be able to, where as in the converse, using DOSBox (which is available on Linux) isn't exactly a ringing endoursement for windows, is it?

Umm...DOS is an entirely different OS. Just saying.

Some old win games with 16 bit setup apps (or native 16 bit apps) will not even work with windows 9 - as there will be no 32 bit variant. For dos games you need dosbox of course - even on win if is is a newer release. Basically there are some old id games using dosbox on steam even for win, those could be easly implemented for linux - via dosbox or via native clients.

You always have the fallback option of virtualization. Provided you still have your OS install disk/CD Key, there really shouldn't be any reason why you can't just run Win 98 SE through Virtualbox or something.

Then again, is this the LINUX community commenting on backward compatibility?

[Kano]

You would be the first to run WIN games on win98 via vbox.

[Spectre]

Have the testers already been contacted about the beta?

[Vash63]

I'm an Arch User and have been added to their Beta List very early. I'll report how things are going on Phoronix and over at the Arch Linux Forums.
My test system is Core i7 2600K with GeForce GTX 580 so it should be ideal in terms of supported hardware.

Ohh happy day!!!! Oh happy day!

Not too different than mine, just swap that 2600 for a 3930. I'm really interested in seeing how Valve is going to do this.

[DaemonFC]

people are gonna scream FUD but i'm just salivating at the prospect of the bug reports on the POS platform that's ubuntu. this is because ubuntu is much buggier than osx and steam on the mac is already glitchy. ubuntu's six month release cycle is a joke. it's basically half-broken apps on a crappy video stack running on a monolithic kernel.

Why would they scream FUD? Running games on Ubuntu under Compiz is about the easiest way to drag your framerate down 10% or more. KDE simply mops the floor with Compiz/Unity. Sorry, but I was well aware of Ubuntu's gaming deficiencies long before Michael ever pointed that out.

It's not even something that's limited to a particular driver, so it tells us the problem is in the Ubuntu stack. Since the slowdowns don't affect Kubuntu, that tells us exactly where in the Ubuntu stack the problem is.

[DaemonFC]

Actually, I was being facetious. I know exactly why people would scream FUD. There's people who think that Apple is a shining beacon of perfection even though a lot of games warn of bad performance on most Macs.

Rochard, for example, warns that most Macs made before about 2009 will have slow rendering issues. Then it goes on to list that the PC version will run fine with a Pentium 4 2.6 Ghz with a Geforce 8 or RadeonHD 2000 series GPU.

I know that Ubuntu has been trying to draw in people who are too poor to pay for Apple's crapware, and they seem to have succeeded, but the attitude is exactly the same.

[Luke_Wolf]

Why would they scream FUD? Running games on Ubuntu under Compiz is about the easiest way to drag your framerate down 10% or more. KDE simply mops the floor with Compiz/Unity. Sorry, but I was well aware of Ubuntu's gaming deficiencies long before Michael ever pointed that out.

It's not even something that's limited to a particular driver, so it tells us the problem is in the Ubuntu stack. Since the slowdowns don't affect Kubuntu, that tells us exactly where in the Ubuntu stack the problem is.

I don't remember there being any benchmarking of Kubuntu vs say Fedora KDE or openSUSE so actually we don't know that there aren't Ubuntu stack issues that are also effecting Kubuntu.

[Setlec]

I don't remember there being any benchmarking of Kubuntu vs say Fedora KDE or openSUSE so actually we don't know that there aren't Ubuntu stack issues that are also effecting Kubuntu.

there a benchmark comparison between some distros made a couple of years ago.

[AJenbo]

Running games on Ubuntu under Compiz is about the easiest way to drag your framerate down 10% or more. KDE simply mops the floor with Compiz/Unity.

Yeah except in the (few) cases where Unity is faster then KDE...