The Steam Linux Beta Begins...

[Kano]

No, but try:

xdg-open steam://run/22010

[Detructor]

No, but try:

xdg-open steam://run/22010

it just says that I've no internet connection o_0.

[Larian]

No freaking way the majority said they're running a 32 bit system. This isn't Windows. And guess what you'll get when you gather the data from the people who run Steam through Wine. They use 32 bit. BECAUSE THE GOD DAMN CLIENT IS 32 BIT and you need a 32 bit wine enviroment to do that.

I hate people who embrace their 20th century technology so much and delay the progress of technology for all of us. There is no single solitary reason why we need 32 Bit programs in the year 2012. My dad bought an old used office PC for under 50 USD. Guess what it has a Pentium 4 and that's already 64 bit capable. If you have a shitty ancient computer that is so old that it has ghosts inside of it, you won't be doing much steam gaming anyway.

Wow. Take a breath before you pass out on the floor.

I was asked to speculate on what Valve's reasons might be, so I did, and that was the best justification that I could come up with. No idea if I'm right. But in fairness, are all of the games in Valve's catalog 64 bit? I'm sure SOME titles are, but certainly not everything on Steam is. Do you not play games or run any programs that are 32 bit? And if not, what did you do with them all? Can I have them?

My point here is that to sweep away support for 32 bit programs (as you suggest) would alienate a portion of the userbase. I think Valve wants to allow everybody the ability to run its software (I've played HL2 on a netbook for crying out loud, albeit with its balls chopped off ... but it ran and was playable!) Hell, I still fire up games in DosBox from time to time. Not everything needs 64 bit support. In most cases it would turn out to be digital masturbation - doing something just for the sake of doing it.

For what it's worth, I do in fact run both a 32 bit and a 64 bit OS, and I seem to be able to play just fine on both of them. And while I haven't checked, I think my WINE client on my 64 bit Mint install actually does identify itself as being 64 bit (compiled with 32 bit library support which was a pain in the ass to figure out.)

[Artemis3]

they seem to rely on the "feature" that ubuntu installs recommended packages as well by default.

This is the default behaviour since Debian Lenny, Ubuntu is doing nothing here.

You probably have the apt.conf APT::Install-Recommends "0" variable set.

http://linux.koolsolutions.com/2009/...-debian-linux/

[psycho_driver]

Got it installed and working in a continuously rolling gentoo AMD64 environment (several minor tweaks were required). So far I've registered my 33 HIB games, of which 16 are showing as being linux compatible. I've only played Auquaria and Space Pirates and Zombies so far, the rest are downloading. In-game overlay is working. I use E17 as my desktop environment. Small issues if I exited fullscreen in the World of Goo demo and then tried to go back fullscreen (panel stayed visible). The Big Picture or whatever it's called is working fine. Color me impressed.

I would like to humbly request that Valve open talks with the rat bastards at Netflix to bring streaming to their Big Picture client, so that commited linux desktop users such as myself can end our boycott of Netflix.

[nir2142]

i dont understand why valve open steam for linux just for 1000 user.
it is beta version!!! so why not open this beta to all user?? the more is better , no?

[psycho_driver]

i dont understand why valve open steam for linux just for 1000 user.
it is beta version!!! so why not open this beta to all user?? the more is better , no?

I wasn't invited to the beta.

Interesting side-note. The client finished downloading steel storm and when I launched it it asked if I wanted to run the 32-bit or 64-bit version. Woot!

[Detructor]

i dont understand why valve open steam for linux just for 1000 user.
it is beta version!!! so why not open this beta to all user?? the more is better , no?

no. The problem is, if you've many people in early stage of your beta test, for every bug found you get multiple bug reports instead of one. And the first 20 comments on each of those reports is going to be "hey, I've this bug, too!!" the next ~10 comments will be "when will this *** **** get fixed? $company sucks!!!!!!!!!oneoneone!!!".

If you don't believe me, three things:

1. I'm a software developer myself and encountered that exact behavior by people that were paid way more than me. And no those bugs were no 'show stoppers'
2. head over to the wine bug database. Check the comments of some bug reports. You'll get what I mean (and yes, I went bollocks about one or two things as well.)
3. I participated in a few beta tests over the years. Let's just say it's really for the better to limit the amount of people and gradually increase the amount over time. You want to fix bugs first that are encountered by most people, regardless of operating system or graphiccard or whatever. Plain programming errors. After those are fixed, you go on to fix things that are only encountered when certain preconditions are met.

Also, just as a hint, using more than one punctuation character of the same type in a row makes it hard to read a post and increases the probability of the reader thinking that you are just an immature kid. Which, in most cases, doesn't really help you.

[nir2142]

i understand what you mean BUT i see companies that have developed bug report that minimized or indexing if there is more then one bug report about the same bug (or even they sometimes have automated delete comments from database about the same bug)
as you can see its very easy solution to solve that.

[benmoran]

To my knowledge, Valve is currently using a hidden forum to work out bug reports. They've never had any public bug trackers in the past, have they? I guess the forum was the easiest way for them to get things rolling, though it definitely makes it hard to organize bugs. If you look at the public Linux Beta Client forum, un-authorized users have already taken it upon themselves to try to organize bugs into indexed posts.

Maybe we can push Valve to get a proper bug tracker up for when the expanded beta goes live.