The public beta of the popular gaming client for the Penguin is out for more than a month: which goals have been achieved? What does the future hold?
It was July 17, 2012: Valve officially announced plans to bring its popular gaming platform, Steam, on GNU / Linux, together with its very large park videogames (including therefore the engine Soruce) and many others of its partners already present in the store or not.
Surely that date marks the beginning of a new era for the world of Penguin: in fact, from that day the prospects open to the entire community have changed dramatically, thanks to a new impulse to the world of video games was giving all ' whole GNU / Linux.
From there was an escalation of positive news: starting from the statements of Valve CEO Gabe Newell called Windows 8 a disaster, then focusing everything on GNU / Linux, we moved to a series of events that took us up to release of the first public beta of Steam Linux December 21, 2012, shortly before Christmas, finally opening the doors to rescue the world of Penguin in the field of video games.
Now that it has been over a month since that historic day, at which point we arrived, what to expect for the future of gaming on GNU / Linux? Let's see together in this interesting investigation.
Bugfixing and Steam Linux Stable
Since the first release of the Beta limited to 1000 meters, the Valve Linux Team (the group of developers responsible for monitoring the project on Penguin) has worked hard to solve the large number of bugs that plagued the first version of the client and Team Fortress 2 first Valve game to be released for GNU / Linux, which initially made it really complex everyday use of the two software.
Initially, Steam was quite unstable and tended to crash very frequently, was not at all integrated with the rest of the system (font, context menu, etc..) And the Big Picture mode, the graphical interface dedicated for use by the controller, often could not start or was subject to delays really unnerving. TF2, however, often did not want to leave and that she could offer the framerate was really low on machines equipped with high-end hardware.
The work of bugfixing, in collaboration with the beta testers, it was truly commendable, and is still in full swing considering the state of Beta release which is still the client, but most of the major bugs have been fully resolved, and now Steam Linux is absolutely suitable for everyday use.
There are still some problems with the use of keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl + X, Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V do not work for example), but overall the work done by the development team is absolutely fine, not to mention the fact that all the titles available have built-in Steam Play, which allows you to use your purchase of all three OS (Windows, Mac, Linux) at no additional cost.
And in all probability just this month will see the light of the first stable version of the client, as long predicted by several reliable sources.
Ubuntu 13.4 and new video driver
One of the most important collaborations that Valve has launched the merits of the project Steam Linux is definitely the one with Canonical: Ubuntu it just was the first distro to be officially supported by Newell's house, and all the efforts in the development are currently focused use of Steam on that platform.
In Ubuntu 13.04, the next version of Canonical's distro to be released in April, is already evident that the collaboration with Valve is bringing the first results: in fact, thanks to several benchmarks made by Phoronix.com site, it was noted in various daily builds released by the South African home as the performance of the distro, above all with the open drivers, are significantly better than the previous release 12.10 and, in some cases, even compared to Fedora 18.
Important in the development process were also initiated partnership with three major manufacturers of graphics chips, Intel, NVIDIA and AMD, which led to a huge improvement in video driver for GNU / Linux.
Especially NVIDIA has worked extremely well in this sense, releasing the new series R310 and R313 which increase significantly the performance of the Penguin on the boards of the American home, and beginning the work that will bring official support Optimus technology also on this platform .
As for AMD, however, the process was more troubled: until a few weeks ago, Valve Linux Team has quarreled a lot with ATI drivers for GNU / Linux, which is causing more and more problems with the client with Team Fortress 2 . Only with the last update 1.13 has arrived at a situation at least acceptable from the point of view of stability, and with the new 13.2 Beta will begin to see improvements with respect to the discrete margins framerate of video games. Persist, however, several problems with the dual-GPU ATI-Intel which have different ultimate notebook, which prevent the driver from starting correctly.
Intel, for its part, already offered good support in GNU / Linux, being the only house to release their drivers open source license: the work done with Valve allowed simply to improve energy efficiency and to optimize the performance on dual-GPU.
See Pictures and Read more : Steam for Linux, what does the future hold?
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