Gabe Newell first scored with Windows; now, time for Linux

[rhoenix]

In an interesting little nugget of computing and gaming history, it turns out that none other than Gabe Newell — then a bigwig member of Microsoft’s Windows team — was one of the reasons that Windows became a viable gaming platform, and probably why Windows went on to completely monopolize the consumer computing market for almost two decades. We raise this point now, of course, as Valve will soon be faced with making its own SteamOS and Steam Box viable for gaming.

For 13 years through to the mid-’90s, Gabe Newell was “producer on the first three releases of Windows” at Microsoft. At the time, according to Newell, “it was common wisdom that it wasn’t possible to write a good game in Windows because of, well, unnamed technical reasons.” In 1993 Doom was released, and according to Newell it became the number one most-used program in the entire US, ahead of Windows. When you consider that Id Software was a company of just 12 people, and Microsoft already had hundreds of developers working on Windows, this was quite an achievement.

Newell was disappointed that this game ran in MS-DOS, rather than Windows, and thus tasked some of his engineers to create a Windows port. According to an interview back in 2007, he then apparently called John Carmack at Id Software to say that Microsoft would do the port for free, and thus the port was eventually released as Doom 95. It is possible that the success of Doom, and Doom 95, showed developers that it was indeed possible to write top-notch games on Windows. It’s also worth noting that WinG, the precursor to DirectX, was maturing at the same time — perhaps it was a combination of factors that finally made Windows the de facto gaming platform.

Either way, the parallels between Newell’s Doom 95 efforts and his work to make Linux a viable gaming platform are startling. There was a misconception that Windows couldn’t run good games, much in the same way that popular consensus doesn’t believe that Linux is capable of running serious games. He used an existing, massively successful game to prove what Windows could do — and now he plans to do the same, saying that AAA developers are porting their games to SteamOS (and thus Linux). He worked on the Doom port for free, believing that proving Windows’ viability was more important than money — likewise, SteamOS will be free and open.

“People don’t realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior,” Newell said in a 2012 interview with All Things D. Newell probably believed that porting Doom to Windows would have a disproportionately positive effect on the Windows ecosystem, and now he’s trying to do the same thing to Linux with SteamOS and the Steam Box.

At this point, with with a rock-solid kernel, mature graphics drivers from Nvidia and Intel, and excellent performance from OpenGL, there are no technological roadblocks that prevent Linux from becoming a viable gaming platform. Now we just need someone to prove it with the release of an AAA Linux game — something like Grand Theft Auto 5 or Bioshock: Infinite. Maybe Newell will repeat the same trick, with Valve doing the porting work for free. Maybe it’s enough to have the seemingly invulnerable, unbeatable, and indefatigable heft of Valve backstopping SteamOS — if Valve believes it can work, then there are surely other games developers out there that will follow suit. Or maybe Valve will release Half-Life 3 for Linux and SteamOS — that’d probably do the trick as well.

If anyone can do so, it might just be Gabe Newell. This might make things very interesting for Microsoft in the coming years, and Sony and Nintendo soon enough as well, with how this is being angled.

More on the subject from the same source:

In the 21 years or so since its inception, Linux has gained some amazing enthusiast street cred, but failed time and again to enter the mainstream. This year, however, may afford it an opportunity it’s never had before: to gain the momentum necessary to join the big boys in the operating system world. If that happens, Linux devotees the world over — from users to developers to even Linus Torvalds himself — may have Microsoft and Windows 8 to thank.

Wait! I know I’ve ragged on Redmond’s reductive “new” OS in this space frequently, but… well, er, I stand by everything I’ve written. But this time it isn’t just me talking. This week the person saying it was Gabe Newell, the cofounder and managing director of Valve. So even if you think I’m bonkers for threatening to decamp to Linux if Windows 8 implodes, you owe it yourself to at least consider what he recently told Tricia Duryee of All Things D:

The big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People don’t realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior.

We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. It’s a hedging strategy. I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality.

Bingo. Windows 8 is really a make-or-break release for Microsoft. It’s an incredibly ambitious gamble that carries with it a huge amount of risk, wrapped up in the as-yet-unanswerable question of how willing people are to sacrifice their everyday computing just to make things better on tablets and phones. None of us can know the answer to that yet, and if the Microsoft folks bet the wrong way, their company could be on the line. And, yes, the stakes are so dire, and the level of failure so severe, that it really might let Linux get its foot in the door for the first time ever. When that happens, the technology world will change irrevocably.

This is not to say a lot of other circumstances have to line up, too — and that means giving audiences a concrete incentive to choose Linux in addition to choosing against Windows 8. And about this, Newell is exactly correct in saying that games have to factor into the equation somewhere in a far more prominent way than they currently do. Sorry, Tux lovers, but there’s no way around this.

Listen, I’ve been a Linux partisan (if not remotely a monogamous one) for years, and have been on the verge of permanent migration for years. But that’s one of the major reasons I’ve never made the switch. I like playing PC games — real PC games, new PC games — too much to give them up, and hardware and driver support just hasn’t been there in a real, definable way with the kinds of games I’m interested in. Yes, there are some not-terrible titles out there now, and some useful alternatives exist — the compatibility layer Wine is perhaps the most famous, and it’s improved by leaps and bounds over the last couple of years — but for the most part your organic choices have been limited to things like Tux Racer, TORCS, Nexuiz, and “complaining about Unity on web forums,” all of which have their charms but lack the polish of most PC titles. There’s little question about why this is: The absence of great money and world-class QA, and R&D has hampered inspiration, innovation, and implementation. (Come to think of it, this is true about pretty much all Linux software.)

But if — and I realize it’s an Empire State Building–size “if” at this point — games are not just playable on Linux but also high in quality, this could have an interesting impact on the current frontrunners. Admittedly, there’s not much chance Linux is going to usurp the field anytime soon: According to tracking information provided by the W3C, as of June Linux owned only about 1.8% of the market, compared with 15.47% for Apple’s various operating systems and a stunning 78.89% for four incarnations of Windows. But if Windows 8 is the desktop disaster folks like Newell and I are predicting it will be, even its new lower prices won’t stop some people from defecting.

So the time couldn’t be better for Valve to finally release its long-awaited version of Steam for Linux, and give users of open source software the truly viable second alternative they’ve never really had. When the choice comes down to Apple (gorgeous but expensive hardware the company is dead set against you upgrading) and Linux (inscrutable software that runs on practically anything, and that anyone can afford) don’t think there’s a not a chance Linux could make a major dent in its competitors’ dominance and skyrocket to objective visibility within a year or so. People want games, and when the playing field is level, they’ll see everything that Linux has to offer (and save) them that Mac and Windows setups no longer will.

All this is contingent, of course, on Apple and Microsoft playing along by not playing along. Mountain Lion has been heralded, but doesn’t boast a ton of game-changing new features (for people in the US, at any rate). And though Microsoft has made plenty of tiny tweaks around the edges of Windows 8, it’s changed so little from its initial developer preview that you may find yourself wondering whether the company has learned anything from its past mistakes. These circumstances suggest both companies are already set in their ways, and their longer development cycles could make them particularly vulnerable to the fast-moving Linux and its uniquely passionate and experienced userbase. (Ubuntu, as but one example, has two major releases per year, with the next, version 12.10, slated to arrive in October.)

Of course, Linux has boasted all those involved Penguin-huggers for ages, and they haven’t helped much. There’s still an enormous gulf out there between everyday computer users and Linux users, in part a necessary byproduct of Linux’s more complicated, makeshift nature, but also because the DIY mindset long ago seeped out of the general populace’s consciousness (as I’ve discussed here before). The fact remains that a lot of people still haven’t realized that Linux offers them almost everything Mac OS X and Windows do, if in a considerably less-flashy and tougher-to-support package. And the learning curve, if you’re not an old-timer or familiar with alternative ways of doing things, can be steep. For the vast majority, paying the extra money and accepting the binding chains that are a condition of the bargain have been worthwhile sacrifices to guarantee software availability and hardware compatibility — assuming they’ve even known about Linux as an alternative at all.

Linux is, as always, facing an uphill struggle, no doubt, and no matter what happens Windows 8 is probably not quite self-destructive enough to blow users over into the open source world. Still, the notion is tantalizing, and not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Newell and Valve have their work cut out for them; if the Linux version of their game distribution software is good it could significantly accelerate the process, and if it’s not it could clamp down the brakes yet again on the operating system’s constant careening toward popularity. But pairing the alignment of the stars that could only happen in 2012 with a selection of instantly accessible triple-A games could upend our preconceptions about PC gaming and force a mini Renaissance within the next few years.

A pipe dream? Maybe. But if it ends up happening, don’t be surprised if the twin driving forces behind the locomotive of change are Windows and Steam.

Honestly, the main thing acting against Linux adoption as a gaming platform is momentum with existing platforms, and the fact that you had to perform configuration file surgery to get things to run properly sometimes. Granted, this makes you feel like you truly accomplished something when you spend an hour tinkering with configuration settings so you can have a 1920x1080 desktop.

However, your average PC user really wouldn't be. If SteamOS simplifies stuff with Linux configuration, while still offering the configuration options that make Linux a good choice, then Gabe might have a chance here, as long as Steam has some good big-name titles being released for it. And, of course, if performance on said titles is equal to or better than it running on a comparable Windows computer.

At the very least, it might shake things up a bit in the PC gaming world - and that wouldn't be a bad thing.

[rhoenix]

Another article, from a different source:

Given Gabe Newell's description of Windows 8 as both a "catastrophe" and a "giant sadness," it come as no surprise that his company, Valve, which distributes computer games to millions of players through its online distribution network, Steam, has gradually shifted emphasis to the open source operating system Linux. But the company has gone one further with the announcement of SteamOS, its own Linux-based operating system catered to living room PCs.

It was about a year ago that Valve released Steam's Big Picture Mode, designed to optimize the Steam games distribution software for users with a PC connected to a TV more likely to be using an Xbox controller than a mouse and keyboard. SteamOS appears to be a logical progression, then.

"As we've been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we've come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself," the company writes on its website. "SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines."

Valve has announced several new features of SteamOS which will also appear in a forthcoming update of the existing Steam software. Perhaps of most interest to gamers will be Family Sharing, which Valve says will allow people to "take turns playing one another's games" while allowing users to earn they own achievements and access their own cloud save files. Alongside this feature are the new Family Options which appear to be straightforward permissions controls to prevent the wee ones starting up Borderlands 2, for example.

Perhaps most intriguing are the media streaming services Valve has announced for Steam and SteamOS. The company says it is "working with many of the media services you know and love" in order to stream film and music (the likes of Spotify and Netflix spring irresistibly to mind). This will come as welcome news to anyone with a living room PC that currently has to reach for a mouse to launch a web browser to connect to such services.

Finally there's In-home Streaming, which Valve says can be used to stream games from a Mac or Windows machine (in your office, say) to a SteamOS box connected to your living room TV. Doubtless this feature has been put in place in recognition that many TV-connected PCs will be relatively modest machines not necessarily capable of throwing around the latest triple-A titles in HD resolutions. Hopefully it's not a sign that Valve anticipates a continuing lack of Linux ports, which will presumably be required for games to run natively in SteamOS. Though Valve has been diligent in porting its own titles to Linux, and though indie titles are readily available, the big-budget third-party releases have been notably absent. This will surely have to change if gamers are to switch to SteamOS as operating system of choice on their main gaming rigs.

There are signs that Valve isn't pitching SteamOS solely at the casual game. The company claims to have achieved "significant" graphics performance gains using the OS, and is working on audio and latency advances to match.

SteamOS will likely be the operating system of Valve's own gaming hardware, informally dubbed Steam Box by expectant gamers, confirmed to be in development last December.

There are some good ideas here, and the added features could make this look more attractive to developers and players both.

[rhoenix]

An interesting tangential development here, considering Nvidia's involvement with the SteamOS project.

Few companies have been the target of as much criticism in the Linux community as Nvidia. Linus Torvalds himself last year called Nvidia the "single worst company" Linux developers have ever worked with, giving the company his middle finger in a public talk.

Nvidia is now trying to get on Linux developers' good side. Yesterday, Nvidia's Andy Ritger e-mailed developers of Nouveau, an open source driver for Nvidia cards that is built by reverse engineering Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Ritger wrote that "NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau. We intend to provide more documentation over time, and guidance in additional areas as we are able."

The first step was releasing documentation of the Device Control Block (DCB) layout in Nvidia's VBIOS, describing the board's topology and display connectors. Ritger continued:

I suspect much of the information in that document is not news for the Nouveau community, but hopefully it will be helpful to confirm your understanding or flesh out the implementation of a few unhandled cases.

A few of us who work on NVIDIA's proprietary Linux GPU driver will pay attention to nouveau at lists.freedesktop.org and try to chime in when we can.

If there are specific areas of documentation that would most help you, that feedback would help NVIDIA prioritize our documentation efforts.

If you have specific questions for NVIDIA, you can ask here, or direct them to: open-gpu-doc at nvidia.com. I can't promise we'll be able to answer everything, but we'll provide best-effort in areas where we are able.

The gesture was well-received. In response, Maarten Lankhorst of Canonical wrote, "You rock!" Lankhorst added, "Our biggest struggle at the moment is the video clocking and power management, which is highly device specific and depends on configuration too. A complete video bios documentation would be nice too, I understand that will take a bit longer than just the dcb."

I popped into the Nouveau IRC channel this morning to get the developers' take on the significance of the news. They confirmed that they already knew much of the information in the DCB documentation but said that it may "help us find a few corner cases for cards we don't own" and allow them "to handle uncommon cases we haven't seen in the wild."

One developer said, "The stuff Nvidia wants to offer in the future is much more interesting, really. That does sound like a good start, though."

Nvidia's move this week (on the same day that Valve announced a new Linux-based operating system for gaming) is a change of heart from the position it took last year after Torvalds' criticism. At the time, Nvidia told Tom's Hardware, "While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging Nvidia common code rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system."

We've e-mailed Ritger, Torvalds, and Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman to get more information and reactions, and we will update this post if we hear back from them.

UPDATE: Torvalds has responded to Ars, saying he's optimistic but not quite ready to apologize to Nvidia. "We'll see," Torvalds wrote in an e-mail. "I'm cautiously optimistic that this is a real shift in how Nvidia perceives Linux. The actual docs released so far are fairly limited, and in themselves they wouldn't be a big thing, but if Nvidia really does follow up and start opening up more, that would certainly be great.

"They've already been much better in the ARM SoC space than they were on the more traditional GPU side, and I really hope that some day I can just apologize for ever giving them the finger."

Kroah-Hartman responded as well, saying, "It's very significant, and very nice to see happen."

Heh.

[rhoenix]

The announcement we’ve all been anxiously awaiting for the better part of a year — the reveal of Valve’s Steam Box — has arrived. It turns out Valve’s purportedly revolutionary games console is, it would seem, a normal PC. Are you ready for a new era of gaming?

Earlier this week, Valve announced part one of its three-part Steam Box plan, the operating system. Dubbed SteamOS, it’d be a free-to-download, free-to-license modified Linux OS. It would run Steam for Linux games — in a way likely similar to (or exactly like) Big Picture mode — and incorporate everything you know and love (or hate) about Steam. The announcement of a new operating system that appears to just be Steam without the shackles of Windows wasn’t particularly exciting, and now, Valve followed suit with an even less exciting “announcement” of the Steam Box hardware.

Dubbed Steam Machines, at this moment it appears the Steam Box is more an initiative or idea than it is a games console. Valve stated it will be releasing a prototype sometime this year. No specs revealed yet, sorry. The company also said that any manufacturer can release their own version of a Steam Box, and gamers can build their own as well. Without knowing the actual specs and physical design of the hardware, all Valve appears to be saying is it’ll be releasing a standard gaming PC with a form factor that fits in a living room entertainment unit. These are things that currently exist, and have done so for a while. You can get a gaming PC right this second that’s smaller than an Xbox One, which is an enormous games console that is supposed to fit in a home entertainment unit.

Sometime in 2014, Steam Machines from multiple manufacturers will be available for purchase. Steam will remain the same, so if you aren’t hip to the Steam Machine jive, you can simply stick with your traditional gaming PC rig and not miss a beat. Valve will allow other manufacturers to have control over their own Steam Machine, optimizing for anything they see fit, such as cost, performance, size — you name it. Valve will also allow you to do whatever you want with the Steam Machine, such as change the OS and hardware, install your own software, or even use it in hobby projects (take that, Raspberry Pi). The Steam Machine and SteamOS, Valve mentioned, will work well with gamepads, as well as a standard keyboard and mouse combo. The company that Gaben built did, however, note that more information about Steam Machine input will be released soon — perhaps this Friday when the final part of the three-part announcement is revealed.

Valve will be releasing 300 prototype units — which you can sign up for via an opt-in beta – before the end of this year.

So, in summary, we still have no idea what a Steam Box is, except now we have to start calling it a Steam Machine (a name certain industry folk are quick to point out isn’t optimal). From the “details” Valve released today, the hardware sounds very much like a regular PC, but marketed as a games console. You can turn any PC into a Steam Machine right now, just consult the above GIF.

The Steam machine is a Linux box with a modified OS, except you can install whatever OS you want (and will probably want to install Windows in order to get the majority of Steam’s library running on your machine). You can change the hardware however and whenever you want, just like the tower sitting below your desk. It can come in any configuration a manufacturer desires, like every PC you’ve ever used.

Right now, it seems like Valve is excitedly walking onto the proverbial stage and announcing the invention of the personal computer.

So. This could become a real shake-up to the PC (and eventually console) gaming market, or... a flop people snicker about for years to come. Either way, this is going to be interesting to watch unfold.

[Hotfoot]

So Steam is getting Nvidia to play nice with Linux for a change. This is interesting, and Nvidia has no reason not to, since both of the upcoming consoles are ATI-based.

Picking a distro of Linux and backing it to the hilt for gaming by the single largest digital distributor and the most recognized 3D accelerator company might be enough to make Windows not be the end-all be-all for gaming, but I obviously have reservations here. Windows 8 not being fantastic is not enough to drive players from the OS as a whole when it comes to gaming. Whatever Valve has in their pocket, they need to make it better than Windows 7 in just about every way, and I doubt they can manage that. Steam itself was a piece of shit for years until they worked out the kinks, and there are still flaws. I doubt their venture into the OS market is going to be painless, and when they're going up against Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft in the console market? Oh man, I hope they are ready for pain. Let's not forget that the last time someone tried to break into that market, it was Microsoft and they dropping gobs of cash into the first Xbox which never made the money back, and didn't stand a chance until they pulled out a reversal on Sony with the 360. They hemorrhaged money into the Xbox as a whole until it came back years later. That was a move of utter dedication and determination, and it still failed in some respects (Xbox and Japan may never, in fact be a thing).

Valve's venture here, then, is one that I see going like the original Xbox. There may be some initial headway, but it won't hold a candle to the existing competition. While the Xbone may not have the juggernaut-like momentum the 360 has built for itself, it's still a good overall option, since they'll be building on what the 360 has. The PS4 is Sony's attempt to regain the ground the lost in the last generation and they appear to be pulling out the stops. Nintendo...well fuck, when they stop printing money I'll talk about them more, but it's sort of irrelevant. They just don't care about anything right now, despite lackluster sales for the Wii U and the latest gameboy. I think they're hitting the edge of the casual market, but it's not like they're still not swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck here.

Meanwhile, the Ouya, the kickstarted open source console, is starting to become a real thing and it's honestly disappointing from everything I've read. Maybe it will be a good baseline to put SteamOS on, but by itself?

Steam has to offer roughly equal levels of convenience to other consoles, be able to put out machines capable of matching existing consoles in power, and have a line of awesome games to offer. Obviously, PC gaming, but it's a tough sell to say "PC Gaming" and "Convenience" in the same breath. Think about all the things you've done to get games to work in the past. Downloading patches, driver updates, fiddling with *.ini files, hex editors, registry editors, looking in obscure forums for reasons why your game doesn't work. That sort of thing is exceptionally rare in consoles. You just put the game in and play it. Your friends list is the same through every game, and you can form parties within games and outside of them.

You don't get that on PC in large part because there is no central authority telling everyone "hey, shitheads, use these standards in your game or we won't publish it". PC gaming is about the freedom to play whatever the fuck you want, however the fuck you want. It makes the games less accessible, but it allows a wider variety.

And because we don't have that, I remain highly skeptical of anyone that says they're going to give it to us, because it means the creation of a console-like body that will demand that degree of conformity from the PC developers, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Time, of course, will tell.

[Dark Silver]

If you want to be technical: their latest handheld (the 3DS) only sold bad for the first year - as of right now it's their best selling handheld - period. Infact the 3DS has just passed Lifetime Sales of the Wii in Japan - and has blown out most of the rest of the DS family's sales records.

The WiiU suffered from it's initial year of having a drought of big name retail games - they had some excellent Indie and Digital Only games - but with the release of PikMan 3, Wonderful 101, Disney Infinity and Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD as singling the big name releases (Splinter Cell Blacklist also released, ACBF and Watch Dogs are coming up soon as well as CoD: Ghost) may see the main console gaining some momentum (the 3DS didn't start really selling until LoZ:OoT's 3D Remake was released which singled the end of the games drought for that system.)



Still, with STEAMOS, it's not just gaming - it really depends on how easy Valve makes this OS for everyone to use - how easy can I put it into my existing network and use the data shares on it? Will it play nicely with media? etc etc.

I look forward to seeing what Valve will do with it, and if it will indeed be a success, or one of their failures. Time will tell though.

Granted, I will more than likely be getting a distro of this to play with eventually.

[rhoenix]

Another update, from Mr, Torvalds:

Linus Torvalds has welcomed the arrival of Valve’s Linux-based platform, SteamOS, and said it could boost Linux on desktops.

The Linux creator praised Valve's "vision" and suggested its momentum would force other manufacturers to take Linux seriously - especially if game developers start to ditch Windows.

"I love the Steam announcements – I think that's an opportunity to really help the desktop," he said, speaking at LinuxCon in Edinburgh.

Valve announced SteamOS last month as a way to bring PC gaming to the living room. Users will be able to install the system on PCs they build themselves, and Valve will make the system available to manufacturers to use on their own hardware.

Should SteamOS gain traction among gamers and developers, that could force more hardware manufacturers to extend driver support beyond Windows.

That's a sore point for Torvalds, who slammed Nvidia last year for failing to support open-source driver development for its graphics chips. Now that SteamOS is on the way, Nvidia has opened up to the Linux community, something Torvalds predicts is a sign of things to come.

"I’m not just saying it’ll help us get traction with the graphics guys," he said. "It’ll also force different distributors to realise if this is how Steam is going, they need to do the same thing because they can’t afford to be different in this respect. They want people to play games on their platform too."

"It’s the best model for standardisation," he added. "I think good standards are people doing things, saying 'this is how we do it' and being successful enough to drive the market."

Pretty login screens

Another reason Linux hasn't done well on desktop, according to Torvalds, is because developers focus on useless UX features.

"Linux is doing wonderfully well in so many different areas, but I still am somewhat disappointed about the fact that Linux desktop is this morass of in-fighting and people who do bad things," he said.

"I do hope the desktop people will try to work together, and work more on the technology than trying to make the login screen look really nice," he added.

Torvalds wouldn't mention specific companies, but has previously championed Google’s Chromebook Pixel, which runs on the Linux-based Chrome OS - describing other PCs as "crap" by comparison.

He's got a point. A bunch of PC nerds making stuff that makes them happy will result in a huge morass of different options. Having Valve come in with a more commercialized package of what Linux is presented as would have a beneficial effect across all the existing distributions of Linux as well, and as Linus said, a greater possibility for proper open-source device drivers from the companies who make the product.

[rhoenix]

A small, related update that I was impressed to see:

Games vendor Valve has offered a surprise present to the Debian Linux community, in the form of subscriptions that give Debian project members free, unlimited access to all Valve game titles – past, present, and future – forever.

According to a message posted to a Debian mailing list on Thursday, the offer is open to all Debian Developers, the project's name for official, registered contributors.

To receive a redemption code, all they need do is send an email to a contact at Linux consultancy Collabora that's been digitally signed by a key in the Debian keyring.

Once they enter the code into Valve's Steam online gaming service, they'll get instant, perpetual access to the full list of past and present Valve-produced titles – including the Half Life series, Portal, Counter-Strike, Left4Dead, and more – and new ones will be added as they're published.

Valve founder Gabe Newell has long been a vocal supporter of Linux, particularly as compared to recent operating systems from his former employer, Microsoft.

In 2012, Newell described Windows 8 as "a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space" and said that Valve was working on making all 2,500 games in its Steam store available to Linux users as a "hedging strategy."

Most recently, Valve has been working on SteamOS, a Linux-based turnkey gaming platform that will come preinstalled on Steam Machines – dedicated gaming consoles based on standard PC hardware from a variety of vendors.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, SteamOS is based on Debian. Specifically, it is a fork of the Debian 7.1 "Wheezy" stable distribution with additions and modifications including an updated kernel and C library, third-party graphics drivers, and a custom graphics compositor – not to mention Valve's proprietary Steam client.

Valve has been working with Collabora to polish SteamOS ahead of the Steam Machines' expected launch later this year.

"Valve are keen to contribute back to the community, and I'm discussing a couple of ways that they may be able to do that," Collabora's Neil McGovern said on the debian-devel-announce mailing list.

Valve's games giveaway is apparently just the first of these contributions. But how laudable this particular offer is seems up for debate. It's certainly a nice gesture – but as a side effect, it seems at least some Debian Developers are likely to become much less productive soon. ®

I don't like and don't use Debian, but since Valve used it as a basis for SteamOS, it's nice to see them giving back to the community that gave them the pieces they needed to assemble the Linux-based system they have in mind.