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posted by chromas on Wednesday April 04 2018, @09:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the spring-steam-cleaning dept.

Valve has directly responded to the Steam communities' worries that Steam Machines and by extension SteamOS, Valve's Linux powered gaming OS, were silently being discontinued. tl;dr: No, they aren't dropping SteamOS or the Steam Machine. In fact, they have more in the pipeline for Linux so stay tuned.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1696043806550421224/

We've noticed that what started out as a routine cleanup of the Steam Store navigation turned into a story about the delisting of Steam Machines. That section of the Steam Store is still available, but was removed from the main navigation bar based on user traffic. Given that this change has sparked a lot of interest, we thought it'd make sense to address some of the points we've seen people take away from it.

While it's true Steam Machines aren't exactly flying off the shelves, our reasons for striving towards a competitive and open gaming platform haven't significantly changed. We're still working hard on making Linux operating systems a great place for gaming and applications. We think it will ultimately result in a better experience for developers and customers alike, including those not on Steam.

Through the Steam Machine initiative, we've learned quite a bit about the state of the Linux ecosystem for real-world game developers out there. We've taken a lot of feedback and have been heads-down on addressing the shortcomings we observed. We think an important part of that effort is our ongoing investment in making Vulkan a competitive and well-supported graphics API, as well as making sure it has first-class support on Linux platforms.

Recently we announced Vulkan availability for macOS and iOS, adding to its existing availability for Windows and Linux. We also rolled out Steam Shader Pre-Caching, which will let users of Vulkan-based applications skip shader compilation on their local machine, significantly improving initial load times and reducing overall runtime stuttering in comparison with other APIs. We'll be talking more about Shader Pre-Caching in the coming months as the system matures.

At the same time, we're continuing to invest significant resources in supporting the Vulkan ecosystem, tooling and driver efforts. We also have other Linux initiatives in the pipe that we're not quite ready to talk about yet; SteamOS will continue to be our medium to deliver these improvements to our customers, and we think they will ultimately benefit the Linux ecosystem at large.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 04 2018, @10:18PM (2 children)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Wednesday April 04 2018, @10:18PM (#662663)

    + 1 Insightful comment, thanks.

    In my own personal use case, I play Civ V on Linux and appreciate the work Valve (and presumably the devs of Civ) have put into it. Civ V runs absolutely fine on Linux, as well as Windows as far as I can tell.

    I also play Civ VI when I fire up my Windows box, as there is no Linux version on Steam and to be fair gaming is the only reason I keep a Windows machine around.

    If there ever comes a day that Linux gaming is as good, or even nearly as good as Windows I will have no reason to bother with a Windows box at all, and I suspect this is a fairly common situation for many Soylentils.

    With Linux having such a small market share I understand why developers of games don't spend a lot of time on it, so there's that.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by stretch611 on Wednesday April 04 2018, @10:51PM (1 child)

    by stretch611 (6199) on Wednesday April 04 2018, @10:51PM (#662673)

    Actually, Civ VI has been released on Linux. As well as the recent expansion and all DLC. If you own it on steam, you have access to it.

    In the case of Civilization, a 3rd party company, Aspyr, has done all the porting. Admittedly, the Linux versions did not come out the same day as the windows version. The main game took a while Aspyr considered the profitability [gamingonlinux.com] and signed the agreements with Firaxis. The recent expansion pack was delayed a month [gamingonlinux.com] after the windows release as Aspyr was having some porting issues.

    --
    Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P