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Valve appears to be working on a set of "compatibility tools," called Steam Play, that would allow at least some Windows-based titles to run on Linux-based SteamOS systems.
Yesterday, Reddit users noticed that Steam's GUI files (as captured by SteamDB's Steam Tracker) include a hidden section with unused text related to the unannounced Steam Play system. According to that text, "Steam Play will automatically install compatibility tools that allow you to play games from your library that were built for other operating systems."
Other unused text in the that GUI file suggests Steam Play will offer official compatibility with "supported tiles" while also letting users test compatibility for "games in your library that have not been verified with a supported compatibility tool." That latter use comes with a warning that "this may not work as expected, and can cause issues with your games, including crashes and breaking save games."
Tools that let users run Windows apps in Linux are nothing new; Wine has existed for decades, after all. But an "official" Steam-based compatibility tool, with the resources and backing of Valve behind it, could have a huge impact on the Linux development space that could reach well beyond games. Assuming it worked for a wide range of titles, the Steam Play system could also help ameliorate one of SteamOS' biggest failings—namely, the relative lack of compatible games when compared to Windows.
With all that said, some caution is warranted before getting too excited about these possibilities. For one, we don't know what specific form Steam Play will take. Valve could simply be preparing a wrapper that lets users run existing emulation tools like Wine and DOSBox on top of SteamOS without actively advancing the state of that emulation directly.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @06:32PM (16 children)
That's what the whole SteamOS crap was supposed to do: Put major muscle behind porting games to Linux.
It didn't happen.
Actually, why is it so difficult to get Windows stuff running on Linux? It's all just bits, right? Is it a legal issue? Is it a philosophical issue?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @07:08PM (5 children)
I don't know .... so you are saying that all these thousands of people working at Microsoft for years on Windows OS, they do nothing? And it would be trivial to duplicate their entire effort (with bugs, I mean features) on top of another buggy system instead?
I think your question is pure ignorance.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @07:25PM (4 children)
You're the one who's ignorant.
Firstly, we're talking about games, here—you know, fullscreen stuff that is entirely under the control of the game maker. We're not talking about the latest trash Windows GUI elements; that's what Microsoft employees spend their time doing: Reinventing GUIs.
Secondly, Windows is famous for its backwards compatibility; that means there's a shit ton of interfaces that are GUARANTEED not to change, and are thus ripe for duplication. Why doesn't Linux support the PE binary format directly? How difficult could it be to make a Windows-translation layer in the kernel? Why is it so difficult to get game makers to use a cross-platform API?
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Thursday August 16 2018, @08:08PM (3 children)
It's under the control of the game maker, but the game maker is not always under the control of Valve. They might choose to use Microsoft-exclusive technologies in that game, such as Direct X. You have heard of Direct X, right? One of the many things Microsoft employees are doing other than "reinventing GUIs".
Oh my god I almost fell out of my chair I was laughing so hard when I read that. Are you joking, or do you just not really know what "backwards compatibility" means? I've got dozens of Windows games that now run better on a fresh install of Linux than they do on Windows. Win98 software won't even run on XP usually, and trying on anything later than that is beyond hopeless unless the original devs release a patch themselves. And don't even bring up "compatibility mode", as I've tried that hundreds of times and never seen it make any difference at all (other than breaking things even more). Windows is "backwards compatible" only in the sense that that's a bullet point the marketing department uses to try to sell it. And that's one of the things with compatibility layers like Wine -- they DO work very well for the old stuff. The stuff that Windows won't even run anymore. They've caught up on those releases, and they work great, and even the bugs are replicated well enough to run the applications that are depending on them. It's the brand new games that rely on brand new features that don't work yet, because the devs haven't had time to reverse-engineer it all.
Plenty of game developers do. But plenty of others won't even consider using any technology that doesn't have a Microsoft logo on it. And it definitely doesn't help if they're planning an X-Box release, for example, as using Microsoft technologies is likely going to make that port a lot easier. And that's the problem that these kinds of compatibility layers are trying to solve. It's the games that are coded only for Direct X for example that cause problems. The games coded for OpenGL usually either have a native Linux version already or are pretty easy to support with compatibility layers like Wine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @08:23PM (2 children)
You've just been hoist by your own petard.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @11:16PM
lol, wow. Are you autistic?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday August 17 2018, @01:45PM
I never claimed it couldn't. What's your point?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday August 16 2018, @07:36PM
I'm not too impressed either, however SteamOS wasn't about providing WINE/compatibility tools. It was about providing a Linux platform for gaming and improving game performance on Linux, so that developers would port games to Linux, as you say.
SteamOS gaming performs significantly worse than Windows, Ars analysis shows [arstechnica.com] (2015)
Since then, it should have gotten easier to support Linux gaming given the existence of Vulkan [wikipedia.org].
More should be done to ensure that Linux gaming is a thing and not a miserably tiny niche. The best thing about SteamOS is that Valve has not cancelled it yet. There's still hope, and the Windows platform is weaker than ever. Android is huge, ChromeOS is decent*, and Fuchsia might take ChromeOS a little further. PS4 is running a FreeBSD fork.
*Yes, I know that the Android and Chromebook platforms are typically underpowered for gaming, but the gap could narrow in some cases and you go where the money is (there are 1-2 billion Android phones). Nintendo Switch has gotten a decent amount of ports despite being less powerful than many PCs and consoles. It also supports Vulkan.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @07:43PM (1 child)
An analogous question to what you asked is, "why is it so hard to translate 'King Lear' into Chinese, they are all just words, right?"
Yes, they are all bits. However, there are fundamental architecture differences (notably DirectX). This is not correct, but imagine Windows represents the number one as "00001" and Linux represents the number one as "10001". Both are self-consistent, but it's complicated to translate between the two. You can emulate those differences with a translation layer (such as what WINE does), but that is imperfect, and it it adds computational overhead and slowness.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @08:02PM
Linux are the Irish, and Windows are the Scottish; both can read King Lear just fine.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday August 16 2018, @08:26PM (4 children)
> Actually, why is it so difficult to get Windows stuff running on Linux? It's all just bits, right? Is it a legal issue? Is it a philosophical issue?
Because the Windows system API is:
1. proprietary
2. an insane clusterfuck
3. changes regularly
A lot of things do run on Linux via Wine. Games are especially bad because they have a habit of relying on the obscure corner cases in the WIndows API, either for performance reasons or because game development happens on a tight schedule where developers can't afford to write non-buggy, correct code.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 16 2018, @08:33PM
> 3. changes regularly
That is why Windows must get tested frequently.
But really, it would be better to just avoid them and be safe with a stable OS.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @08:33PM
Maybe Linux would necessarily trail behind new developments in the API by, say, a year, but it should be possible to keep up. It must be the case that there is no money in it; indeed, Linux developers have their own game already: Writing file system drivers. etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @11:27PM
Like systemd, apart from (1) in theory
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @12:51PM
be sued by microsoft ...
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday August 16 2018, @08:57PM
DirectX. Marketshare. Games are distributed in binary form and one binary can work on multiple versions of Windows. How many Linux distros will the same binary run on? Maybe game devs haven't figured out how to use appimage.
There's also the fact that Steam is a piece of crap which some Windows users wouldn't even put up with, let alone Linux users.
(Score: 3, Informative) by forkazoo on Friday August 17 2018, @04:38AM
SteamOS was never really about Linux. It was about hurting the Windows Store. Valve saw the Store as a threat to Steam, so they suddenly got Linux religion. Except that they didn't really have a lot of internal experience with Linux. They just sort of assumed that if they started pushing Linux, they were big enough that everybody would adopt it with them. That ego didn't turn out to be justified. It basically surprised them to learn that there was a large community of people who already loved Linux, like web serving, VFX, etc., that were already quite happy with it and didn't need anything from Valve. And they were equally surprised to learn that the community of people who didn't care about Linux were quite happy with Windows or Mac and also didn't really need anything from Valve. Which left Valve with a lot of press releases, and a lot of people standing around wondering what problems Valve was actually going to be solving.
You saw a bunch of talks at Gamedev conferences from Valve developers who had spent their whole career writing code for Windows about how to write code for Linux, as if they thought they had some sort of insight. They mainly just had ego, and a massively inflated sense of self importance. And at the end of the day, Valve didn't really like anything about Linux, per se. It was never a technical solution for them. It was a business decision to fight Microsoft and Windows 10. Linux just wasn't under the control of a direct competitor. But it wasn't as if XFS made games more fun, or game engines needed to be able to ship dynamically loadable kernel modules, or the game industry was crying out for a platform with better symlink support than WinNT's festering rotbrained implementation. No unique Linux feature was ever really at play in the strategy -- just the general unfeature of not being a Microsoft thing. And merely not being one other specific thing isn't actually a specific reason to use Linux.
As for why it's hard to run Windows apps on Linux... Look at Wine. You can read the bug tracker to see the difficulties they have implementing the Win32 related API's. It's all open source, so none of that is secret if you want to dig around for a bit. There's not really that much demand among Linux users for native binformat support for .exe's in the kernel. Linux users mainly run Linux software, which is why they use Linux. Adding more support for Windows software doesn't make Linux better at being Linux - it just makes it more like Windows. But there's already an OS that's really good at being Windows. Namely, Windows. So if I really need to run Windows software, I'll probably just use that.