Gabe Newell Thinks Steam Can Help Mainstream Linux

[Epona]

When the head of one of the most influential businesses in PC gaming is afraid of what the next Windows will bring, you know that's when shit got real.

More worrying, the launch of Windows 8 will be the first without that antitrust suit hanging over Microsoft's head. (Congress brought the suit against Microsoft in 1998, and won).

From what I've heard via the rumor mill Microsoft is going back to integrating Internet Explorer directly into the Shell of Windows 8, and Newell would almost certainly know about this by now (if his company didn't have any Beta environment testing or demos by now, I'd be stunned).

Besides that, I'm curious as to what would spook Newell into so openly stepping on Microsoft's toes like this.
Love him or hate him (or Steam), Windows is essentially his core platform.

He didn't have any problems stepping on Sony's toes and then he went on to retract his words, as I recall.

Gabe is awesome but not infallible. I have yet to see any details on this matter, it's all been vague and as someone who has been using Windows 8, I just don't see what he's talking about.

 

[Ardure]

With everything going into touchscreen friendliness it will be nice to have an operating system that is designed for a PC... Windows 8 looks like hell... as in worse than Vista... Steam is big enough to make linux legitimate on a gaming level. I am tempted to try it when Steam makes it to Linux... not right away but when they have enough of the bugs worked out =)

 

[Atmos Duality]

He didn't have any problems stepping on Sony's toes and then he went on to retract his words, as I recall.

Gabe is awesome but not infallible. I have yet to see any details on this matter, it's all been vague and as someone who has been using Windows 8, I just don't see what he's talking about.

While he certainly isn't infallible, he has been in the gaming business for a long time and at more than just the administrative level.

From a business standpoint, it doesn't make much sense...Windows is by far his biggest platform, and Linux, while powerful (hell, I'm typing this up on alt-boot Knoppix install), does not really constitute a major portion of his potential user base.

I just want to know what it is he sees in Microsoft's next platform that has him suddenly blazing on about supporting Linux full-bore.

As for the point about Sony; I don't get it. Sony is pretty high on a list of companies I would avoid making a partnership with if I were touting open-source development, because they are purebred Proprietary dogs.
Why he backpedaled with them, I can only assume that negotiations broke open after he made his statements.

 

[Plazmatic]

Personally, I'd rather see Steam target Android, for the sake of the budget tablets and PC's, and media players and homebrew projects... and that Ouya console thing as well. Surely there are more people ready to support Android gaming, than Linux gaming!.

Android sucks for anything but phones. The whole Java targeting of Android is absolutely useless for gaming, not powerful enough for PCs or tablets, and is only really useful for quick application development for things that aren't very reliant on processor power.

First: Sorry, I was kind of mad yesterday, because of the amount of shit people say in this (and other threads here and on xda). Let me make myself clearer here.

Some tips:
1. Windows and Mac are both more user friendly than just using Linux, this is not a subjective opinion, this is objective fact. The only time in which this would not have been true is if you had been using linux, and ONLY linux all your life, in which case it still technically wouldn't be more user friendly because, again, approximately 99 percent of desktop users use Macs or PCs

No, they aren't. You can't define "user-friendliness" objectively. It's something that is highly subjective, because what fits one user and what's liked by him, can totally be hated by somebody else. Search the internet. There is no "universally super-OS". People complain about OSX' lack of customization and that you can't do x that you could in Windows. People complain about Windows when they saw feature y in some Linux OS or OSX all time.
Here are some facts about my personal opinion:
-I used Linux first 2,5 years ago.
-Before that I only used Windows.
-Ubuntu was the first distribution I've used.
-Overall it was more user-friendly for me, while not as polished as Windows. (Many small bugs, nothing fancy)
-After Gnome 3 was released I was like "WTF is this shit".
-However, after using it for a while Fedora 15 became my primary OS for this reasons:
1. It had all the "user-friendliness" Windows had (Aero-Snap,...)
2. It had better hardware support (no need to instally any driver besides video driver)
3. It had more user-friendliness than Windows (Multiple workspaces*, Dualpane and multiple tabs in the file explorer, faster startup/shutdown and login times, updates without rebooting all the time (got better under Windows in 7), perfectly integrating extensions for the UI and package-managing)

*This and this alone is a feature that adds SO MUCH to the user-friendliness of an OS. Chatting with friends while listening to music while browsing Wikipedia and having Office open to write the information down is not even remotely as comfortable under Windows.

Besides that there is Android, which in many points is more user-friendly that WP7 and even iOS.

2. you totally missed the point on this one, I was saying the he specifically wasn't a real linux user because of the obvious ways he tried to plug in mac crap.

Okay, sorry.

3. I contributed by getting rid of his usless mac praise, which worked as you can clearly see.

4. only said it once, don't understand the tired tone here.

Yeah, that was good, but why:

stop trying to plug in your pro Mac bile, and actually contribute to the thread, you hardly have the right to call your self an elitist for using an inferior platform, not because of the user friendly-ness or the pretty colors, but because of the platforms unwarranted price.

instead of:

this is no Mac thread.

Yours was kind of an overkill.

5. so far you've only been proving my point and telling me why I'm right, this is fairly confusing, though I guess since you completely miss-interpreted my post it makes sense.

Kind of, except point 1. What I'm trying to say is that user-friendliness cannot be defined objectively. I hope you get my point.

I see we mostly agree, but what I meant about the user friendly-ness on linux versus Macs and PCs isn't based on the Operating systems you can use with it (because that would make my point entirely mute since both MacOSs and Windows are based on Linux kerneling I believe) I was talking purely on what you your self said about using a kernel being obviously less user friendly than say, kernel + windows. And to be clear, I wasn't saying any operating system, based on actual function, was any better or more user friendly than another (windows certainly has a lot of downfalls that make me want to puke that neither macs nor any others have)