9 years ago
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Valve hits a Linux landmark—1,500 games available on Steam
A few months after Valve officially launched Steam for Linux in 2013, Gabe Newell gave his LinuxCon keynote crowd a bit of music for their ears. "It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming," the Valve head-man said. "It's sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope."
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It's a good start, but there's still a lot of work to go. However, it would be nice if this push by Valve gets the ball rolling for other parts of the software ecosystem.
I've been working with Windows and Linux for a while now, and there's a huge difference in the amount of software available on each platform. While Linux boasts a lot of free and open source software, Windows reigns supreme when it comes to "professional" programs. Microsoft Office, the suite familiar to most people doing word processing, isn't on Linux. The Adobe ecosystem, full of programs that are the tools to get many tasks, such as video and photo processing, isn't available on Linux. While there's software that is designed as alternatives to many Windows and Mac only programs, they lack the backing of a large team - as well as many of the features and design aspects that many "AAA" programs feature.
Maybe the widespread adoption of Linux on Steam will be used as an example that there's people on Linux. Hopefully, switching from Windows to Linux will not see a loss of popular products. It sure would be nice.