Re: [PLUG] Steam coming to Linux

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Sam Gleske <sam.mxracer@gmail.com> wrote:
> Not sure how many of you game or would like to game on Linux.  But recently
> I found out some exciting news that Steam will be available natively on the
> Linux platform by the end of 2012.  Here's the article.
>

Will be interesting to see how they implement this such that it
doesn't cause distro headaches.  Do they plan to just grab a directory
in /opt and keep everything contained in there (seems preferable to
having unmanaged files all over the place)?  Will they have clearly
defined dependencies, or statically link everything, or manage their
own dependencies in their little world off of root?

Of course I'd really prefer to see people just follow the distro model
- make their dependencies clear and the distros will package/ship
their stuff for them.  They could always use a license key or whatever
to separate payment from distribution.  Then again, I don't know how
many distros would buy in - Gentoo has a few commercial applications
pacakged but obviously not too many devs get into supporting this
class of software.  (The Gentoo approach is to tell the user to get
their hands on whatever file the vendor distributes, put it in their
distfiles cache, and then the package manager unpacks and installs it.
 We do the same thing for stuff like Java which is not downloadable
from a stable URL.)

It will be interesting to see if this takes off...

Rich
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