* Intel’s Ben Widawsky, who works on Intel’s Linux graphics driver efforts, says that “Broadwell graphics bring some of the biggest changes we’ve seen on the execution and memory management side of the GPU… [the changes] dwarf any other silicon iteration during my tenure, and certainly can compete with the likes of the gen3->gen4 changes.”*

Pretty the much the only reason I'm putting off buying a laptop right now.

[1] http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/12/30/1550239/intel-releas... [2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_bro...

I actually installed steam yesterday (for the first time, I'm not a gamer) to see the available games for Linux.

I was pleasantly surprised that there were a few that looked okay. So I bought a couple. None worked -- mysterious launch errors, etc. No luck after a couple hours of debugging.

DISAPPOINTED!

I seriously question how many people actually run on Linux vs. login and browse the store? That said, I'm sure the experience will improve and it's great to see Linux as a growing platform for games!

1) Missing libraries: Almost always 32-bit/64-bit problems.

2) Missing executable: this is usually fixed sooner or later.

3) Graphics problems: This shouldn't be a problem on NVIDIA systems, and the Intel Mesa drivers are pretty good these days, but it still can occur.

I wouldn't bother running Steam on a non-valve distro, it just doesn't seem practical given the options available (Win/OSX/SteamOS).

Full disclosure: I use Steam on OSX & inside a Windows VM. My biggest peeve is that Valve restricts the Steam client to a single runtime (meaning: I can't run steam on OSX & Windows at the same time "This account is logged in elsewhere"). So I'm always switching between the two, which causes a bit of user fatigue. Come on, just allow unlimited instances/logins from the same IP. I digress.

Have Steam installed and want to logon automatically so you don't have to enter your password everytime? Great, just tick the appropriate checkbox.

Works great for me, but when my brother uses the PC with his own Windows account, you already know what happens when he tries to start Steam and wants to play using his Steam acount. Correct, he gets auto logged in into my Steam Account. Because as far as Valve is concerned, 1 PC == 1 Steam Install == 1 Steam User.

Granted, Windows wasn't always "multi user" but I think it has been for quite some time now ;) Seeing this and looking into their Linux efforts and their SteamOS for the "Family" and "Living Room" I really see some problems for them unless they finally change this behavior. In a family and in a living room you are bound to have multiple users with Multiple Steam Accounts and especially on a TV, I bet many people would like to log in automatically instead of having to log in manually using a controller to type out the password.

I'm very capable of debugging library and video driver problems. In this case, it seemed to be actual game-internal issues from a recent update. The specific game was built on the Unity platform, and they seemed to have resolved the issues for Mac and Windows but not yet Linux. I'm not annoyed at Steam or the developer (it's reasonable that Linux issues aren't their priority if it's only a tiny portion of users).

My intent was not to say that Steam on Linux is generally broken, just to share my own mildly-amusing experience. :)

On a positive note -- after the initial frustration, I eventually bought Counterstrike and it worked great. I think it's amazing that Steam supports Linux at all, so I wasn't really upset when things didn't work perfectly. I was happy to risk throwing good money after bad, I'm sure I'll be able to play those other games some day.

I had the same experience on Windows and OS X. I feel like playing russian roulette when buying games on steam. Some games run flawlessly and some won't even start.

I guess the problem lies rather with games themselves (short deadlines, product must ship before christmas, a gazillion of possible hardware configs, no time to test) than with steam.

I would expect games wouldn't run as easily on a different distro or on a heavily customized Ubuntu.

The Linux ecosystem is HUGE. I suppose that's why they are making SteamOS, so they can focus on one smaller part of this large landscape.

Obviously in context you didn't literally mean 99.9%

So far I've installed and played Half Life, Half Life 2, Amnesia and Don't Starve with zero problems.

As a data point: I wouldn't have bought anything during the sale, had they not had so many games that work with Linux. I reboot into Windows so rarely that it seems like an ordeal to do just for a game. Likewise, I'm considering canceling my Netflix account because I haven't used it in two or three months...don't want to reboot, and Amazon Prime videos work fine under Linux.

http://fds-team.de/cms/pipelight-installation.html

For a personal anecdote: I've been a gamer my entire life, but I didn't start dual-booting (or using two systems) until I decided to get serious with programming and hacking.

I bought a dedicated laptop for programming. I have a dedicated box for gaming and one for media. With steam and pipelight it's the beginning of the end for my windows machines. I figure it's going to be gaming, as ever, that will keep the life support on my windows machine going, but it will be relegated to living in the utility room with my htpc if/when the Steam Machine streaming is proven.

no, 1.85% of the user base tried Steam on Linux. we don't know what portion of those adopted it as their primary platform to use Steam.

I think the shift will happen as people upgrade their computers, or have to reinstall their OS because of malware. I wonder what percentage of these gamers are using a pirated version of Windows, because my anecdotal experience is that anyone who's built a computer has pirated a copy of Windows. When building a computer on a budget, spending an extra $100 on your video card is more ideal than on the OS. So going legitimate and free would be a very attractive option for gamers.

It's already better than the windows desktop (xubuntu anyway, not unity, however). The barriers to uptake are no longer technical and haven't been for some years. It's all market + legal now.

When people buy something in a PC form factor they expect it to run windows. Linux on the desktop will not happen in a traditional desktop form factor because people don't want it and/or don't see the point. The one possible exception are chromebooks, because a laptop that only runs chrome and is therefore cheaper / lighter is something people see the point of.

Besides, linux as mass market OS has already happened, it's called android.

Not exactly how I remember it. They sold like wildfire initially when linux was first put on it. Then MS started giving away windows licenses because they freaked out over linux adoption overtaking them.

Somehow them and intel managed to prevent all the hardware manufacturers from improving their specs (each year they got progressively worse).

Something very fishy went on with that market.

Those were gimp versions (distributions) of Linux though. We haven't seen what happens with a properly supported straight-up Ubuntu or such full-featured desktop.

I think the linux desktop is farther away than ever. For the modern home user, some level of iOS or Android device will take the place of the "family" computer. Gamers and edge cases will exist, but in much smaller numbers. For a gamer, a Win8 OEM license is a trivial cost.

This is also why linux distros are stupid for chasing MS, instead of implementing their own vision and their own added value. Yet another WIMP, Open Office, Chromium box that serves no one but FOSS enthusiasts isn't going to win anyone over, especially when they can't use the Outlook/Exchange/IE/Office/Sharepoint stack they've become accustomed to. They've invented a poorer version of Windows when the demand for a Windows-like OS is at its lowest and people are shifting largely to mobile devices and keeping the big clunky desktop for work stuff that is deeply tied to proprietary MS or Adobe or Intuit software. For pros, Gnucash doesn't replace quickbooks. The gimp doesn't replace photoshop.

I'd love to see the business world standardize on some FOSS desktop solution, but that has so much politics and proprietary stuff attached to it, that its the same story we have today as we did when slashdot was telling us that Mandrake would take over windows in 2002 or 2003.

I guess you could call android a linux desktop, but that's quite a stretch. Its a linux kernel and a lot of mobile stuff Google came up with. That's a face-saving win, but in reality the linux desktop has been a massive fail in terms of adoptability and business penetration.

Disaggree. Unity is by far superior to the Windows Desktop. It's the most productive DE on a notebook I know (OS X included)

Besides, they're preinstalling 12.04, and upgrading to newer versions (in my experience) requires blacklisting kernel modules and setting kernel params.

And investing in re-schooling people to the new system and applications (Office suite would be probably the most notable one).

I recall spending ages trying to figure out where on the hard drive the file actually was without having to go via "Save As" (used to be File->Properties, and there it is). I'm sure it's trivially easy, but that interface change effectively made Office a whole new program to learn for me, with the predictable result that since I now had to relearn how to use it, it was on a level playing field with other tools - one of which I switched to. While I'm only one data point, making me relearn the interface meant Office suddenly had to actually compete again.

I also struggle to use any version of Windows beyond XP. I am a total cluster on Win 8 and it's quicker for me to find someone who can use it and get them to do it for me. The older I get, the more sure I becomes that there is no such thing as an intuitive interface; only convention.

The only true bugbear is porting Excel spreadsheets with VBA macros.

Everything else works pretty much the same anyhow. There's a minor learning curve for learning how to install software. That's about it.

Questions that came to my mind when I read your comment:

- Is the number of Vista/Linux users declining or increasing?

- How long is Steam for Vista/Linux available?

- How many games are available for Vista/Linux?

My expectation is that Vista's falling, while Linux rises in that statistic.

I'd say the fact that Steam is 'new' for Linux and relatively restricted/obscure for now (Ubuntu centric) the percentage isn't too bad.

Given that a lot of games (mostly the oh-so-expensive so-called AAA titles in my experience) are still Windows only or Windows/OS X only, I find the number still quite interesting and not really disappointing.

Vista (at least after the first service pack) is a solid OS. I still run it on my gaming PC (which also dual boots to Ubuntu) and I don't see any reason whatsoever to "upgrade" to W7 or W8.

For my wife, year of the Linux desktop was 2011.

Admittedly, I know how to use linux, so I might not notice problems that beginners do.

1) The drivers are still crappy. It's getting better but it still needs a lot of work. To simply manage multiple screens or to change resolution requires a restart! Nvidia is still better than AMD drivers.

2) Many games just get the Linux ports to a "working" condition and leave it at that. The games are really buggy. Valve games are top notch and deserve a lot of credit for creating a good experience. Thank you Valve.

3) Ubuntu needs to create a stable platform people can build on. Getting people to use LTS is good but it is still buggy (I have a lot of issues with Unity). Also, LTS software gets stale really quickly - there needs to be a solution for this (without PPAs).

For instance I run a shell script which does some xrandr commands to make my external desktop work on Xubuntu (same for debian).

2. Agreed

3. LTS means more stable and packages are more tested. Getting newer packages will mean testing less, meaning less stable packages.

I think I better solution is game developers using the newest stable version of dependencies on popular LTS's instead of using newer ones just because. Basically this requires communication between game devs and linux package maintainers for mesa/xorg/nvidia/fglrx.

To be fair, changing resolution does not always require a restart (but for my multi-monitor setup it often does). I can do most changes without a restart with Nvidia not AMD. Also, why should I change the resolution within the driver software...why not do it in the desktop like Windows or OSX.

I am really curious to know how Intel graphics drivers work on linux. Intel seems to be more linux friendly compared to AMD/Nvidia. Is the support a lot better?

They ‘just work’ – you can change the resolution/screen setup any way you like at any time, either using xrandr directly or one of the many frontends (each DE usually has one called ‘Display Settings’). Of course, the drawback is that these are still just Intel on-die GPUs; enough for Portal (2), CS etc., but even KSP runs rather slowly/only at low details.

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)

actually doesn't just work. I think it says "DP error slip" or something similar. That reminds me I need to submit a bug report ;)

That said, a lot of games on linux deal extremely poorly with multimon no matter what. They'll usually try to play over all screens with sometimes completely insane geometries.

Sadly I have to disagree with you at this point. I used the Intel GPU on my i7 2600k (HD3000) since 2011 on Arch Linux and at some point about six months ago they stopped working properly. On a Displayport connector I didn't get video at all @ boot sometimes, other than by messing with xrandr and unplugging the cable the only solution was to try booting again.

That wasn't too horrible. What was horrible was the fact that OpenGL didn't work at all really. Every time I used anything that utilized OpenGL I would get "GPU hung, stuck in render ring blah blah" in my dmesg every minute or so and indeed the whole GPU and hence the screens would freeze completely for 5 seconds or so. The machine became unusable. No more GPU accelerated mplayer after that (vaapi or any of the opengl options). Google Maps with WebGL was especially hilarious, I only had to drag with the mouse a bit to make the GPU hang.

I tolerated it for a few driver versions but no improvement happened so I bought a passively cooled ATI HD7750 and use that with the open source drivers. KDE compositing doesn't work @ OpenGL 3.1 at all (even though it should based on the driver's specs) and with compositing enabled accelerated video crashes my Xorg so I had to start using Openbox but at least the screen doesn't freeze for 5 seconds at a time all the time.

Really disappointed with Intel, the drivers were extremely solid in the past.

xrandr --output DFP6 --auto --left-of DFP7 --output DFP6 --scale 1.0001x1.0001

I only had this issue with AMD (not Nvidia).

In many ways it's a good thing, I get more code dOne this way.

TF2 isn't exactly a new game, but neither is my graphics card.

Is the AMD open source driver better than the closed source one?

For older hardware, the open source driver is getting competitive in terms of performance, and of course has the usual benefits of open source drivers.

I signed up for Steam and installed it on linux, downloaded TF2 only to find that it would not work with Wheezy/my integrated Intel GPU (I didn't investigate beyond some "you don't support GLX_WHATEVER message, it could have been either), then deleted the installation and haven't done anything with it since.

I presumably am not counted in this statistic since I did not do that within the past month, but I wonder how many other people like that are.

OS choice is a new aspect of the survey. The survey's original intention was to find things like 64bit penetration, number of cores, monitor resolution, internet connection type, and power of GPU. Most of it is automated.

We don't know Valve's exact methodology. I would hope they take a random sample of users who logged in the prior month and send them the survey. If you get selected a window will popup and ask you for permission to run the survey. If you say yes then it gathers your system data. They should only count you as a linux user if you were on linux when you took the survey.

This still leaves room for Valve to cheat in the selection process but otherwise the survey should be meaningful.

When I last checked, what was necessary is backporting a new verison of libgl1-mesa and possibly other things. Haven't had time to see if that fixes it yet though.

FWIW: I just decided to give it another shot and Half-Life seems to work great, surprisingly at 2560x1700.

Before the age of LCD my monitor had a whopping 1920x1440 res, many gamers opt into similarly high (16:9) resolutions now.

The higher pixel density isn't necessarily a plus, though. I find 1080p does just fine for everything and want my gpu to be able to render with AA, anisotropic filtering (check out Skyrim with and without AF), and other details. There is a constant tradeoffs in an industry where software demands much more than hardware can supply.

They make very serviceable gaming computers.

I'll try it out again whenever a new game is available or when there's a graphics driver update, but at the moment I'd much rather reboot into Windows than pull my hair out over how bad Linux is for gaming.

I reboot into Xubuntu when I want to game though, and don't have any problems. Well except when I hook up to an external monitor... but I have a hacky xrandr script for that. I don't things are quite "there" yet for most people to game on linux.

You mean Debian Linux which is what you're running. Ubuntu runs Steam just fine even with the Unity interface. I can Alt+Enter to go back to the Desktop and do stuff then get back into a game.

The thing that's always surprised me about Steam for Linux is how close the numbers are to those for Mac users.

Let's check my library... 82 titles total (not counting the junk/demo/beta entries), 18 of them have declared GNU/Linux support, that's 21%. Way more than I expected (before I started counting I thought it would be somewhere between 5 and 10%), but still almost none of the games I'd play (new ones I haven't played yet or old ones with personally high replay value).

So, it's still WINE and/or dual-boot for gaming. No changes here.

It wouldn't surprise me if there's a fundamental difference in thinking between linux vs other users. It's great that Steam's been providing Linux games, but that's just not enough for me.

That doesn't mean they are more inclined to buy Steam games of course, but it does seem to indicate they do not mind spending money on games.

There is definitely a need for a 'third' choice when it comes to desktop gaming platforms, hopefully Linux can take off sometime in the future.

Edit: Nvm found my answer

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Its optional. Also other people have mentioned that steam randomly chooses users to take part in the survey and then asks them if they want to participate.

I haven't actually tried any of the really tough games, like Half Life or whatever yet...but, I'm actually super excited about playing Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux on one of the new GPUs. So, we'll see soon enough.