[GRLUG] Steam for Linux

[John Wesorick]

I know there are some Linux gamers out there who will be interested. I got
my Steam for Linux beta invite on Friday, and actually got a couple hours
to play with it Yesterday. Did anyone else get their's yet? I was able to
play a bunch of my games previously purchased from Humble Bundles, and
bought a few extra games. Everything worked very well, except it handles
dependencies a little screwy, since it doesn't actually handle them while
installing. I am guessing that it just installs everything to your home
directory to avoid needing root privileges  Some games that had unmet
dependencies just failed and didn't open, but others would actually open up
the Software Center and try to install them.

I also had a slight issue with Big Picture mode where when browsing my
games, it would just automatically start the last game played. That may
have been because of my controller too. I'm using an Xbox controller, and a
cheap Chinese wireless adapter. Big Picture Mode is beta on Windows too, so
it may just be a bug too. At any rate, the default view works fine.

As for the actual games, once they were installed, they worked fairly
flawlessly. I ended up buying three extra games to show support. The
graphics were great, no slowdown, etc. I did have a slight issue when
viewing cut scenes in Serious Sam 3, where it would sort of clip the sound
on scene changes. It was slightly distracting, but it didn't really affect
the storytelling, so I am not sure if this is normal or not as I have
nothing to compare it to.

Overall I am very pleased with it so far. I'm happy to see Linux gain some
ground as a gaming platform. Also, although they only officially support
Ubuntu 12.04, I am running 12.10, and several people on the forums are
getting it to work with various other distros, i.e. Fedora, Arch, etc.
-John Wesorick
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