Starting Steam without a desktop enviroment

[Nerv]

Currently games take quiet a performance hit when using Unity (the default DE, not the engine). This will probably be improved/fixed in the next couple of releases, now that it's a priority for Canonical, but the fact remains that Ubuntu 12.04 will be around for quiet a while and some resources will allways be lost to the DE.

So it would be really cool if Steam could start without a distinct Desktop enviroment. This could be handled similar to XBMC: After you install XBMC you can run it like any other program, but you can also select it at login, to only start XBMC (whithout Unity).

Experienced users could ofcourse implement this themselfs (similar to the process described here: http://vexfloss.blogspot.de/2012/09/why-and-how-i-use-single-terminal.html). But it would be great if it was alredy implemented by default.

[ryannathans]

When answering the survey, I came to the 'desktop environment' question. I've multiple installed I just left it with unity. Hope they don't penalize me :P

[Artem]

I think that Steam's Big Picture mode is very close to your offer. Let us hope that Valve will make Big Picture available for Linux and it will act like XBMC.

[Shigutso]

It's hard to image a software the depends and won't run if you don't have Unity installed.
You can run GNOME apps in KDE, and vice-versa. Why not run Steam for Linux in Fluxbox? :-)

[blackout24]

Set your .xinitrc to "exec steam" and boot into runlevel 3. Type "strartx". Voila now you have a single program running on a bare X Server with nothing else.

[Nerv]

Originally posted by Artem:

I think that Steam's Big Picture mode is very close to your offer. Let us hope that Valve will make Big Picture available for Linux and it will act like XBMC.

Yes this would be ideal for Big picture mode. But it would also be great for fullscreen Steam in desktop mode (I prefer mouse navigation to controler imput)

Originally posted by t.jp:

Set your .xinitrc to "exec steam" and boot into runlevel 3. Type "strartx". Voila now you have a single program running on a bare X Server with nothing else.

Thats kind of what I meant. I was just suggesting they implement this by default, so you have the option to select this in LightDM.

[SinSchism]

I hope to eventually present Valve with a modified steam client that has the "close" buttons removed and has the web browser brought to the top (next to the "News" button for example).

Under steam, the quit option would be a log-off/shutdown prompt. I'd have to eventually integrate a CLI for updates, but it'd make a pure steam/linux distro.

[somoiogul]

Well XBMC uses X libraries to do some barebones window management for the fullscreen xbmc window. This could actually improve performance with no composition because games would run fullscreen anyway.

Though this brings in the problem that steam must manage the XDG session on its own (all the autostart stuff, network manager, etc). And that kind of integration is really difficult to achieve, because we do not realize that this means asking for a Steam DE which is easy with XBMC because it is an open set of libraries and 3rd party frontends to such utilities are easily coded(ex. NetworkManager frontend, etc).