Steam Client for FreeBSD

[StrikerASD]

As FreeBSD is a system which is very good for games (runs the same or even better than on linux) i wish Valve could consider to port Steam for FreeBSD. It will be worth it :)

[dirrtymartini]

引用自 StrikerASD：

That's correct... But what about NVIDIA drivers on freebsd? Are they open source? Because they are available in ports. Either way, in order to add Steam to FreeBSD, there need to be changes in BSD licence, yes? Well... it's not good, because despiting that FreeBSD is open source System it should have some other ports three with different kind of licence to be chosed in installation process. You know, you want to install FreeBSD and want have access to let's say... Binary installers or something like that, you need to accept special licence where you are installing FreeBSD. I think it's duable, what do you think?

It's possible but Valve would have to tread carefully. Would be interesting to watch. It only takes one legal loophole to potentially expose their Steam Client to some shady development house.

I can't speak about the Nvidia drivers in FreeBSD since I don't use FreeBSD anymore.

[dirrtymartini]

引用自 stqism：

I'm a bit late to the party...

(snip silly FreeBSD rant)

Yet Netcraft keeps burying FreeBSD every single year. Lemme think. Am I going to rely upon an operating system used by hundreds of millions of users around the world? Or trust a very small but very vocal minority who still can't deliver a working desktop in a single install?

And if the Linux compat stuff in FreeBSD was so good, why aren't you running the Linux Steam client right now?

[dirrtymartini]

引用自 Gowcaizer：

Lets face it. Steam has so much clout they could create an entirely new Operating System and get enough users to make it a viable option. The whole, Linux has more users argument is moot in that light.

You're joking right? Six million Steam users versus Six hundred million Linux users? They aren't even in the same universe. I typed that as an 8yr Steam member who really, REALLY likes Steam, Valve and everything they do.

Even so, if your point was valid, Valve would have created their own OS. They didn't.

[noided]

gsharp, I think you should stop talking about licensing and how Valve should tread carefully. If you've ever read the BSD license and it's variations (4-clause, 3-clause, FreeBSD, etc) you'd know how permissive the license is. The license is... what 2-3 paragraphs versus the GPL's novel? It's extremely easy to understand. Valve does not need to release ANY source code on Linux or BSD so long they write all their own code and keep everything proprietary. Which is what they are doing and will continue to do.

Having an application on Linux or BSD does not mean you're forced to be open source.
To the point of the original post, as much as I would love to see BSD support from Valve I think they should worry more about Linux right now. Besides all that BSD has a lot of catching up to do still in terms of compatibility and support of modern hardware not to mention the support of the community. Don't expect a BSD port any time soon, let's just hope that Linux support won't be dropped any time soon.

[wolfspam]

引用自 dirrtygsharp：

Even so, if your point was valid, Valve would have created their own OS. They didn't.

Yes, because creating an Operating System is that easy. I mean, it's not like I can count on my fingers how many OS are in active development.

引用自 dirrtygsharp：

And if the Linux compat stuff in FreeBSD was so good, why aren't you running the Linux Steam client right now?

The Linux emulation (yes it's a kind of emulation so says the person who developed it on his doctorate thesis) is not even close to being good enough run steam. It does run source DS quite well though, and generally I prefer it over wine.


On topic, the question becomes how viable it would be to develop steam for BSD, as we are really the minority: people who run exclusively FreeBSD on their desktop/laptop and want to play steam games. Hell, I myself only went full FreeBSD (stopped dual-booting) when I was too old care about new game releases. Even now, though, I play most steam games on a virtual machine and the old ones run flawlessly in wine.

All this talk about licenses though is just silly: as always we get kids discussing business models and licensing issues without even understanding what those things are. The reality is that we can only show that we would pay for a service like this on our favorite OS. They obviously researched this and found Ubuntu to be the main target and GNU/Linux in general to be their target for a possible dedicated free gaming OS.

All in all, the news of the native steam client for Linux as a bad sign for FreeBSD gamers, as developers will have no more incentive to make the software play nice with wine and, we forget but "FreeBSD is not Linux" means more than a few idiosyncrasies, it means porting between the two can be hard work.

[dirrtymartini]

引用自 wolfspam：

(snip useless details)

This thread was dead and buried for a month now. Quit reviving dead threads.

[Mivo]

引用自 dirrtygsharp：

This thread was dead and buried for a month now. Quit reviving dead threads.

Why is that bad? This was a good debate and I think sticking to existing threads is better than starting new ones all the time. This is a forum, not Twitter.

[wolfspam]

引用自 dirrtygsharp：

引用自 wolfspam：

(snip useless details)

This thread was dead and buried for a month now. Quit reviving dead threads.

That was the first google search result and I just assumed it was still relevant.

引用自 Mivo：

引用自 dirrtygsharp：

This thread was dead and buried for a month now. Quit reviving dead threads.

Why is that bad? This was a good debate and I think sticking to existing threads is better than starting new ones all the time. This is a forum, not Twitter.

I'm sure he's just an impartial observer and that has nothing to do with his strong opinions on the subject. It really is bad form to revive such threads, even though this one was not stale for that long. In the end I'm used to discussions that lasting a little longer between replies, I apologize.

[ryao]

引用自 dirrtygsharp：

Would the Steam Client have to adhere to the BSD license? If so, that is probably a deal-breaker.

No.

引用自 kehcorpz：

The amount of people running it as a desktop client is beyond ridiculously small. I mean I ran it years ago to host a mail server and that's about it. And their "ports" system is way behind what linux distros are doing with their repositories. It wouldn't be worth the resources.

I have no idea how to respond to your desktop client argument because we are talking about operating systems, not clients. The number of people running the steam desktop client is rather large.

With that said, both Linux and Mac OS X have small marketshare in comparison to Windows, but that has not stopped Valve from supporting them. You might dislike BSD ports in comparison to Linux package managers, but neither Mac OS X nor Windows have package managers, there are alternatives available and BSD ports are entirely optional. For instance, Gentoo FreeBSD offers Gentoo's package manager.

Additionally, FreeBSD and Linux tend to share many userland components. Supporting both should require minimal effort on Valve's part. While Valve is at it, support for Solaris/Illumos would also be nice.

引用自 stqism：

I'm a bit late to the party... silly kids, bsd boasts a faster filesystem, faster scheduling, faster networking, a rock hard kernel featuring code from the very first unics release, and an integrated development environment with ports, resulting in many times more possible applications than Linux. Did I mention that it can natively run Linux binaries too?

This is not true. BSD 4.4-Lite removed all original UNIX code.

引用自 dirrtygsharp：

引用自 Gowcaizer：

Lets face it. Steam has so much clout they could create an entirely new Operating System and get enough users to make it a viable option. The whole, Linux has more users argument is moot in that light.

You're joking right? Six million Steam users versus Six hundred million Linux users? They aren't even in the same universe. I typed that as an 8yr Steam member who really, REALLY likes Steam, Valve and everything they do.

Even so, if your point was valid, Valve would have created their own OS. They didn't.

I doubt that there are six million Linux users, much less six hundred million.

With that said, Valve could always base their Steambox on FreeBSD rather than Linux, like Netflix did with its Content Delivery Network. It would not be difficult.

引用自 wolfspam：

引用自 dirrtygsharp：

Even so, if your point was valid, Valve would have created their own OS. They didn't.

Yes, because creating an Operating System is that easy. I mean, it's not like I can count on my fingers how many OS are in active development.

引用自 dirrtygsharp：

And if the Linux compat stuff in FreeBSD was so good, why aren't you running the Linux Steam client right now?

The Linux emulation (yes it's a kind of emulation so says the person who developed it on his doctorate thesis) is not even close to being good enough run steam. It does run source DS quite well though, and generally I prefer it over wine.


On topic, the question becomes how viable it would be to develop steam for BSD, as we are really the minority: people who run exclusively FreeBSD on their desktop/laptop and want to play steam games. Hell, I myself only went full FreeBSD (stopped dual-booting) when I was too old care about new game releases. Even now, though, I play most steam games on a virtual machine and the old ones run flawlessly in wine.

All this talk about licenses though is just silly: as always we get kids discussing business models and licensing issues without even understanding what those things are. The reality is that we can only show that we would pay for a service like this on our favorite OS. They obviously researched this and found Ubuntu to be the main target and GNU/Linux in general to be their target for a possible dedicated free gaming OS.

All in all, the news of the native steam client for Linux as a bad sign for FreeBSD gamers, as developers will have no more incentive to make the software play nice with wine and, we forget but "FreeBSD is not Linux" means more than a few idiosyncrasies, it means porting between the two can be hard work.

The Linux emulation could be improved. However, FreeBSD is volunteer based and the only one interested in working on Linux emulation is probably happy with it as is.

With that said, improving the Linux emulation to support Steam on FreeBSD should be preferable to reliance on Wine. We just need developers to volunteer to work on it.

[Τhe Rolling Cheese Wheel]

引用自 dirrtygsharp：

You're joking right? Six million Steam users versus Six hundred million Linux users? They aren't even in the same universe. I typed that as an 8yr Steam member who really, REALLY likes Steam, Valve and everything they do.

Even so, if your point was valid, Valve would have created their own OS. They didn't.

I really do hope that 600 mil is a typo..

Seeing how only about 15% of people on planet earth has a computer (very very generous percentage, only includes laptops and desktops) Your number would imply over half of these people are using linux...

Source: google "https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2153rank.html"

around 1 billion internet users, but I'm gonna be pessimistic and say that not everyone who uses the internet actually owns a computer. Public computers and game stations everywhere :D!

[TeknoTroll]

I think with more and more popularity of linux as a gaming platform, freebsd's best shot would be to improve the linuxulator on the platform. I think freebsd has a lot of room to grow. I just wonder, because mac os x has a lot of utilities borrowed from freebsd wouldn't that cut half the work for mac developers?

[76561198086014943]

Close Steam instead, keep it out of freeBSD, it was a mistake to bring it to Linux as well.

go outside instead... too much moving pointless pixels on a screen...

[OmegaOne]

To all those who say that FreeBSD would fall behind Linux when it comes to performance, you should read these benchmarking results: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?item=linux_games_bsd&page=article
It's from September 2011, but not just Linux developed since then, also FreeBSD did. You can clearly see that FreeBSD did even outperform Linux on OpenGL tests with Linux binaries which can be used through the Linux compatibility layer. Even though I think FreeBSD is the system which is definitely better for gaming, I can understand why STEAM decided not to support it (yet?). Just few people use it as an operating system for desktop-computers (I'm one of them) compared to Linux. However, I didn't lose my hope yet and dream of STEAM on FreeBSD :)

[Jonny Sandwich]

OK, this idea has gone a bit off the rails and turned into a slanging match. I know, I was guilty of that too.

But we need to get it back on track. I outlined above the steps that would be needed to get Steam on FreeBSD, we just need to find someone to do it. I will try and find the time, but it's a little tight at the minute.

Otherwise, we could look at putting forward a GSoC project, or funding the work in some other way?

[OmegaOne]

Would be great... I also think it's not too much work which would have to be done. So we should be able to find a way to initiate a project somehow to get Steam running on FreeBSD. :)