Steam Client for FreeBSD :: Suggestions / Ideas

StrikerASD 2013 年 1 月 5 日下午 4:05

I've already tested many games on this operating system, i even consider a migration from Linux, but a few tests need to be passed before i make such step. Nevertheless support for NVidia and Intel graphic cards is well supported. In FreeBSD 10 maybe even KMS support for ATI graphic cards. What do you think of it? Is it steam ready for FreeBSD? In my opinion it is...

#1

dirrtymartini 2013 年 1 月 5 日下午 4:09

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

#2

krystianpants 2013 年 1 月 5 日下午 4:58

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.

#3

StrikerASD 2013 年 1 月 5 日下午 11:35

Kehcorpz, i see that you are not aware of FreeBSD possibilities. It's a fact, that FBSD is not so advanced system as Linux, but time has changed it. I don't use FreeBSD for some small purposes. I've tested it in a numerous ways including hosting a http/ftp server, multimedia testing and now it's time for test it with games. And it has bigger pottential than Linux for over a years now. I am not BSD fanboy, i'm just consider the facts. BSD architecture is far better than linux and because of that this system performs better. And the fact, that you are not using FreeBSD as a system to work with, it doesn't mean that very small ammount of people are using it. I don't know how it is with BSD license, but it should be considered. Linux is the most popular open source system in the whole world, but it is not fastest and one alone deserving for such treating to have steam platform available. And i'm not offending no one.

#4

Mivo 2013 年 1 月 6 日上午 12:44

FreeBSD has even worse support for modern hardware, from a performance perspective. It is super stable, supports ancient hardware extremely well and has a cute mascot, but it is totally niché and not actually intended for the desktop.

I ran FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) on a desktop, back in 2002-06'ish, and yes, I loved it, still follow its development (just don't have a machine for it and less time for tinkering), but from a gamer's perspective it is less suitable than Linux. Even less suitable, really. I would agree that BSD is better than Linux and that both are better than Windows, but that's like VHS and Betamaxx. Popularity decides, in the end, what is really viable (driver support).

#5

krystianpants 2013 年 1 月 6 日上午 6:01

Striker, you're fighting a losing battle. The freebsd architecture will not provide any noticeable performance gains in games. The UFS filesystem may help load games a bit quicker, but not noticeable to the human perspective. The CPU scheduler may provide more efficient scheduling to the process, but once again not noticeable to the human perspective. Keep in mind that the performance gains in linux are not noticeable either, it simply looks good on a benchmark to have 3 higher fps. But anything over 60 or 120, depending on your monitor, will not even be seen, so it's useless. The benchmarks done by valve were just plain brute force FPS. This is not an accurate way to measure performance, these days you have many factors to consider like latency and other measurements. Actually, arstechnica did a good piece on measuring all the different factors in a game that actually do matter to the person. Anyways, I'll bet my left testicle it won't happen.

#6

ReBoot 2013 年 1 月 6 日上午 6:26

Ow boy, can't the people who have chosen to be a totally unimportant minority stop asking being catered for and just stop being a minority? BSD is even way more unimportant than Linux and driver support from hardware vendors is essentially non-existant (at least where it counts in this context).
Stop being that kid no one wants to play with and just play with the rest of the world. Install Linux or get Windows for 30 bucks, viola, your gaming machine.

#7

StrikerASD 2013 年 1 月 6 日下午 1:16

I've already installed Ubuntu distro for Steam. And you all right, it's a loose battle. But in near, or far future this will change. BSD is not so far behind as it was 5 years ago. But still, it is some winning, because Ubuntu is free and i like it for being so.

#8

Jonny Sandwich 2013 年 1 月 18 日上午 4:14

Some people in this thread are suffering from a lack of clue.

FreeBSD has excellent support for Nvidia cards, as Nvidia release native drivers: http://www.nvidia.com/object/freebsd-x64-310.19-driver.html

Most people with FreeBSD who want good HW acceleration choose Nvidia accordingly. But since you don't use FreeBSD, you don't have to worry about this but you can rest-assured that we have good HW support and that our HW acceleration is a good as on any other platform.

You will see neither meaningful performance gains, nor meaningful performance losses, in using FreeBSD in a desktop environment in comparison to Linux. This is a red-herring. Performance is not the reason that Steam should be made to work on FreeBSD. The reason is that innovation is good, and by supporting more platforms you might bring in more innovation and innovative people.

The differences between FreeBSD and Linux, and in fact Linux and any other Unix, are very small compared to the differences between Linux and Windows. The major piece of work re Steam occurred in this transition. Going to additional Unices should not require much further incremental effort as all of the libraries that steam and related games use, compile for FreeBSD.

But perhaps nobody can be bothered with the effort of a native port, and that's fine. FreeBSD has a Linux ABI, which means it can run Linux binaries. This isn't emulation: the ABI maps Linux kernel syscalls to FreeBSD kernel syscalls, so it's just a thin wrapper, and no performance is lost. Linux binaries need to load Linux libraries, which is fine, because all the libraries that steam needs can be freely copied from any Linux installation upon which steam works. A FreeBSD port would require someone to work out which libraries need copying as part of the install, and then setup a few scripts.

BTW, the ports system of the BSDs is actually ahead of every Linux distro I can think of. Tell me how you'd install a program with custom compilation flags, and handle all dependencies automatically in Ubuntu? You wouldn't, you'd use apt or synaptic and accept what you are given, or do it all manually. Of course, you might not care about this, but to say the ports system is behind Linux is a ridiculously un-informed statement.

While I'm at it, anyone that claims that FreeBSD is only for the server environment, is lacking logical reasoning. The ULE scheduler was designed with one goal being to improve interactivity: http://www.usenix.org/event/bsdcon03/tech/full_papers/roberson/roberson.pdf. Precisely what do you think an interactive task is? Ask yourself whether you think a game is an interactive task...

So before you write off an entire community out of ignorance, you should do some research.

最后由 Jonny Sandwich 编辑于; 2013 年 1 月 18 日上午 4:24

#9

krystianpants 2013 年 1 月 18 日上午 5:52

Well Johnny, you re-iterated what I said minus the ports argument. While I haven't been up to date with ports for ages because I haven't used it in years, it lacked the applications that were available on linux at the time. My guess is with a smaller community you will always have less applications. It wasn't about ports being less advanced and less features, simply applications available. Now, I never said it can't be used as a Desktop, I simply said most people set it up as a server environment to play around. Once again this was a few years back so if it has a huge Desktop user following then that's fine, but I haven't seen much indication of that in the mainstream. You hear about linux all the time in the mainstream.

#10

StrikerASD 2013 年 1 月 18 日下午 3:53

Yes, Linux is hot now and allways has been. But FreeBSD grows in power. It IS ready for games too. The interest in this particular system is growing too, anyone refer to http://freebsd.org for information what FBSD can support by now and what features does it have. I want to have a choice of software on any open source system. I don't use only Ubuntu distro, i use it because for now i simply have to. Is there a way to install DEB packages on FreeBSD? If it is and it is 100% working on 64-bit BSD i will change Ubuntu for FreeBSD. I have reGen2 Linux distro (it's a fork of gentoo) based on ports. It is very advanced in a way of compiling ports and i think that it is as good as FreeBSD management system. So, it will be nice if Wine 64-bit will be easily installed from ports without combining. And i think that skype and TeamSpeak should be in FreeBSD ports collection too.

#11

dirrtymartini 2013 年 1 月 18 日下午 4:24

引用自 StrikerASD：
Yes, Linux is hot now and allways has been. But FreeBSD grows in power. It IS ready for games too. The interest in this particular system is growing too, anyone refer to http://freebsd.org for information what FBSD can support by now and what features does it have. I want to have a choice of software on any open source system. I don't use only Ubuntu distro, i use it because for now i simply have to. Is there a way to install DEB packages on FreeBSD? If it is and it is 100% working on 64-bit BSD i will change Ubuntu for FreeBSD. I have reGen2 Linux distro (it's a fork of gentoo) based on ports. It is very advanced in a way of compiling ports and i think that it is as good as FreeBSD management system. So, it will be nice if Wine 64-bit will be easily installed from ports without combining. And i think that skype and TeamSpeak should be in FreeBSD ports collection too.

You can argue the technical merits until you're blue in the face...but for the Steam Cllient to be released under the BSD license means ANYBODY can reuse the Steam Client code. THAT means you will never, ever see a Steam Client in FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or NetBSD. For Valve to open up their code and allow EVERYBODY to not only see it but to reuse it freely is just absurd.

#12

StrikerASD 2013 年 1 月 19 日上午 1:10

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?

#13

Gowcaizer 2013 年 1 月 19 日上午 11:07

"The BSD License allows proprietary use and allows the software released under the license to be incorporated into proprietary products. Works based on the material may be released under a proprietary license or as closed source software."

Little more explanation on BSD vs GPL
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html

Furthermore, I figured someone at Valve might realize the potential of having an Operating System with a hardware ABI versus the current annoying trend of monolithic kernel that breaks drivers.

A self contained program that works in a system versus a program with dependencies that can be broken with lack of hardware ABI or kernel update.

Don't just take my word for it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh-cnaJoGCw

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.

#14

🦅c̵̡̤̞̥̈͒̒́̏͝͠oup 2013 年 2 月 5 日上午 12:49

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?

#15

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