I had only been dual-booting Ubuntu for a couple years when Steam came along, so my experience is limited. I tried a few open source games that were in the software center, and those were one-click installs not unlike what you would do in Steam. Anything else I played would have been through Wine and PlayOnLinux, so not native.

Open source games were mostly in repos or came in various formats. Closed stuff was usually plain archives or .sh intallers. Or installers on DVD :)

How did you go about installing from DVD?

software for linux in disks was not existed in my experience. That is why for me Linux became a sane choice as a main OS only when I had fast enough internet.

I am using exclusively Linux since 2008 but between 2008 and 2013 I was not playing any commercial games. Only free software games, retro games with dosbox/scummvm and browser games.

free software you could usually install it easily from distro repositories or it could be useful if you needed the latest to compile it yourself. Ubuntu software center also included commercial software (I say this is extremely stupid). Commercial software could come in .deb (bad) .tgz (good) or various other installers or archives types.

I remember installing Doom 3 on linux using a mix of the installer from id's ftp and the CD in 2008. I also still own the DVD version of UT2004 with the Linux logo on the case and installer on disc. Such good memories.

Quoting: Avehicle7887I remember installing Doom 3 on linux using a mix of the installer from id's ftp and the CD in 2008. I also still own the DVD version of UT2004 with the Linux logo on the case and installer on disc. Such good memories.

I was going to say the UT games had installers on the disc, and Loki Software and LGP had Linux native games. I now own Myth II for Linux, which is still usable since the engine is open source and you can download a newer installer that reads the files off the discs.

But to answer the question; there were usually the Loki installer https://github.com/megastep/loki_setup that was used for installation.

Quoting: slaapliedjeBut to answer the question; there were usually the Loki installer https://github.com/megastep/loki_setup that was used for installation.

Yup, this. :)

Edit:

Some commits "20 years ago" :dizzy:

Where does the time go?

Quoting: DorritJust out of curiosity, how did one install native games before Steam? Did they usually come in .deb files or were things often more complicated?

There was really no consistency. Some came nicely packaged in a .deb file or the distro equivalent. Some had distro agnostic installers. Others had to be installed "by hand". And still others had to be compiled from source (only open source games, obviously). That was one of the things that a lot of developers pointed to as a reason for not supporting Linux, that there was no single governing body saying, "It must always be done this way."

Thanks for all the answers :)

everyone missed the part where you spend 3 weeks on the ubuntu forums trying to track down a dependency issue.

I started with Mandrake and RPM hell was for real that is why when I got highspeed internet I switched to Debian pretty much every dependency was in the repository just use synaptic or apt and get it. Ubuntu was pretty much the same no real dependency issues just easier to install. If Canonical gets bought up by somebody I may have to change distros depending on how they treat the OS like installing a bunch of spyware. but that seems to be a little ways away. I am thinking Solus, Manjaro, or Debian.