Valve, stop with this positivism. You can't be real. Internet says so.

Seriously though, it is nice to hear such optimism from Valve. I have never seen them rushing out to drink their own kool aid so testing of drivers must be quite promising.

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Quoting: maodzedunIndeed - the lack of AAA games on Linux is a big problem. And let us be honest - even the ports that are released are not exactly amazing. AMD performance aside, most ports, if not all simply provide sub par game performance compared to Windows. Even the better ports see 10 to 30, even 40% performance hit. That is a lot even in the best case scenario. Not to mention horrible releases like Dying Light.
The 1500 games sure can be used as a marketing trick by Valve but the sad truth is at this point Linux/SteamOS just has nothing to offer on the purely gaming front. In fact I'd go as far as say, that the Nvidia DX12 fiasco that will obviously stall DX12 game development with up to half an year, is probably the best thing to happen to Linux gaming this year. With the performance gains we've seen on Xbox One with Gears of War you can imagine the improvement on PC, thus adoption rate. Fortunately, for Linux games, it's unlikely we'll see any DX12 games/patches before Pascal cards.
In short - what appeal does a Steam Machine have at the moment? There is worse performance, a small library, lack of AAA games and Directx 12 is obviously way ahead of Vulcan at this point. And they're expensive. Like - very expensive. Not to mention the front runner of the litter cannot even upgrade its GPU (I'm looking at you Alienware). With things at their current state - console gamers will stick to consoles and PC games will just build something on their own and put Windows on it, just forcing it to boot in Big Picture mode.

So much complaining, so little facts.

Not to mention horrible releases like Dying Light.

Growing pains. Port was done by few guys with little time on their hands. They got their stuff together eventually. While not named WB game is still getting repaired 3 months after release.

Even the better ports see 10 to 30, even 40% performance hit.

Again, let's talk facts. Different cards have different performance. Classic recent Nvidia card like 760 GTX works reliably well, with good performance. Older cards and AMD is big issues vendors need to tackle.

In fact I'd go as far as say, that the Nvidia DX12 fiasco that will obviously stall DX12 game development with up to half an year, is probably the best thing to happen to Linux gaming this year.

Errr what. Seriously this is your argument for success or failure of DirectX12? First of all, DX12 is a buzz word, as Vulcan. For Windows to use low level APIs require seriously restructure how things are done on that platform. Due of how young Linux is to gaming, Vulcan will clearly give more benefits to Linux. There's also lack of pull to do DirectX12 ports - Windows 7 is still out there, Windows 8 is still out there. Vulcan will be available to all those platforms.

Directx 12 is obviously way ahead of Vulcan at this point

You know all major developers had access for Vulkan for all this time, don't you?

Seriously. Do some fact checking.

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Btw 355.11 or better is like bloating edge Nvidia binary driver. Some fancy compute shader stuff going on I will guess. Yeah, definitely won't run on anything else yet.

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Quoting: Leflmmh too bad that only NVIDIA is supported, would get that even if its a horror game and im afraid of horror games

It's not a horror game. It's space adventure action game in that matter with really good AI for main antagonist. Game doesn't rely on how much it uses jump scares. It's how unpredictable it is.

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How about organizing good and serious discussions about what's lacking in Linux gaming? How to make developers aware of help they can get from community? There are so many ways to look at this positively.

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Can we at least change a tone? Seriously, I understand skepticism, I really do, but this is getting very tiresome. Gaming on OS X sucks...yet people play games on that platform and don't complain much.

Can at least celebrate this achievement a bit?

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First, at this point I don't even think it was worth to ask and second, so few EA games I really care about.

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Quoting: kingofrodeoI've expressed my concerns previously here on GOL that it seems to me that Valve might not be very committed to their own Steam Machines (SM). Looks like they aren't advertising as much as they could. Like in the previous promo they were announcing a free Rocket League + Portal 2 when buying Steam hardware but in the pics there was no sign of SM. I don't know if they just don't want to promote a particular brand or something else.
Like Liam, I appreciate that Valve gave a little (but big) push to Linux gaming but could it be that this whole SM thing was just send a message to Microsoft?

Which SM Valve should pick to promote? How fair it would be to other vendors?

There's lot of questions how Valve will handle all SM launch, or how much marketing push it will give to it, but frankly it would be very welcome we could stop spin this fringe theories. Valve have done a lot to promote Steam Machines on their own site and client, they certainly don't shy away from it. Also consider first iteration to be certain trial balloon. Both Valve and vendors will evaluate SM feedback data along with sales numbers and will change their marketing accordingly.

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I don't know, I don't see how it really conflicts with SteamOS goals. Remember, Steam Machines are PC consoles. Workshop tools aren't really in that scope there. I really wouldn't jump to conclusions here. Some things are worth doing. Some things aren't. Porting Workshop Tools might be important for few people, but not really else.

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Blender, Inkscape and GIMP are certainly real alternatives for today's developer, especially those without lot of initial cash investment to spend on expensive software. As for GIMP it is certainly good for basic to intermediate work and only special filters is something it lacks (and there's lot of sub based image services to fill that niche). Blender is comparingly hard to other 3D editors, but it certainly make up with slew of features it has for it's cost (t.i. free). Also very active community and developers is something worth of gold. Said that, there's also lot of training available for it so it's clearly an option. And Inkscape this year released their big upgrade with list of features.

As for tools in general, it is really about how developers are willing to learn new things. If you combine your skills as coder and tool sets available for you on Linux you can create wonders without huge initial monetary investment. Biggest hurdle is various plugins and extensions used by commercial software to make development faster.

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