Journal Journal: Steam on Linux
I, for one, cannot wait to play Valve's games on Linux.
I, for one, cannot wait to play Valve's games on Linux.
If I know I want to install the system and have already tried it, I don't want to be forced through a desktop environment -- something curses-based will do just fine. Running Ubuntu off a DVD on a laptop has always been unbearably slow for me.
But then I also use vim instead of gedit or kwrite or whatchamacallit. God knows why.
Are the video formats from the late eighties really all deficient in some important way? With all the formats that were floating around back then, competing to cram more video into less space, it's difficult to imagine that NONE of them can meet our needs in this decadent era of cheap storage, extravagant bandwidth, and powerful multi-core CPUs. What am I missing?
Even if you went 20 years back in time with the h264 or Theora spec, no processor would be able to decode and play the files in real time. (According to Moore's Law, computers today are 1,000 times faster than they were 20 years ago.) The codecen in the late 80's were designed with processing time in mind, and as such, the image quality they produced is rubbish compared to what we have today, because they didn't have the same processing power and storage space available in decoding.
(nb: I wasn't born in the 80's, so I have no practical authority on this.)
This is another reason Linux is not that user friendly. It's a chicken and an egg problem. I'm have average computer skills and using Linux is a lot less user friendly because of issues such as the issues with Flash. It appears to be getting better and I hope to use Linux on my laptop eventually, but it is still a pain in the ass to use Linux. Also, I have a Verizon broadband card that doesn't have Linux software for it.
If configuring your system is a pain, maybe Linux is not for you. Luckily, it's big enough as a platform that any user-level problem can be answered with a little Google search on the right search terms (in my experience. YMMV). Yes, there's no unified one-click-install for Flash on Linux, but once you've followed the instructions to set it up, you're all the more capable of troubleshooting it if anything goes wrong down the road. Moving from Windows to Ubuntu on my desktop around half a year ago was a real speed boost in the short term (might just be the fresh system install effect), and recently my (very non-tech-savvy) little sister made the switch as well, and I'm teaching her to search the web whenever she has problems and helping her with the command line whenever.
If you have problems setting up Flash, search the web. Someone's probably had exactly the same problem as you before.
With regard to lack of hardware/driver support
A big downside for me was that it is i586, something I didn't think off when buying it, meaning that distros such as Arch Linux won't run on it natively.
I was about to suggest for speed, why not use Arch+dwm? Your post covers it slightly, but what about installing dwm in Ubuntu, or in another i586-native Linux distro? My laptop is getting old, and after neither Windows XP nor Ubuntu ran acceptably fast, I switched to Arch and dwm, and while boot is only slightly faster, time to login is basically nil, since it's as simple as 'su user -e startx' in inittab. timothy is complaining about Gnome startup times
No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.