Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public (opens in new tab)

I've seen this quite a bit recently. It's a hack but it's a quick way to get a public-facing issue tracker out there.

Are there any better solutions for getting a tracker set up easily where non-contributors can raise bugs and discuss feature requests?

It's actually a pretty nice idea. Since the wiki and issues tabs are already optional features, perhaps the "Code" tab should be optional too.

Yea, i was a bit interested by that too. Probably already use it internally for other projects, and if they've integrated their internal tools with the GitHub API, it's a no-brainier.

There's a list, found here: http://store.steampowered.com/search/?os=linux

Very few games are compatible, but Team Fortress 2 is one of them.

The latter. I suspect the list will be similar to the list of games that work on Mac. It's a small subset, but it's growing.

The games are native ports, according to their Linux blog.

You need to update the client to fix that. Easiest way to do this is to evade the beta check (start steam with "steam steam://store"), then choose "steam/check for steam client updates" from the title menu.

> I'm not 100% sure why they have a "repo" for an "installer". It sort of rather defeats the purpose.

It's because they don't really grasp yet how these things work on Linux. Which is understandable, since they're coming from a Windows world, where package management has to be done manually. So the Steam executable you download is an installer that downloads/installs the Steam package manager, which then downloads/maintains the games.

Ideally, all the Steam Linux games would be maintained in APT repositories and you would update them through APT, but I don't know if that will ever happen. At least this is better than nothing at all.

Steam has a package so dependancies can be satisfied easily without resorting to "install xyz beforehand", and it runs an installer into your home folder because the user has to be able to modify the games directory for many, many games on steam, because stuff like configuration, custom maps, custom models etc, is stored alongside everything else.

Also steam has diff based patching (which requires accress from whoever is running the steam binary) which makes a lot more sense than how package managers operate for large packages, imagine downloading an entire 20 gig game every time there was a minor bugfix, it would be very obnoxious.

Unless the design of both package managers, and how steam games store settings/etc both change radically, this really is the only workable solution.

Luckily, you will still be able to share steam folders cross user, just simply give both users read/write access to the folder.

The Steam executable, libraries, data files, and games install with user permissions. This way games can install and update, and Steam itself can auto-update, without privledge escalation. Windows and Mac versions behave this way.

There is a launcher script that is installed in /usr/bin/steam. There was strong feedback from users that updating this script should belong to the system package manager. This is why the repo exists - so this script can be updated and managed by the system package manager.

that is because they are keeping themselves open to have a Steam packaging format.

It is something I have always bet that they will eventually do - once they see the number of support questions by people who have some sort of dependency problems (e.g [1], [2] and [3]).

I wonder how long will it take for them to latch on to something like Zeroinstall or nix.

[1] http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/846940247... [2] http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/1/846940247... [3] http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/882965118...

So I thought I'd try and see what the score is:

TF2 is 12.0 GB ... damn, that's hefty.

This had better be the richest, smoothest, highest quality game; feature rich and expansive. That is about 11GB bigger than any [single] thing I've ever downloaded before. Estimated download completion time ... Christmas.