I have an nvidia card because I naively thought having a proper graphics card would be an advantage. I have to run Steam from the shell with an LD_LIBRARY_PATH env to make it work at all.

A recent steam update for no apparent reason moved the steam folder so I had to manually move my steamapps (i.e. installed games) to the new location. Then I upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04 and Steam wouldn't work anymore at all, so I had to reinstall it using steamcmd (because the regular installer did nothing).

Oh, and some games still cause trouble: Wasteland 2 won't launch if I have Google Chrome open. It's a known issue although it sounds completely made up.

It's less painful but it's certainly not foolproof at any level comparable to the experience on Windows.

That really doesn't sound right. I have an Nvidia card, too. It works flawless without any workarounds..

Also.. the Steamupdate did not move the steam folder.. There are two versions of Steam. The one from the Steam website and the one from Ubuntu. They have different app folder locations. You probably switched one with the other.

Oh, fun. AFAICT I now have three versions of Steam installed.

And I can't even start Steam when I'm not using the nvidia card (and to switch cards I have to log out from Ubuntu and log back in).

Maybe this is just the result of me being an idiot, but either way this proves Steam on Linux does not pass the idiot test either.

My cool trick is:

    find ~/.local/share/Steam/ \( -name "libgcc_s.so*" -o -name "libstdc++.so*" -o -name "libxcb.so*" -o -name "libgpg-error.so*" \) -print -delete

Yeah, Graphics manufacturers are not doing their job well.

I'm currently playing FO4 on windows 8 and there are a lot of hickups as well. Even the computer dies sometimes. Saying that something is less painful on Windows won't do good either.

That's interesting. I wonder what an strace of the crashing Wasteland 2 would show. I'm guessing Chrome tries to take control of some GPU feature for some reason.

AIUI it has something to do with Unity3D and graphics acceleration in Chrome, so I guess you're right.

Most of the games available in the Humble Bundles and the Humble Store come with a Steam key as well. The process for every game is the same: buy game, get Steam key, add game to Steam library, play. It just works.

That's because Steam ships a full runtime of what, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS?, and makes the game use those instead of your distribution's.

That isn't really a problem, is it? It means it can also do it all without root privileges. Shipping a local environment is increasingly how it's done.

It's a huge problem if it's expecting you to use the AMD closed-source drivers but the open-source drivers in the 4.4 kernel you're using perform better.

It is an important but somehow always glossed over argument in the "are snap/flatpack necessary?" debate, if our most successful way of game distribution uses related technologies (with related drawbacks).

I agree. Although I know Steam games have DRM, I regularly use it. I figure if Steam ever goes out of business, somebody will break the DRM because there are so many users out there that have games from it.

In my experience (YMMV, I've a long history of gaming), if steam disappears I'll be disappointed to lose my titles, but it won't be the end of the world. Games I've played yesteryear rarely hold up over time - the vast majority I've fired up again feel very dated. And there's always a ton of new, interesting, and cheap games coming forward. Games are somewhat ephemeral/disposable, I find, so the "won't be around in five years" is less of a problem than for other software.

Again, that's my use case, others may differ.

It really depends on the games. The vast majority won't even be interesting after a year, but there's a few gems that are timeless.

Although those are also the games that tend to get regular remakes; while I still have my Final Fantasy VII disks for Playstation 1 I'd rather fire up the Steam port than mess around with an emulator. Or OpenXcom rather than the DOXBox'd original.

People still play Star Craft:Brood War as a profession. And I still like to play Master of Magic or Doom 2 from time to time. GOG.com made business on these kinds of games, so I'm not alone.

DRMs and always-online requirements are sad and I hope they go away.

Steam's DRM is opt-in too, not all games distributed via Steam actually use it.

Yeah, Steam is also not an angel. But right now it gets us something we need deeply: Playing on a free OS. Let's worry about the next step after that one succeeded.

Not in my experience