Steam Expands Beyond Games

[DarkTower87]

Aug 8, 2012 -- Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the first set of Software titles are heading to Steam, marking a major expansion to the platform most commonly known as a leading destination for PC and Mac games.


http://store.steampowered.com/news/8584/

[Maniac]

We're interested in more than games... I'm just not sure I want them on Steam. We'll see how it pans out.

[AruisDante]

Well now we know even more why Valve is afraid of Windows Store.

This move actually makes the most sense on Linux. There really isn't a solid way to buy pay-for software on Linux. Not that many users of Linux want to pay for software, but there are some software vendors that might be encouraged to port their for-pay software to Linux if they have a distribution method with Steam's brand equity.

[Maniac]

Installing things on Linux is a pain in the neck as well - that's the reason I've given up every time I've tried it. Last time I tried to install a media player, and landed into an infinite loop of dependencies.

If Steam can make installing software on Linux easy, then it might be worth another shot.

[Nagoshi]

Originally Posted by Maniac

Installing things on Linux is a pain in the neck as well - that's the reason I've given up every time I've tried it. Last time I tried to install a media player, and landed into an infinite loop of dependencies.

If Steam can make installing software on Linux easy, then it might be worth another shot.

I never found out yet how to even try to install something on Linux.

Back in the day I had an old Red Hat Linux box complete with manuals and a bonus disk that came with a bunch of .RPMs (if I remember), one of which was the Doom game, along with some more games. Even by reading the manuals I never got around installing that **** thing... which was, according to the box, supposed to be easy to do.

[N64link]

I didn't have a problem with a media player on ubuntu, I think it was VLC. I was toying around with it to try and get a 64bit OS but lack of game support put a halt to my experimenting.

[bravotsx]

it'd be a bit annoying to have old software in your library compared to old games, but maybe that's just me. i mean at least fallout 1, 2, and 3 are all different. i'd just feel like a tool if i had office 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010.

[AruisDante]

Installing on Linux varies WILDLY from distro to distro. Ubuntu has its own 'software center' that makes installing software quite simple. It and any Debian based distribution also has a pretty simple to use package manager for the command line, "apt-get". Installing most software which officially lists itself with a Debian package is a mater of typing 'sudo apt-get install package_name".

Other distros can be much less friendly.

For the record, Steam is only supporting Ubuntu when it says it's making a Linux port.

[Maniac]

To be fair, I haven't tried Ubuntu. Last time I tried Linux it was RedHat (and yes, I was trying to install via RPM), a year or so before Ubuntu came out. I've heard a lot of good things about Ubuntu.