Arch Linux

Fruity

Member

Registered: 2009-12-16

Posts: 198

Desura is being ported to linux

Desura is a steam-like platform, and it's coming to linux. They have a blog which you can follow to see how they are progressing. It's great to see this, it's something I feel valve are missing out on - they are porting steam to PS3, but not linux. Surely gloablly linux is a larger market that PS3? Even if you take servers out of the equation, all the mobile-like devices, and desktops? A question for another thread maybe..

Anyway great to see desura, and I hope it all goes well for them... and us.

alexj

Member

From: Canary Islands

Registered: 2010-04-22

Posts: 23

Re: Desura is being ported to linux

It's the first step, and it's welcome. But I think the problem is they are worried about creating a "SoftwareCenter/ModCenter"-like app before "real" games are actually written to be compatible with linux (i.e. using DirectX instead of OpenGL simply hinders the option to port them easily).

Last edited by alexj (2011-06-10 23:38:14)

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Disfruta la vida, es más tarde de lo que crees. - Proverbio chino
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Darksoul71

Member

Registered: 2010-04-12

Posts: 319

Re: Desura is being ported to linux

I think their approach is right. A good distribution platform in the first place can help to encourage more devs to develop for Linux.
At least Desura is independent from the distribution (unlike Ubuntu's Software Center).  It's somewhat of a chicken-egg-problem.

Personally I would like to see something similar to Gametree Linux in open-source. This could encourage more devs to port Windows-games to Linux.

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My archlinux x86_64 host:
AMD E350 (2x1.6GHz) / 8GB DDR3 RAM / GeForce 9500GT (passive) / Arch running from 16GB USB Stick

iskandr

Member

Registered: 2011-05-06

Posts: 41

Re: Desura is being ported to linux

I've been using it for a couple of days now and I must say I really like it so far, though it sometimes randomly crashes and overall seems far from being stable. Not many games on there yet, but I think it's a great way of organizing and launching your games on Linux. Like Steam without the DRM part. I have only installed the games from my Humble Indie Bundles so far and got them all running now somehow.

However, I still wonder how desura handles dependencies. I'm running Arch64 and games with a 64bit port seem to work
out of the box, whereas I had to manually get some dependencies for other games from the AUR.