Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers [LWN.net]

Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

Posted Oct 3, 2013 11:46 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers by hummassa
Parent article: Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

LSB is not supported by Debian

this is incredible BS. LSB 4.1 is supported perfectly by debian, via the installation of the (oooh, surprise) "lsb" package.

That's not support. That's a joke. It reminds me my first experience with Debian many years ago. I've used RedHat back then with a couple of custom PAM modules and wanted to play with Debian. And shiny new (back then) version of Debian supposedly included PAM support. Ok, fine, I've installed Debian and tried this “support”. Can you guess what happened? Right: it was possible to install PAM and get shiny new /lib/libpam.so.0 library… and that's it. You could not use it for the logon authentication, it's not used by the xlock, etc.

even packages compiled in Fedora 12 in C++ work if you install the (surprise, again!) "lsb-cxx" package.

Sure, you can use it to run some LSB-compatible software (which does not really exist) but can you develop something for Debian using LSB? How will you know which version of LSB to target to support which version of Debian? Where will you find libraries to access APIs not included in LSB (and there are many APIs not included in LSB)? LSB package, yes, it's supported by Debian. LSB development… nope.

LSB was developed as a good basis for the hypothetical “Linux distribution's SDK”, but nobody bothered to actually make one. Because it's more-or-less impossible without help from distribution makers and distribution makers are not interested.

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Why Steam on Linux matters for non-gamers

Posted Oct 6, 2013 12:12 UTC (Sun) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]

> LSB was developed as a good basis for the hypothetical “Linux distribution's SDK”, but nobody bothered to actually make one. Because it's more-or-less impossible without help from distribution makers and distribution makers are not interested.

The problem is not interest of distribution makers, the problem with LSB is that it codifies what RHEL ships at the time of a LSB release.

To be actual useful for both SDK and Application vendors, it would have to specify a situation that distributions would then strive to implement.

I've been to an LSB meeting once. SDK providers asked for a binary compatible update of some libraries for the standard's next(!) version, but the request was turned down because those versions would not be already be available in RHEL at the time of the standard's release.