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Valve confirms Steam for Ubuntu on new Linux Blog

by Alistair Lowe on 17 July 2012, 10:49

Tags: Valve

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qabjp5

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It has long been rumoured, with screen-shots, videos and even script leaking out all over the web, that Valve was intending to port its Steam gaming platform to Linux. Well yesterday Valve made this rumour official, announcing on its new Linux Blog that the team was indeed working on porting its famous platform over to the Ubuntu OS.

Valve Steam on Ubuntu

The goal of the team is to port to Ubuntu 12.04; it's the current Long Term Support (LTS) release of the OS and by focusing on a single distribution at first, the team can experiment, one step at a time. To back-up this port, the team is also looking to move Left 4 Dead 2 over to Linux in-order to test the in-game features of the Steam client.

Valve has already successfully ported Steam and has a native copy of Left 4 Dead 2 up and running, however both are rough around the edges, with Steam requiring some tweaking here and there, followed by an internal beta phase and, Left 4 Dead 2 still requires a little OpenGL optimisation to pull performance up to Microsoft Windows and DirectX levels.

Looking to engage its community, Valve is encouraging users to get involved and post feedback on its blog posts, either via email or through commenting. The firm expects to be providing regular updates and so stay tuned.



HEXUS Forums :: 13 Comments

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Sweet. Just a shame Ubuntu has such a nasty interface by default but assuming it'll work just as well with proper Gnome or KDE desktop?
cheesemp
Sweet. Just a shame Ubuntu has such a nasty interface by default but assuming it'll work just as well with proper Gnome or KDE desktop?

This is just going to be a case of “we needed something we could all build against, this is popular so this is it”. It won't be tied to a particular window manager, and is unlikely to be tied to a particular distribution assuming library versions for basic things like libc6 are satisfied.
This has taken a while but glad for Ubuntu users. Shame there aren't more titles….
Excellent. I wonder if Half-Life 3 will support Linux when it comes out in 2018?

Perhaps by then I won't have a god awful Intel IGP in my otherwise hella-fast, hella-portable laptop.
This is awesome news, even if I'll just be using it for steam chat to begin with on my laptop.
If they can get games working properly aswell, my reasons for sticking with Windows will plummet.