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.
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.
