Valve confirms Steam for Linux
As rumoured, Steam - along with Left 4 Dead 2 and other Valve titles - is heading to Linux in the not-too-distant future.
Announced late last night on the newly-launched Valve Linux Blog, the company has confirmed that its Steam platform will be launching on Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution, with other distributions potentially following at a later date.
'For some time, Gabe has been interested in the possibility of moving Steam and the Source game engine to Linux,' the Valve Linux team explains in the blog post. 'At the time, the company was already using Linux by supporting Linux-based servers for Source-based games and also by maintaining several internal servers (running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu server) for various projects. In 2011, based on the success of those efforts and conversations in the hallway, we decided to take the next step and form a new team.'
That team has been working, in slowly eroding secrecy, on moving Steam to Linux with a specific focus on making the software work under Ubuntu. 'Why Ubuntu? There are a couple of reasons for that,' the team explains. 'First, we're just starting development and working with a single distribution is critical when you are experimenting, as we are. It reduces the variability of the testing space and makes early iteration easier and faster. Secondly, Ubuntu is a popular distribution and has recognition with the general gaming and developer communities.
'This doesn’t mean that Ubuntu will be the only distribution we support,' the team adds. 'Based on the success of our efforts around Ubuntu, we will look at supporting other distributions in the future.'
Having already successfully ported Left 4 Dead 2 across to Ubuntu Linux, the team is now working on ensuring that the Steam client operates natively with full functionality, boosting the performance of Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux using OpenGL and porting additional Valve titles to the platform. As yet, the company has not confirmed whether it's working to help any of the other companies that publish through Steam port their own games to OpenGL and Linux.
The overall goal, the team explains, is to get Steam running on Ubuntu 12.04 along with a copy of Left 4 Dead 2. 'Over the last few months, excellent progress has been made on several fronts and it [Left 4 Dead 2] now runs natively on Ubuntu 12.04. We're working hard to improve the performance and have made good progress. Our goal is to have L4D2 performing under Linux as well as it performs under Windows.'
Valve's support of Linux - albeit only, at present, for a single popular distribution - will be a major boost for the cause of gaming on the open-source operating system. Should Valve's efforts be rewarded with a large install base and substantial revenue from Linux users - and there's little reason why it shouldn't - we'd expect to see other companies following suit.
Whether Linux will form the heart of the oft-rumoured Valve Box console, as has been suggested by industry watchers in the past, is as-yet unknown - as is, sadly, when Valve will be making Steam for Linux available to the public.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyAtlast I can get steam chat easily on my laptop :P
If they start getting games working properly on linux aswell, my reasons for using Windows will plummet.
I mainly use my pc for gaming, and that is why I run Windows but I have always wanted to get in to Linux but could not be bothered with the constant reboot's to boot back in to Window's, or running it in a Virtualbox so this maybe the way in to Linux for me.
Nice work Valve not often I can say something good about you but this is excellent news.
Pending the answer to that then this is pure win!
Valve you are doing smart and wise step again.
...?
Wrong.
Do you really think they are committing game devs to make an application multiplatform compatible?
But I fully support gaming on Linux.
Gabe Newell and Valve have helped PC and gaming development.
Yours in Appreciative Plasma,
Star*Dagger
The best comment here. What a complete waste of time and money, Valve dump this useless project and finish HL3!
Well clearly you are in the minority here with that view. Why shouldn't they spend time porting games to Linux and OSX? Good to see they are going cross platform. Cant wait to try this on my Kubuntu install.
Once they get Steam working on Linux on the less demanding games and increase the install base to a decent size, maybe AMD and Nvidia will pull their fingers out?
Here in this topic maybe but not the minority in the outside world. Can't think of a bigger waste of time and money than this project.
I can't tell if you're trolling or genuinely can't see the benefit.
And, I highly doubt they've taken people working on HL3 (if that's even under development) and put them on this...
The Valve Pool: It's like a swimming pool, but dug by hand using teaspoons and filled with Fabergé eggs.
Steam 2.0: It's software distribution, but not digitally: instead, pipes containing REAL STEAM are routed to every customer's house. CDs and DVDs are then propelled through the pipes at high speed to their destinations. TO DO: Figure out a way to stop the discs melting.
City 17: A live-action role-playing game where players get to visit the real City 17. TO DO: Invent time machine, wait for invasion from another dimension due to idiotic janitor-with-a-PhD.
Gabeland: A themepark built by Gabe Newell, for Gabe Newell. No, you can't visit.
He is trolling and yes he genuinely can't see the benefit. Windows fan boys often can't see the world out side their own very small interest. Best to just ignore him, like most he'll go away.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2012/06/18/torvalds-slams-nvidia/1
Dont know like! KDE is perfectly good on Kubuntu! Might need to have a look at opensuse though. What package manager does it use?
It's going to be awhile before gpu drivers are up to par with windows as well.
"Originally Posted by bagman
No one cares Valve stop wasting your time and make more games."
I agree.
Had Linux for a whole week on my netbook before I replaced it with a stripped out version of XP after having to trawl the internet trying to get the simplest of programs to work.
Suse this suse that, what a headache.
As fdbh96 rightfully reminds you all, that cock speaking for linux will have to go and eat some humble pie and beg nvidia to offer support, otherwise this total waste of time and money by Valve really will be a total waste of time and money.
Nobody is saying Microsoft are scared or worried..? Everything has to start somewhere. Its moves like this that will get AMD and NVIDIA off their arses and put more work into the Linux drivers, also Gabe Newell is a very big supporter of Linux so I don't see this going away any time soon.
And as for Torvalds, NVIDIA and AMD are never going to totally open source their drivers...its business. But hopefully they will put much more work into them if there is going to more games ported to Linux.
OSX had little to no games when they first ported over a few games now it has a huge library of games on steam! Just give it time.
Its perfectly user friendly just choose the right distro. Ubuntu, PClinuxOS all completely idiot proof, but very customisable at the same time!
With the recent views of Windows 8 By valve and Blizzard they both see it's faults are are trying to avoid going down with the Titanic so they just aren't purchasing a ticket instead they chose to take a different ship completely in fact it's for the better as this will not allow all of us FORCED to play in windows due to the lack there of for support for gaming in Linux which as of now will become a mere memory in only a few peoples head and the rest of the world will move on and not care that valve went and made a Linux port in fact Linux may become more main stream then you think with this failed OS Microsoft is pushing if your to blind to see it then that's to bad but I hope you enjoy your Windows 8 Have fun having to be like make and purchase a whole new system or at least a new monitor for the price of a system like Apple did to all it's faithful Motorola PowerPC users when they caned all support for the PowerPC and went Craptel based.