Steam for Linux Beta Now Available
 

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the launch of a limited access beta for its new Steam for Linux client.

The Steam for Linux Beta client supports the free-to-play game Team Fortress 2. Approximately two dozen additional Steam titles are now also available for play on Linux systems. Additionally, the Steam for Linux Beta client includes Big Picture, the mode of Steam designed for use with a TV and controller, also currently in beta.

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"This is a huge milestone in the development of PC gaming," according to Gabe Newell, Valve President and co-founder. "Steam users have been asking us to support gaming on Linux. We're happy to bring rich forms of entertainment and our community of users to this open, customer-friendly platform."

The Steam for Linux Beta client is currently available for installation on Ubuntu 12.04. "An overwhelming majority of beta applicants have reported they're running the Ubuntu distro of Linux," according to Frank Crockett, a member of the Steam for Linux team, "We intend to support additional popular distros in the future; we'll prioritize development for these based on user feedback."

Within its first week, Valve received over 60,000 responses to its request for participants in the Steam for Linux Beta. The first round of beta participants has been selected from this group of respondents.

The Steam for Linux Beta client will become available to a widening group of users over the course of the beta. Subsequent participants will be chosen among survey respondents, and once the team has seen a solid level of stability and performance across a variety of systems, the Steam for Linux client will become available to all users of Steam.
Steam is a leading platform for the delivery and management of PC and Mac games with over 50 million accounts around the world and over 2,000 titles offered.

More details regarding Steam for Linux, including community discussion, beta participants' feedback, official announcements and syndicated news can all be tracked on the new Steam for Linux Community Hub at http://steamcommunity.com/linux.

Woooooooooooooooooooooooottttttttttttttttttttttt!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And for those interested, here is the list of games supported officially: http://store.steampowered.com/search...der=ASC&page=1

It has BEGUN!!!!!

That's quite a long list.

this. is. awesomeeeeeee.

I feel like downloading Linux games from my Steam today....

A lot of the independent games there were built for PC are built with Source. So it ends up being if Valve games work, so do these.

I'd disagree bunch of small time games a few good classics etc. It be hard pressed to see many games outside of the source engine unless valve works out some sorta deal to encourage support for linux but i doubt there be any basis outside of f2p games, which don't really need steam outside of visibility.

anyone able to benchmark team fortress between windows and linux setup?

Nice just in time for windows 8 comming out.

Hopefully there are more games before windows 7 gets phased out ...

Linux + games = no reason to run windows.

awesome ............

Cool....

Windows, OSX or Linux...

It appears that Valve is now the most progressive video game company in the world as they are pro-choice.

Finally!

The biggest Linux fail are countless distros. If they'd somehow manage to consolidate and standardize this, it would be a much harder competition for Windows than current fragmented mess.

Heh, I just got Linux Mint 13 all setup for it when it comes out of beta.

Gonna be good times.

Anyone willing to do some benchmarks!?

Would be awesome to find Linux gives us a few FPS XD

Only thing I could find is this.
http://steamforlinux.com/sites/defau...uVsWindows.jpg

Which OpenGL version are those games using?

Now I got to make a partition, to install mint on, to install steam on linux. I have no need but for some reason I feel I must...

whoooo-hoooo!!!! :roll:

How would Raspberry Pi fare with that list of games?

tf2 would knee it beyond repair;)

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edit: the client: http://media.steampowered.com/client...ller/steam.deb

in a terminal, you can do steam steam://open/friends

navigate to your profile, and start some of the supported non-valve games you might have, and play.

I guess I'll stick with Windows 7 exclusively for games not supported. Once all Source Engine games are ported I can begin to unchain myself from Windows once and for all.

:D

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/j...space1_001.png