14 DAY TRIAL // The Valve Linux team announced last evening, July 16th, that they have selected the Ubuntu operating system to deploy their upcoming Steam client for Linux.
The Linux team at Valve just created a few hours ago an official blog where they will publish everything there is to know about the Steam client for Linux, or more exactly Ubuntu.
Why Ubuntu? Simply because it is the number one Linux operating system out there, used by millions of users worldwide. However, there will be support for other Linux distributions as well!
"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. Based on the success of our efforts around Ubuntu, we will look at supporting other distributions in the future," the blog announcement read.
It the upcoming months, Valve wants to unleash a fully-featured Steam client for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system, optimize the Left 4 Dead 2 game to run at a high frame rate with OpenGL, and, of course, to port other popular Valve game titles to Linux.
"We’ve made good progress this year and now have the Steam client running on Ubuntu with all major features available. We’re still giving attention and effort to minor features but it’s a good experience at the moment."
"In the near future, we will be setting up an internal beta focusing on the auto-update experience and compatibility testing. [...] Our goal is to have L4D2 performing under Linux as well as it performs under Windows," the Linux team at Valve said.
Go Valve!