After so long of rumors and here say. Newell finally took his time to oversea the Linux project and has found a new love and attempt to bring the almost non-exsistent linux gaming to light.

Now as a Linux gamer I am content with Desura, and all the Indie games I can buy or play for free. But it makes me happy that Valve now finally wants to sell thier games to the linux community. Now I am not going to get into a "OS war" because I feel that it is a waste of everyones time. I know alot of my friends will fully switch to Linux because of this.

Good for Linux people. Steam is easily the best gaming service out there.

So when does Steam show up on my graphing calculator? I have been very happy to play Doom on my TI-89 but I think it would be amazing if Gabe would overocean a Steam client so I can play Plants Vs Zombies on my alternative OS.

What about the drivers? These still remain a problem for Linux users and last time I checked, games aren't played in the console window anymore.

@valrog said:

What about the drivers? These still remain a problem for Linux users and last time I checked, games aren't played in the console window anymore.

There was talk Valve was interested in throwing around some money at Linux graphics driver development not too long ago.

@valrog said:

What about the drivers? These still remain a problem for Linux users and last time I checked, games aren't played in the console window anymore.

You are dealing with very outdated information, drivers are not a problem anymore. The main problem is and has been for a while to get around lazy coding that makes porting games rather hard, but there are more and more games that run on Wine just fine (Guild Wars 2 runs much better for me on Ubuntu than on Windows 7 for instance) with little tinkering.

I´m glad that Steam is coming to linux, but Im afraid that until devs start to pay attention to the platform this wont make much of a difference.

@Rattle618 said:

You are dealing with very outdated information, drivers are not a problem anymore.

Unless there's been some major development that I wasn't aware off, all of the graphics drivers aside from the binary NVIDIA ones (which are largely cross-platform) are buggy and somewhat slower compared to their Windows equivalents. Valve in particular complained about "a bunch of performance issues" when working on Linux.

Anything that lets me play with more people on Steam is awesome, I hope something comes out of it soon.

Well in a interview with the Verge Gabe mention that they will port their source engine to Linux adapting it to OpenGL. With this their first port they are working to do is Left For Dead 2. I know with alot of games that like @Rattle618 said game companies get lazy with the coding and it becomes a mess to try and sort it out. But in the buissiness end Linux is a "risky" market for now, but because it is growing as seen by Humble Indie Bundle the market is there. Plus with OpenGL they are not paying for licensing cost to use DirectX coding unless they bring a game to Windows.

I think Steam will have a significant impact in helping legitimize linux as viable OS for a lot of people out there. Gaming has long been the largest caveat in any decision to switch to the platform, but Steam's presence can only have a positive influence on the matter. Certainly, there are a lot of games out there whose paradigms render potential linux ports awkward, but there are also plenty of games in Steam's catalog that either already have such a port (c.f. the humble bundles, most indie games in general, &c.) or are coded in such a manner that such an undertaking would not necessarily be cost prohibitive—enough to make the decision more of a "well, why not?" sort of ordeal.

All in all, only good things can come from this.

@theManUnknown: Agreed on that, And I was just watching a video on Ubuntu Vibes here: Steam and Canonicalthat Canonical and Valve have had talks are Ubuntu will be the main focus for Linux first. And since I upgraded to 12.04 this makes me happy.

I carry around a netbook that is mostly just for doing stuff on the web. Occasionally I also like to play some indie/old games on it and watch Netflix. I run both Win 8 and Lubuntu. Most of the time I've got a hidden taskbar and Chrome maximized so I'll even forget which OS I'm currently booted into. If not for Steam and Netflix I'd probably go Lubuntu exclusively.

I'm really excited about Steam on Linux. Many of my Steam indie games come from Indie Bundles and have already been ported to Linux. I imagine they'll just be added to Steamplay which means I'd already have a library of Linux games. Now if the good people at Netflix would make it available on Ubuntu I wouldn't even have to dual boot anymore.

Great news!
open source = power to the people

@Omegus said:

But in the buissiness end Linux is a "risky" market for now, but because it is growing as seen by Humble Indie Bundle the market is there.

I expect Valve's plan is to create a market for Linux games by designing a cheap gaming PC running it and launching a bunch of big games on it. They've long been rumored to be interested in having their own hardware platform, and Linux makes more sense than Windows since they don't have to pay Microsoft or abide by their restrictions. It'll be a bit like Google creating Andriod rather than relying on Apple and Microsoft for access to smartphones.

@BlackLagoon said:

@Rattle618 said:

You are dealing with very outdated information, drivers are not a problem anymore.

Unless there's been some major development that I wasn't aware off, all of the graphics drivers aside from the binary NVIDIA ones (which are largely cross-platform) are buggy and somewhat slower compared to their Windows equivalents. Valve in particular complained about "a bunch of performance issues" when working on Linux.

That's an ATI specific problem which also exists on the Mac to some degree too (because ATI are shit like that in terms of drivers). ATI does not want to put any money into their Linux binary driver team at all because their base OpenGL support needs a lot of work before the driver performance can be addressed. Nvidia drivers have never had these issues. Nvidia drivers are not substantially slower than their Windows counterparts. There are even some quite advanced benchmarks which prove it too.

Photoshop, Premiere and Steam are the only things keeping me from switching completely. Even though this would make like 80% of my Steam library unplayable since only OpenGL games will be supported, I'm just glad it's coming out. I use Steam more as a messaging client than for playing games anyway.

HELP PLEASE IM CONFUSED

how does steam work? like lets say i have seam on my pc, and i wanted to play modern warfare 3 with my other freind, but he had a ps3, can i play with him??

I for one am waiting eagerly for this. I've only got the beta windows 8 right now as far as windows goes, and I game regularly on linux with steam via wine. So if I could get all the nice indiegames that have linux ports through steam.. words fail me.

They made the announcement official. They've set up a blog to follow their Linux stuff

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/