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Steam for Linux announced by Valve

Can someone perhaps give a summary? I'm blocked from seeing it.
BTW, all you admins out there, trendnet is really terrible as it continuously blocks financial pages/blogs/etc as "gaming" sites.
Not that it's a false positive this time...
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~ Project Hope ~

Steam’d Penguins
Steam’d penguins? Is it a recipe for an exotic South Pole dish? Perhaps it’s one of those bizarre YouTube videos of penguins in a sauna cavorting with the Swedish Bikini team?

The truth is that this is the first post of the Valve Linux blog. This blog is where you can find the latest information from Valve about our Linux development efforts. Avoid the rumors and speculations that multiply on the Web. Instead, come to the source – a blog where people who are interested in Linux and open source game development can get the latest information on Valve’s efforts in this arena. In this initial post, we’ll introduce the team (and a bit of its history) and then give you a snapshot of what we’re currently doing.

Big Things Have Small Beginnings

For some time, Gabe has been interested in the possibility of moving Steam and the Source game engine to Linux. 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. At that time, the team only consisted of a few people whose main purpose was investigating the possibility of moving the Steam client and Left 4 Dead 2 over to Ubuntu.

Why Ubuntu? There are a couple of reasons for that. 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.

After successfully porting L4D2 to Ubuntu, interest grew within Valve and, as a result, the team and projects we were working on also grew. Currently, our focus is on the following projects:

getting the Steam client onto Linux with full functionality
optimizing a version of L4D2 running at a high frame rate with OpenGL
porting additional Valve titles
Current Projects

The goal of the Steam client project is a fully-featured Steam client running on Ubuntu 12.04. 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.

Since the Steam client isn’t much without a game, we’re also porting L4D2 to Ubuntu. This tests the game-related features of the Steam client, in addition to L4D2 gameplay on Ubuntu. Over the last few months, excellent progress has been made on several fronts and it now runs natively on Ubuntu 12.04. We’re working hard to improve the performance and have made good progress (more on that in a future post). Our goal is to have L4D2 performing under Linux as well as it performs under Windows.

We’ll be posting more information about those projects (and others) on a regular basis. Since this is a new effort for the team, we’d love to hear your opinions about the blog so shoot us an email. We also encourage you to leave comments and ideas for future postings. We want this to be a community of game developers, communicating with each other and talking about current efforts and future efforts in a powerfully creative environment.

After all, isn’t that what open source is all about – the idea that collaboration and teamwork achieve amazing things?

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The Valve Linux Team

Our mission is to strengthen the gaming scene on Linux, both for players and developers. This includes Linux ports of Steam and Valve games, as well as partner games. We are also investigating open source initiatives that could benefit the community and game developers.

Initially formed in 2011, the Valve Linux team is currently 11 people and growing. Our mission is to investigate open source development with a specific focus on supporting Steam and other Valve products on the Linux platform. The Linux background of our team varies from those who have a deep knowledge of Linux development to those who have just scratched the surface. However, one thing we all share is a great passion for supporting all things Valve on Linux. If you share that same great passion and think you have what it takes to join our team, let us know!

Steam’d Penguins
Jul. 16 2012
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Show off that hardware: join Team Discovery and Team Helix

Thx.

reply to rexbinary

reply to rexbinary
Looking forward to buying some native Linux Valve games.
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Vita est bona.

I would be so freakin' happy to be able to play CS/CS:S on 'nix natively. After all these years, it's still the game I play the most.
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~ Project Hope ~

Positive things, great news! This is probably the most excitement "Gaming on Linux" has seen since UT2004.

Patience, though... 11 people sorting through "performance issues" for one title may take some time to realize an entire platform ported over.

Still, it is exciting. Don't be shy and quiet, if this interests you, visit Valve's blog or even forums and express your opinion. If things become quiet, projects may go dark
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Show off that hardware: join Team Discovery and Team Helix

reply to rexbinary
Good. Good. Good. Good.

Now I have to retrace all my posts to blogs and say, "Neh-Neh-Neh-Neh-Neh-Neh! Told you so!"

reply to rexbinary
They just need to make Steam DEV an IDE that can be used to write games for both Windows/Linux/Mac all from a single code base.

Write/Build/Publish all from one console. Small startup studios would love it, Mac & Linux users would like it, MS would hate it.

reply to markofmayhem

reply to rexbinary
*Faints*
Did hell freeze over?

So much better then EA's supposed games that run on linux [HTML based games].

reply to rexbinary
Next in line to go, Blizzard (crosses fingers).

reply to rexbinary
I'll be happy with Valve fine tuning their OpenGL software. They've already brought all of their Source based games to Mac (Half-Life 2, Counter Strike:Source, Team Fortress 2, etc).

Making TF2 run better on non-Windows platforms is good by me.
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less talk, more music

reply to rexbinary
Apparently serious sam 3 may be in the linux pipe line too.

»www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n···=MTE0MjU

reply to markofmayhem
I have gotten world of warcraft to run on my linux box. I use playonlinux to configure wow and wine.

I had wow running on Ubuntu a few years ago, back then it took me a few hours and a bit of hair pulling to get it to work.
But thanks to playonlinux, it's nearly a breeze to sit up WOW. All I did was copy my wow directory on my windows PC onto a portable USB drive, then carried it downstairs to my linux box. There I copied it onto the linux box, pointed playonlinux to the directory, and it configured everything "auto-magically".

I went with playonlinux because it's a free program compared with cross over. So when ever I feel like playing WOW, I can enjoy it on my 46" TV screen vs a 17" monitor upstairs.

But I agree, it's kind of condusing as to why Blizzard still has opengl in their stuff, if they aren't supporting a platform that uses it. Maybe they secretly support it?
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Is a person a failure for doing nothing? Or is he a failure for trying, and not succeeding at what he is attempting to do? What did you fail at today?.

Ahh, I keep forgeting about Mac stuff.. mainly because I don't have a mac and mac OS is a closed OS, like windows.