f13.net

Looks like this is out of private beta and available to the general public.

I would expect most don't care, the range of games will be small and the main value it has is as a strategic move for valve in the long game... But damn is seeing the familiar steam interface running under Linux a blast. Something that I would never have expected to see.

It looks and seems to behave exactly like the windows client, there's 39 games available (giggle)... Look forward to actually playing some when I'm not on my netbook. I'm as interested in seeing it unify linux gamers (which it should do) as believing it's going to drive a flood of ports anytime soon.

Is it in any way technically feasible for them to run some sort of background virtual box thing that can emulate directx and the such?  So that somebody could just run any game in steams library from the Linux client and the game wouldn't realize its not on windows?

But yeah, this their opening shot in releasing the steam console system (and raging against Windows 8).  Will be interesting to see if they can leverage their not insignificant influence to change anything.

It would be very interesting to see what the o/s market looks like five years from now, if Valve can get their box made and selling. 

They've had this for years. The project is called Wine (http://appdb.winehq.org/) which maps windows calls into linux system calls. And since it's just doing remapping, rather than emulation, there's not much of a performance hit (some games have run faster under linux). It took a long time to mature but apparently it's quite solid now. There's even some sort of front end around called "Play on Linux" that does some of the configuration for you. I still have an old vista partition around, and if I'm going to be gaming don't mind a reboot, so I've not really messed with it.

Native would be better though.


The door was pretty much opened by apple actually selling some boxes and the console / PC games market coming closer. A market for games that consider portability a positive and aren't tied slavishly to directX means additional ports become much more viable.

Played this a bit on Linux Mint, which is essentially Ubuntu.

Its fiddly to get it to work, but I did. TF2 looks a bit junkier in Linux than Windows, but hey, it runs. Nothing much else to report.

I got it working on my Archlinux install on my work Macbook, which is surprising but neat. There's an issue right now where some games are marked for Linux compatibility but don't seem to actually have any files for it yet, so the download completes instantly and then you get an error when you try to launch the game. Dustforce is one of these games, which is too bad since Steam's cloud thing would save me from having to restart my progress. Faster Than Light works, but it doesn't upload my saves to Steam, so meh.

Yeah, a whole bunch of games are on their list as "linux games" but don't have any files attached. In some cases because the port is still in beta or they haven't uploaded the new files. Which is sort of careless. Limbo is the game I have in that category.

I suspect there's a lot of clean up work left at the back end. And Steam needs to be smarter about finding where flash is installed (or not using it).

I wonder if they'll offer incentives to port to linux. If they have dreams of a linux based console some time this year they're going to need a richer launch line up than this.