Valve Announces Steam and Left4Dead 2 for Ubuntu

[MaydaX]

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.

 

Rest can be found at

 

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/steamd-penguins/

[MaydaX]

 

Things have been going well. We will be having an internal beta starting next week, and a private external beta for 1,000 users sometime in October.

The private external beta will include:

• Steam
  
• One Valve game
  
• Support for Ubuntu 12.04 and above
  

It will not yet include:

• Big Picture mode
  
• Additional Valve games
  

For existing Linux users, the external private beta is a good release for seeing where we are in running our games on Linux. We will be using a sign up page for the external beta. Information about the sign up will be announced in a future post.

For those new to Linux, we recommend waiting for a subsequent release where more features are implemented along with improvements to the user install experience.

 

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/beta-late-than-never-3/