Valve releases Steam for Linux beta

We have reported in the past on Valve’s plans for releasing the Steam client for the Linux platform. Keeping true to that promise, the company has released the first beta that can be installed on systems running Ubuntu 12.04 and above.

To start off, you will be able to play Valve’s highly popular, online multiplayer, free-to-play game Team Fortress 2. If that’s not enough, there are a whole bunch of other games as well, including Amnesia: The Dark Descent, World of Goo, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, Serious Sam 3: BFE and many more.

The client is fully featured and also includes the recently released Big Picture mode that is designed for use with a TV and controller.

Valve is currently working on bringing the platform to other Linux distros and bring more games to the service.

In other news, if you have an NVIDIA GPU in your PC, you should also be glad to know that NVIDIA has released a new GeForce R310 drivers for Linux, which promise up to double the performance over the previous drivers.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

Steam for Linux arriving next month as a private beta

Valve announced back in July that they are planning on bringing Steam to the Linux platform, starting with Ubuntu. They have now announced the next steps in this initiative and that includes beta testing priviledges for a few luccky users.

Valve has announced that they will begin internal testing next week and a private external beta test consisting of 1,000 users in October.

The private external beta will include the Steam client, one Valve game (probably Left 4 Dead 2 as was mentioned before) and support for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and above. It will not include the Big Picture mode and support for other Steam games for now.

Valve had previously mentioned that they chose Ubuntu because of its popularity among Linux distributions as well as it is easy for them to stick to one distribution while developing and once they perfect that they will consider developing for other distributions.

Once the development reaches the final stages, you can probably expect more games from Valve, such as the Half-life series and Portal series, along with other non-Valve titles.

While this is definitely great news for Linux users, who often had to switch to using Windows or use an emulator such as WINE to play their games, it would be too early to expect the same level of preference for the platform from the game developers as Windows enjoys right now. Just look at OS X and you’ll see why. Even though it is vastly more popular than Linux and has had the Steam client for over two years now, the game selection is nowhere even close to matching that on Windows. To think things would be any different on Linux any time soon would be wildly optimistic.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com