Valve & Linux
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PC Gamer wrote...
Valve has confirmed that an official port of the Steam client is on its way to Linux, and will have a native version of Left4Dead to accompany its release. Gabe & Co have shown off working prototypes of both to top Linux blog Phoronix, and say that there are plans afoot to bring other titles to the platform too.According to Phoronix, Newell is personally involved with the Linux project at Valve and something of an evangelist for the OS. Which is great, as it always helps to get the non-mangers on your side.
Author of the article, Michael Larabel, says this the Linux clients at Valve are beyond the experimental stage, and Valve is actively hiring more developers.
Michael Larabel wrote...
“I am still struck by just how interested Valve is in Linux as a platform; it is certainly beyond my original expectations. This Linux work just is not some half-assed attempt by them to make it look like they are a Linux-friendly organization. Gabe’s vision to support, embrace, and promote Linux are amazing, assuming they execute, which looks to be very high probability at this point.”I know it's old news, but Linux finally seems to be getting it's due in the entertainment sector, and who better than Valve to start the movement? Linux has grown massively in popularity as a free operating system over the past several years, in no small part due to the advancements of the desktop environments and of course, the newbie friendly Ubuntu distrubution.
I'm a regular L4D2 player so I'm incredibly excited to hear the L4D series is going to be the first ported over for use with the new client. Hopefully we can continue to see more game development companies move in this direction. For some reason I get the feeling games will run better on my Arch-linux install, after all, unlike Windows most Linux distros (Especially Arch/Gentoo) are incredibly light-weight when compared to OSX and Windows, they also allow you to tweak far, far more options involving performance via the use of scripts.
What are your thoughts? If you're a Windows or OSX user: If more games were released for Linux, would you be willing to switch over? If you're a Linux user: How awesome do you think this is on a scale from 1 to 10?