Valve finally confirms that Steam is coming to Linux

Valve launched the Valve Linux blog, thus officially confirming Steam for Linux. The company has long been interested in porting Steam over to Linux because Source-based games already support Linux servers. A team was formed in 2011 to convert Steam and Valve's popular shooter Left 4 Dead 2 to the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu.

Valve wrote in its new Linux blog: "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. Our goal is to have L4D2 performing under Linux as well as it performs under Windows."

If you run another Linux distribution, you may still be able to enjoy L4D2 in the future as Valve's current goals for Steam were outlined as follows:

• 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

Valve did not provide any additional information on which titles will be ported to Linux next. You can check out Valve's new Linux blog here.