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We Do What We Must Because We Can: Valve Bringing Steam Client to Linux?

Valve Software was in the market a little over a year ago for a software engineer who would, among other duties, work with porting Windows-based games to Linux. No word on who got the job, or how that engineer's first anniversary review went, but evidently, this year was productive.

It seems, according to Phoronix, the "Left 4 Dead" demo (Windows client version) shipped with some very suspicious sounding Linux libraries. The file names (such as steamclient_linux.so) lend some weight to the theory that these files have little to do with the Linux server build.

While it seems that Valve is taking concrete steps to make Steam cross platform, it isn't clear how soon this will happen (though the 2009 release of Postal III is slated to use the source engine and run on Linux). Left 4 Dead's demo (with the Linux libraries) is no longer available.

The Phoronix piece suggests, and I agree, that it's possible the inclusion of the Linux libraries in the Windows demo was accidental. Since the .so files don't appear in the Windows build that Phoronix purchased, I'd imagine it's almost certainly the case.

But Phoronix makes some interesting observations, comparing the Windows and Linux libraries, and how (in theory and practice) difficult it is to create games with most files running cross-platform, and operating system specific files included where needed.

This would be a plus from a user standpoint, with a single Steam download being able to work on either Windows or Linux.

It seems less a point of debate now whether Linux will ever be a gaming platform -- it's more about how much of a gaming platform it can be. Valve, with its push to support Steam on Linux, has made a real step forward in an area where the efforts haven't always been consistent.

• open source
• linux
• games
• gaming
• Valve
• Steam
• cross-platform
• ports

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