Steam on Linux is real and L4D2 on Ubuntu outperforms Windows

One of the greatest (in my opinion) video game developers, Valve, has long-been rumored to be working on a Linux client for their digital distribution platform, Steam. A couple months ago they admitted to porting Steam and one of their best-selling games, Left 4 Dead 2, to Linux. Other than that, not much has been told. But yesterday the Valve Linux team posted to their blog that they have Left 4 Dead 2 ported and benchmarked the same game, on the same computer running Ubuntu 12.04 against Windows 7. The Linux version outperformed the Windows version by 14% (in terms of frames per second generated). Although it's true that they optimized their game engine for use with the Linux kernel, the graphics card drivers, and OpenGL, they managed to do this immensely faster than they did with Windows and Direct3D.

There's more details that you can read about here, but I think this is a fantastic step to bring quality games to the Linux platform. For many, big name games are one of the only reasons people keep an install of Windows around. This could really help push the community in an entirely new direction. I would gladly buy the entire Half-Life series, Portal and Portal 2 all over again just to play it on Linux.

Good work, Valve. I hope to see this make enormous progress in the future.

I've been following that news also.  I tip my hat to Gabe Newell for his stance on this matter.  Valve is big enough and has some really popular games that just might influence people to finally get off the crappy windows platform, which is dying anyway.

On the other hand Richard Stallman has recently raised some valid points regarding the infiltration of DRM into Linux as a result of this development, and that would suck in a really big way.

Cool that you posted this thread.  Kudos!