Steam coming to Linux?

This is coming from Phoronix as with past "news" about Steam coming to Linux, so an unhealthy dose of salt may be required. However this seems to have a little more evidence than their past claims.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...pfnudeln&num=1

"As I have been sharing for a few weeks, Valve invited me out to their Bellevue, Washington offices after Gabe Newell asked me last month for some referrals of developers with Linux OpenGL experience. They already have a team of Linux developers working on the client efforts, but they are looking to expand."

I so hope this actually happens.
Really would like to give switching to linux a proper go on my main PC, wine kinda worked, but wasn't great.

Steam works with WINE. Surely they're hoping the games are linux compatable too?

You know why this is, don't you?

If Valve is building its own gaming hardware, it makes sense to run Linux on it, because it's free 'n' all that.

If this happens, that's great news. However, as much as my i3 has the processing power for it, I doubt the HD3000 in this laptop could handle Half-Life 3 when it comes out in 2020.

This could be what's needed to give Linux gaming a much needed kick-start.

I fear that all it will accomplish is bring Source based games plus a few oddball titles to linux though...

With the fairly recent rumours of a Steam console I wonder if this is related, whilst Valve could probably afford to licence a proprietary OS they may be restricted by the licence terms. Another thought is that with Microsoft and Apple both moving rapidly to the app store model they may start trying to make life hard for Steam - this gives them a way out.

As for the game selection - a lot of indie games have Linux ports available already, and it can't be too hard to port games from OSx, with it already being Unix based and using OpenGL. If Steam is on Linux and Mac, with Valve's games and a reasonable selection of indie games then it may encourage other developers to consider ports.