I was just so exited I felt like telling every gamer here at LQ that finally steam has to a leap toward folks like you and I.

It is still in beta release but I'm checking it out.

Hmm I wonder how Valve is going to play this one...

E. g. Steam itself, port to Linux, no problem. This is awesome for my fav operating system.

But what about all the games that Steam gives you access to which are universally Windows-only binaries....??

Surely almost no game development companies are going to go cross-operating system with their code? Or will Steam spawn some form of Valva uber-virtual-machine to run a Win32 / Win64 executable in a Linux environment? You're gonna need AWESOME machines if that is the case to get acceptable performance?

So what is the point of porting Steam if all the stuff it runs for you are Windows-only binaries? From what I've seen trying to run Windows games on Linux is possible but is still non-trivial, requires a lot of configuration and can be quite hard to do - not for the gamer, maybe only for a Linux expert willing to invest enormous amounts of time just to get the game to run in the first place (on Wine, for example.)

If its a windows binary it won't be listed for the linux version of steam. I was a bit disapointed about that but hey. Its a another step to having more games ported to Linux. Personally I am a gamer and I love to game but I don't really play games any more because most of my games I play are windows only and I get tired of dealing with the bugs in wine. Some games still work with wine but things like Americas Army 2.x.x won't play with wine unless you don't use punkbuster so the only alternitive is to play 2.5 native linux version which is missing lots of maps and features.

But either way it goes it has my hopes up.