Valve has been working behind the scenes on a port of its Steam game download system for Linux for a while now. This week, the company revealed it will begin an internal test of the Steam Linux client sometime next week.
The post on the official Steam Linux blog said that small test will be followed by a bigger external beta for Steam Linux, but it will still be limited to 1,000 testers. Valve says the test will include one unnamed game from the developer and will support the Ubuntu port of Linux, for versions 12.04 and above.
The beta will not support the recently launched Big Picture mode for Steam, nor will it support any other Valve games other than the one unnamed title. The blog adds:
For existing Linux users, the external private beta is a good release for seeing where we are in running our games on Linux. We will be using a sign up page for the external beta. Information about the sign up will be announced in a future post. For those new to Linux, we recommend waiting for a subsequent release where more features are implemented along with improvements to the user install experience.
Source: Steam Linux blog | Image via Valve
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