Valve’s official Steam for Linux installer application for GNU/Linux operating systems
What’s new in Steam Jul 8:
- General:
- Fix Steam chat windows sometimes not showing when activated if the chat window was created during a full-screen game
- Removed the “Music Details” menu option. Soundtrack content can still be accessed through the Library.
Steam is the official client of Valve’s extremely popular and powerful Steam software, the ultimate online digital distribution, multiplayer, communications and digital rights management platform.
Features at a glance
With the Steam client for Linux users will be able to buy and install games, organize their entire game collection, communicate with their friends and see what games they play, as well as to uses the popular Steam Big Picture.
Its graphical user interface is easy to use and modern. It allows the user to browse the entire Valve game catalog in style, configure your Steam account, manage Trading Cards and game achievements, or share your game collection with others.
Be aware though, that on the download page you’ll only find a small file of approximately 3MB in size, which is actually an installation script that will automatically download and install the Steam for Linux client on your Linux distribution.
Under the hood and supported OSes
At the moment, Steam for Linux is distributed only as a DEB installer for the Ubuntu Linux operating system developed and published by Canonical, but it was successfully ported to other Linux-based distributions as well, including Debian, Arch Linux or Linux Mint.
A source archive is also available for download, but you can easily install Steam of Linux on other Linux distributions by using the official or third-party packages provided for their operating system, through official or community derived software repositories.
Bottom line
Summing up, Steam is without no doubt the world’s most popular and free unified game organizer/manager/installer software that runs on a wide range of operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and Android.
Valve also developed a distribution of Linux based on the award winning Debian GNU/Linux operating system and built around the Steam for Linux client. It is called SteamOS and it’s available for download on Softpedia!
