Steam marks 8 years since the Linux Beta release

Steam It has been available for Linux, in its beta version, for 8 years. A long road full of great conquests in the world of videogames under the platform of the penguin. A project that started with that limited beta version that saw more than 60.000 people originally signed up for testing.

Little by little, Valve saw how that user community expanded rapidly with the fully public arrival in December 2012. Finally, the version that we all know today would arrive in 2013. To this day, many things have changed in this video game client, something that few would think was possible a few years ago ...

This tour has seen many ideas, including the SteamOS distro. Valve seemed determined to fight for gaming on Linux. Despite some casualties, such as its famous Steam Machine, not all projects have been unsuccessful. Some have been very successful, boosting the video game industry. For example, Proton for Steam Play (working closely with CodeWeavers), and even support for OpenXR, as well as DXVK and VKD3D-Proton, etc.

During that time, they have not only created projects, they have also they have collaborated to improve others. For example, they have helped to improve the MESA graphics drivers, their developers have also worked on other parts of the graphics stack, and they have even been involved in the evolution of the Vulkan graphics API (creating new extensions), etc.

Nor should we forget Valve's own video games that are available for Linux natively, such as half-life portal, etc. Neither does the shader pre-cache system and other enhancements for video game shaders, Steam Linux Runtime Container "Pressure Vessel" (along with Collabora) to ensure old juices run properly on new systems, and so on.

But after this 8th Anniversary, Steam is unstoppable. You won't sit idly by here. In fact, there are a lot more projects already planned on the roadmap, and they will have GNU / Linux in mind. For example, Pierre-Loup Griffais has been working on Gamescope, which looks promising. The idea is to have complete control of the display of the games.

All that effort has resulted in a list of more than 7000 video game titles on Steam with GNU / Linux support. A growth that has been about 1000 since April of this year. And several hundred have been added in recently. That's without taking into account the Proton compatibility layer, which adds several thousand more playable to the list. Who would have thought two decades ago that this would be the case today?

Happy 8th Birthday, Steam!