What would be the advantages for Valve to make this?
Why should they do it/don’t do it?
Discuss.
no disadvantages, and no reasons why not to
they’ll increase their market even further, and finally, everyone can enjoy sweet games from Valve
oh god monopoly
Yeah, that would be my reason to completely switch to Linux.
Most of the framework for a linux client was already done for the Mac client anyway, so it’s just a matter of convincing the game companies to port their games to linux.
I have a disadvantage.
It would trigger another wave of snobbish Linux-superiority threads. Then, I would get someone who uses computers once a week to try using Ubuntu. Once they kill themselves in a dismal feeling of worthlessness two days later, everything would go quiet again.
True, but it would make the world a better place
the lack of steam for linux is the only thing keeping me from using it 100% rather than the 96% of the time i use it
Steam for Linux should have the most complex install procedure, with at least a dozen installation steps in Terminal and requiring the installation of another dozen dependencies, each one with its corresponding lengthy installation.
This will allow Valve to separate the noobs from men, when it comes to Linux.
I want them to release the godam source-code of the client, we will then need to fix like a hundred headers and definitions to finally get it to compile with gcc.
If STEAM ever gets to Linux I hope this would motivate the video card companies to actually release good drivers (I look at you AMD).
The only problem with playing games on Linux is the drivers. They just wont work at all. I have tried at least a thousand times to run games on Linux, with Nvidia and ATI cards, but all the drivers seem to crash or just not work properly…even the proprietary ones. Though I did get CS: S and HL2 working on the nvidia card (with some minor bugs). ATI however, is the worst when it comes to drivers. Their drivers don’t even work properly on my windows system (I have Win7 btw). But this might get fixed if Valve would make Steam available for Linux, as the graphics cards manufacturers would probably pay more attention to 3d graphics in Linux.
The newer 10.6 driver from ATI (fglrx) is running alright (although the performance seems quite lower than the 10.4,10.5), what drives me insane is the glitchy vsync.
The nvidia driver is really good to be honest, (there’s even hardware assisted video decoding with VDPAU!) clean implementation. Still things should be improved as it is and AMD needs to step up.
The open-source projects aiming to replace the proprietary drivers (born out of the frustration) are getting better every day.
It will increase their market but by how much?
This is the question that is stopping them from doing it if they are not already in progress.
I reckon there’s more people using Linux than Mac, but I might be wrong.
edit: yeah, I was wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
I would reinstall ubuntu maybe.
Yeah, Nvidia is pretty cool about Linux drivers and such but AMD is shit. I have considered buying an Nvidia card. Been using a Radeon HD 3800 after i fried my 7900GS a while ago. 
I hope drivers for Linux will be better in the future.
Everything is there for linux steam except for profit potential
I think there’s potential.
Although I know most people would be reluctant to operate a client in order to play their games, also considering the games that would have Linux counterparts are for most available DRM-Free from the developer’s website anyway.
One might also consider that people are using more than one operating, and they didn’t make the jump because of lack of certain features.
If one major player of the games industry was to embrace the Linux platform, it could potentially lead to a wider range of OSes being supported by more developers.
The difference between that and steam for Linix is there are a ton more people who play indie games then people who use Linux.
Once Mac gets up to like 50% of computer use all the idiots who want an OS that makes them feel different will move on to Linux and you’ll get your Linux client. But with a bunch of yuppie douchebags.
The problem with that way of measuring market share is a lot of Linux users set their browser to mask their OS as Windows XP due to buggy websites, so we cannot truly know the market share of desktop Linux.
In that case hopefully VALVe is betting on the number being much higher then that.
You can safely bet a good chunk of Windows XP machines on that measurement system will be Linux boxes.
I seriously hope they bring Steam to Linux though, and it’s apparently been confirmed as coming to Linux by one or two news outlets, but how true those confirmations are will remain to be seen.