Valve official statement: the commitment to Linux is maintained and Steam support in Ubuntu also

Valve

The mess was important and one of the most well-known developers of Valve posted a personal message warning that Steam would stop being officially supported in Ubuntu, obtaining as a response from the developers of Ubuntu where I said ... that ended up becoming a official statement in which they retracted their plans and promising 32-bit support at least for the next two versions of the system.

Now, the same developer of Valve that launched the threat folds in the course of the events and, this time officially, publishes a statement clarifying the position of Valve regarding Steam support in Linux and more specifically in Ubuntu, as well as to the importance of the 32-bit for the gaming platform.

As we explained, "support with 32-bit libraries is required not only for the Steam client, but also for the thousands of games available on Steam that only support 32-bit environments", he says, responding in step to a common criticism of Steam: "Enabling the Steam client to run in pure 64-bit environments, even if feasible, would leave most of the Steam catalog inaccessible to such users without an additional compatibility layer" .

"Steam already includes many of the dependencies needed by 32-bit games, but it is currently based on the fact that some key components are available in the operating system: a glibc ELF, Mesa and NVIDIA graphics driver libraries, to name a few» Add. "We do not think it's a particularly positive move for Steam and the game-oriented users who rely on this support."

Steam on Ubuntu

Recognizes that "an important part of our Linux users are in the latest version of Ubuntu and are updated as new versions are available", so "require such a fundamental change in the environment Steam execution in that This period of time would have been very risky for these users, and it probably would not have resulted in a perfect experience. "

However, in Ubuntu they have changed their minds and "although we are still not particularly enthusiastic about the elimination of any existing functionality, a change of this type is extremely welcome and will allow us to continue working to achieve improvements in the Steam distribution model without causing new headaches for users, "he says, so that" it seems likely that we can continue with the official support of Steam in Ubuntu ".

But there is life beyond Ubuntu, as it also recognizes: "There are several distributions on the market today that offer an excellent desktop experience for games such as Arch Linux, Manjaro, Pop! _OS, Fedora and many others. We will work closer with many more maintainers in the future ". We will have to see in what concrete. By the way, no mention of SteamOS, which is still in development.

In conclusion, it reaffirms Valve and Steam's commitment to Linux games: "We remain committed to supporting Linux as a gaming platform, and we continue to drive numerous character development and driver development efforts that we hope will help improve the gaming experience and desk in all distributions «. Proof of this is the news that we gave you yesterday.

And colorin colorado this story is over? For the moment, yes, although we will definitely read about it again, because there is no definitive solution. With so many parties involved, however, there should be no greater problem. If the abandonment of 32-bit support in Ubuntu and the support of Steam in Ubuntu materialized, the stick would have been taken by the Linux desktop in general and the Linux gamers in particular ..., because Ubuntu without Steam resists, but Steam without Ubuntu ...