Valve frontman Gabe Newell is reportedly showing his true feelings about the current state of operating systems.
Phoronix.com recently had a chance to visit Valve corporate headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, and has published a report about potentially big things that might be coming from the company.
Valve is known for creating some of the most popular hardcore PC games, but its reach has been vastly extended thanks to its digital distribution platform Steam. It acts as a centralized hub for PC gamers of all stripes to download and get instant access to games from all kinds of publishers across all genres.
According to Phoronix, the company has been recruiting people well-versed in the Linux operating system, and it may be soon ready to launch a native Linux port of Steam. Valve has apparently been working long and hard behind-the-scenes to allow its Source Engine run natively on the open-source OS.
The report notes specifically that Valve has been dedicating a lot of its work in Linux development on the game Left 4 Dead 2 because the company feels it has a very stable code base.
Linux is of course the least-represented operating system, by far, so pouring a lot of resources into it hasn’t made much business sense up to this point, but with Valve now firmly embedded in Windows and Mac, it was time for that next step.
As for ensuring the next version of Windows is all good to go, Newell isn’t that excited. The Phoronix report states that the Valve head has a “stunning” level of negativity toward Windows 8. We’ve seen people on both sides of the fence, but bear in mind the operating system hasn’t been finalized yet, so we’ll see how Newell feels about the final version.
