The beta will involve Steam, one Steam Game and will support Ubuntu 12.04 and above. They have also stated that it will not yet include Big Picture Mode or additional Valve games, but that “yet” gives us hope to see it soon. Valve stated on their official blog “For existing Linux users, the external private beta is a good release for seeing where we are in running our games on Linux. We will be using a sign up page for the external beta. Information about the sign up will be announced in a future post.“ We can see that they want experienced Linux users to test it and to provide good feedback, while they recommend the new Linux users to wait for later release that will have more features.

So far there is no additional news on where or when the beta signup will take place. According to rumors the “one game” will be Left 4 Dead 2. This is because Valve has used it already for their internal tests. It is nice to see there are still companies that care about gamers, unlike Microsoft that could ruin it with their new Windows 8. Will this move from Valve bring more users from Windows to Linux? It is certainly possible, but the main problem with this is that Windows users are used to the Microsoft OS and don’t know how to configure Ubuntu once it's installed. Maybe they will stop being lazy if Windows 8 really ruins the gaming experience and read a few tutorials on how to do it, or maybe they will just stay on Windows 7.

[Ed – We have said this for a while now. Windows 8 will hurt Microsoft more than they think. There are some that are already working on trying to downplay the impact Windows 8 will have on gaming performance. A quick look through our YouTube channel will show that. There are still comments saying that Microsoft is working on “fixing” the problems despite Windows 8 having been released to manufacturers in its final state. When that is brought up the same commenters quickly blame AMD and nVidia for poor driver support. While we will certainly not see a mass exodus to Linux because of Windows 8 we do expect to see more companies offering Linux as an alternative to Windows.]

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