The Ubuntu Developers Summit now happening in Copenhagen this year has put forward some interesting facts about gaming on Ubuntu platform. Some of the Valve's employees were present during the summit and discussed the future of Steam on Ubuntu in particular, and Linux in general. 

Valve employees gave away the first Steam beta client to attendees of the event. This was followed by their talk, and they admitted that Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming.

Earlier, valve chief had called Windows 8 as “catastrophe” for gaming. Also, Left For The Dead, the first game ported by Valve on Linux platform outperformed Windows in performance.

One of the chief reasons why Windows 8 many not be good for gaming is that it ships with its own app store. Users wishing to install apps or games on their Windows machine will have to use the app store to do so. Also, app developers need to share a portion of their revenue with Microsoft if their app is listed on the store.

This is a closed platform model which will repel many app developers. Linux has a much more open platform in this regard.

‘We chose Ubuntu to start because of its broad user-base, strong community, and a strong company backing it in Canonical. Ubuntu was a simple choice to make.’ 

Drew from Valve team said that Steam beta is doing well on Ubuntu and he has experienced good cooperation from Canonical. He further announced that the source gaming engine has been fully ported to Linux and newer source games (Half Life 3) will be available in Linux.

There is no time announced for Steam's official release, but hopefully, it will be soon.

Further, Canonical developers are planning to improve gaming performance in Ubuntu 13.04. A separate group in Launchpad, called Ubuntu Game Developers have been set up and their chief task will be making game performance better.

Some of these enhancements will be backported to Ubuntu 12.04, the current LTS version of Ubuntu.