Valve has launched a limited access beta for its new Steam for Linux client. There was an encouraging excitement around Steam for Linux. Valve received over 60,000 responses to its request for participants in the Steam for Linux Beta within its first week. The company has selected the first round of beta participants from those early adopters.

The arrival of Steam for Linux owes a lot to Microsoft which has started to turn Windows from a platform for OEMs and developers into a Microsoft only product inspired by Apple's walled garden.

"This is a huge milestone in the development of PC gaming," according to Gabe Newell, Valve President and co-founder. "Steam users have been asking us to support gaming on Linux. We’re happy to bring rich forms of entertainment and our community of users to this open, customer-friendly platform."

Fortunately, and unfortunately, Steam for Linux is currently available only for Ubuntu. Ubuntu is an extremely popular distribution among the young crowd and Valve noticed "an overwhelming majority of beta applicants have reported they're running the Ubuntu distro of Linux," according to Frank Crockett, a member of the Steam for Linux team. "We intend to support additional popular distros in the future; we’ll prioritize development for these based on user feedback."

So if your a non-Ubuntu user and want to play Steam it's about time you make your presence felt.

The Steam for Linux Beta client will become available to a widening group of users over the course of the beta. Subsequent participants will be chosen among survey respondents, and once the team has seen a solid level of stability and performance across a variety of systems, the Steam for Linux client will become available to all users of Steam.