Seven years ago today, Steam for Linux went into limited Beta

Sometimes it only feels like it was a year or two ago but no, it has been seven years to the date since the valve was opened a little to let some Linux users get some Steam.

In that time, Valve have done a huge amount for Linux gaming. Sure, the whole Steam Machine and SteamOS idea didn't quite work out but thanks to the initial push we're still here. Not hard to imagine where Linux gaming would be without Valve, hardly any others really stepped up and took interest.

Likely thanks to their push, just over a year after the full public release of Steam for Linux in February 2013, GOG also entered the scene announcing their own support of Linux.

Valve have contributed to the Mesa graphics drivers, they helped push the Vulkan API, they fund DXVK and D9VK for translating various version of Direct3D into Vulkan, teamed up with CodeWeavers to bring Wine and everything together into their new Steam Play and so much more.

Truly incredible some of the games we have available now, despite being a minority platform. Going by Valves own survey, we're currently less than 1% (0.83%). When Valve last gave out their monthly active users count back in January, they said it was 90 million which puts the monthly active Linux gamers somewhere around 747,000. Every time I take a look at my own Steam library taking that into account, it's pretty amazing. Hopefully there's many more to come, both users and games.

Who knows what's coming in future. Perhaps something called Steam Cloud Gaming? Happy sort-of birthday, Steam for Linux. Thanks for all the fun Valve.

I hope you like my little joke achievement pop-up there, that took me way longer than I would care to admit.