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Linux is on Steam for half of Steam's lifetime on 20th of July
Eike Jul 18, 2022
A little celebration is in order.

Steam itself seems to be around like forever, and Steam on Linux still feels somewhat new, right?

I did a bit of calculation lately:
Date of Steam release: Septembre 12th, 2003
Date of Steam for Linux release: February 14th, 2013
LibteOffice Calc (because, what else?!?) says that was a wait of 3443 days.
(Not that I've actually waited for Steam on Linux, I never deemed it possible.)
Adding these 3443 days to the Steam for Linux release date gives us the 20th of July 2022.
So, the day after tomorrow, Steam on Linux exists for half of Steam's lifetime.

Steam - Half of Your Base Are Belong To Us!

🥳
Xpander Jul 18, 2022
Steam closed beta test for Linux started in September/October 2012 iirc and one month later it went to open Beta.. so 10 years soon!

edit: i was few months off, remembered wrong. i remember i got into closed beta testing and it was amazing :D

QuoteAs of the official announcement, a near-feature-complete Steam client for Linux had been developed and successfully run on Ubuntu.[315] Internal beta testing of the Linux client started in October 2012; external beta testing occurred in early November the same year.[316][317] Open beta clients for Linux were made available in late December 2012,[318] and the client was officially released in mid-February 2013.[319]

Last edited by Xpander on 18 July 2022 at 10:42 am UTC
damarrin Jul 18, 2022
That is very cool, though just shows how time flies by faster as you get older. Steam has indeed been around since "forever" in my mind, if someone asked me, I'd say the ratio between pre-Linux Steam and Linux Steam would be about 2 to 1.
CatKiller Jul 18, 2022
Next year, half of the time the Linux Steam client has been available will have been with Proton built in.
Valck Jul 20, 2022
Quoting: EikeLibteOffice Calc (because, what else?!?)
gnumeric, because it's always good to have options ;)
randomgamerguy1997 Jul 21, 2022
ah yes, I remember the days of the steam for linux beta. the early years of steam on linux wasn't too bad because even though the amd drivers were complete garbage and wouldn't allow me to play Half-life 2, but the windows version still worked fine under wine. proton mostly made that unnecessary but some games still kinda needed steam under wine to work and at that point running steam under wine was a bit of a mess. I guess at that point they didn't care about keeping it functional under wine.
yaarthe7 Jul 25, 2022
I'd like that too, and it would make sense since Debian has basically said they'll never drop support for 32 bit. But I doubt they'll be comfortable using a distro that releases so few updates outside of security updates, and they'll run into issues encouraging people to download stable and edit their apt sources to switch to tracking a more up-to-date release.
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Last edited by yaarthe7 on 25 December 2022 at 5:40 am UTC
GustyGhost Jul 25, 2022
I remember 2013 when the independent tech press lost their minds over the announcement of SteamOS and Steam Machines. One of the Tek Syndicate (remember them?) guys actually stopped what he was doing in Grand Central station to film an update about it. Interesting times.

This summer, for me, marks the fourth year that I haven't had Steam installed on my system.
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