Linux Steam: closed beta testing has begun

Today, the first lucky people in their mailboxes have received an invitation to a closed beta test of their Steam client for Linux, as reported in the official community:

“The first wave of invites has been sent!
If you have passed the survey *, but you still have not received a letter, do not despair. We will expand the beta in the future with a large number of survey participants.

Thank you for your support in releasing Steam for Linux.
Valve Linux Team. ”
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(* a recent survey on the Valve site, in which anyone could fill in some information about their Linux and hardware).



Steam was released as a deb-package for i686 architecture, which can be downloaded at media.steampowered.com/client/installer/steam.deb .

Also in the Steam store appeared a search for games available for Linux, which is not so much, mostly this is what was previously sold in the Humble Bundle .

Here is the official discussion group for the beta client for Linux.

What to do if an invite did not come to me?

Wait. And if you don’t want to wait, there is an unofficial PKGBUILD for ArchLinux, which, among other things, includes a workaround for the error message that falls out if you haven’t received an invite. The performance of the author of the notes has not been verified. Among other things, for ArchLinux already created a package in the AUR called steam. Users of other distros may try to create the file / usr / bin / steam-hack, containing:

 #! / bin / bash
 xdg-open steam: // open / friends /

and launch it using Steam. Performance is not guaranteed.

UPD: Added a few more links, for the update, thanks lexfrei