I'm actually really frustrated by Steam's linux port. If you're not running Ubuntu it's freakishly inconvenient to get running.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not complaining that Steam doesn't have a gentoo package that is maintained by them. I'm pissed off that they call apt-get directly from the application, don't make it easy to discover steam's requirements to run, have a confusing maze of launch scripts, and a bunch of other major no-no's.
The ubuntu desktop is an easy access market, with some big upsides from Steam's perspective. But there's a long history out there of vendors successfully handling a broadly usable linux port without pulling this kind of nonsense (attempting to maintain dependencies system-wide without even asking if it's okay!), and a great number of linux users are happy to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH and rebuild libpng or whatever for any special application requirements if they're not running your 'officially supported' distribution.
That having been said, I'm playing Cave Story right now on linux.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not complaining that Steam doesn't have a gentoo package that is maintained by them. I'm pissed off that they call apt-get directly from the application, don't make it easy to discover steam's requirements to run, have a confusing maze of launch scripts, and a bunch of other major no-no's.
The ubuntu desktop is an easy access market, with some big upsides from Steam's perspective. But there's a long history out there of vendors successfully handling a broadly usable linux port without pulling this kind of nonsense (attempting to maintain dependencies system-wide without even asking if it's okay!), and a great number of linux users are happy to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH and rebuild libpng or whatever for any special application requirements if they're not running your 'officially supported' distribution.
That having been said, I'm playing Cave Story right now on linux.