The rumours were true. In a new blog post, Valve have officially announced Steam for Ubuntu. Alongside this will be a port of Left 4 Dead 2. According to the blog, a full-featured Steam client running on Ubuntu 12.04 already exists, and the ultimate goal at this stage is to get L4D2 running as well in Linux as it does on Windows.

Users of Linux distributions other than Ubuntu needn’t fret, however. Valve are targetting Ubuntu for now to keep things simple, and because Ubuntu is a popular, well-supported distribution. In future, they plan to add support for the other major Linux distributions as well.

It’s fair to say that  this is the biggest news in the history of Linux gaming, proving that there’s enough Linux users to justify such a port, and providing developers with an easy and well-supported way of porting their titles to Linux.