Valve is all too familiar with gaming folks out there. They are the guys behind the awesome STEAM online gaming platform. They were in a bit of controversy recently when they denied all reports of a Linux version of their famous online gaming platform. But once again, Valve is in the news.

At last week’s Ubuntu Collaboration Summit in Brussels, Ubuntu developers discussed key features of the forthcoming version 10.10, including the possibility of another change to the default file system

A bit of a discussion on upcoming technologies in the Syntensity FOSS gaming platform, and some suggestions as to how it could make a complete gaming experience that would help loosen Valve's deathgrip on the online gaming industry, using Free Software.

Luckily for our gaming customers, Valve has forced our hand. That is, they have released an entirely rewritten version of Steam today. And, unfortunately, it does not work at all in our existing CrossOver Games releases. And since Steam is a large part of what our customers use CrossOver Games for, we've been forced to rush out a release to provide that support.

I spent last week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Belgium, where we kicked off the 10.10 development cycle. Due to our time-boxed release cycle, not everything discussed here will necessarily appear in Ubuntu 10.10, but this should provide a reasonable overview of the direction we're taking.

An article from Phoronix posted here started a rumors that Valve is working on a Linux version of Steam. It got us very exited about it, unfortunately for the moment there is no Linux version of Steam in development :(

Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton and eighty other important kernel developers are now debating how they plan to proceed with the future development of Linux at the Kernel Summit 2008 in Portland, Oregon.

The past few days we have been reporting on Valve's Steam client coming to Linux (and some of the Source Engine games too) soon as we had found Linux references within the Steam Mac OS X client and then other Linux references. We even ended up finding the unreleased Linux files on the Valve servers.

I use Ubuntu Linux as my primary OS. However for a moment, I was pleased to have kept Vista around. How can I meaningfully discuss the merits or pitfalls of Ubuntu without experiencing Ubuntu's primary contemporary competitor, Vista, firsthand?