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Is Valve quietly preparing Linux ports of its games? Rumors of an impending Source engine port emerged over six months ago, and today, Phoronix claims to have located some Linux libraries in the Windows version of the Left 4 Dead demo that further point in this direction, in particular, one named 'steamclient_linux.so.'

While the game's full release does not include these libraries, their inclusion in the demo suggests that Steam games could have native Linux clients in the near future, especially considering the libraries contain several strings nonessential to a Linux Left 4 Dead dedicated server but rather point to a Steam 3 release client on a Linux file-system.

Despite the somewhat limited appeal such a move could possibly have among the gaming crowd, it doesn't seem entirely out of the question that Valve would be striving to make Steam completely platform-agnostic, and a recent job listing at the company looking for someone whose responsibilities would include porting Windows-based games to the Linux platform seems to support this.