Valve Officially Confirms Steam for Ubuntu 12.04 - Softpedia

A very good news from Steam... (Finally Can I install Ubuntu at my home pc to play Team Fotress 2 and DOTA 2???) The Valve Linux team announced last evening, July 16th, that they've selected the Ubuntu operating system to deploy their upcoming Steam client for Linux.  

The Linux team at Valve just created a few hours ago an official blog where they will publish everything there is to know about the Steam client for Linux, or more exactly Ubuntu.

Why Ubuntu? Simply because it is the number one Linux operating system out there, used by millions of users worldwide. However, there will be support for other Linux distributions as well!

"First, we’re just starting development and working with a single distribution is critical when you are experimenting, as we are. It reduces the variability of the testing space and makes early iteration easier and faster."

"Secondly, Ubuntu is a popular distribution and has recognition with the general gaming and developer communities. This doesn’t mean that Ubuntu will be the only distribution we support. Based on the success of our efforts around Ubuntu, we will look at supporting other distributions in the future." - was stated in the blog announcement.

It the upcoming months, Valve wants to unleash a fully-featured Steam client for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system, optimize the Left 4 Dead 2 game to run at a high frame rate with OpenGL, and, of course, to port other popular Valve game titles.

"We’ve made good progress this year and now have the Steam client running on Ubuntu with all major features available. We’re still giving attention and effort to minor features but it’s a good experience at the moment."

"In the near future, we will be setting up an internal beta focusing on the auto-update experience and compatibility testing. [...] Our goal is to have L4D2 performing under Linux as well as it performs under Windows." - said the Linux team at Valve.

No Flash for Android 4.1, Jelly Bean, users | ZDNet

This story really is sad for me... too sad....

Some of you may be thinking that this isn't a big deal because Flash is supported in Chrome. This, after all, is how Adobe continues to semi-support Flash in Linux. Specifically, Adobe is working with Google on a single application programming interface (API) for hosting plug-ins within the browser. The API, code-named "Pepper", provides a layer between the plug-in and browser that abstracts away differences between browser and operating system implementations. Pepper is currently an experimental feature in Chrome. 

But, if you look closely you'll find that the "Pepper" implementation of Flash Player is only for the Chrome browser on x86/64 platforms. So, even though Chrome is Jelly Bean's default Web browser, Pepper isn't available on Android 4.1 and thus neither is Flash. 

So, can you just use an older version of Flash on your new Android 4.1 device? Adobe suggests that this wouldn't be a smart idea. “In many cases users of uncertified devices have been able to download the Flash Player from the Google Play Store, and in most cases it worked. However, with Android 4.1 this is no longer going to be the case, as we have not continued developing and testing Flash Player for this new version of Android and its available browser options. There will be no certified implementations of Flash Player for Android 4.1.” 

Looking ahead, Adobe will be blocking Flash runtime downloads. “Beginning August 15th we will use the configuration settings in the Google Play Store to limit continued access to Flash Player updates to only those devices that have Flash Player already installed. Devices that do not have Flash Player already installed are increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store after August 15th.”

Just because Adobe says it doesn't work and won't support it doesn't mean that the existing Flash Player won't work on Android 4.1-powered smartphones and tablets. Some users are already successfully running Flash on their Jelly Bean devices. In the future, they expect they'll just sideload it on their devices. But, as one developer pointed out, “Sooner or later, Adobe Flash Player will break.” 

Reading Adobe documentation it's clear that Adobe is betting its future on Windows and Macs. There's no Flash for iOS, Flash will gradually die off on Android, and Adobe has no publicly announced plans to bring Flash to either Windows Phone 8 or Windows RT. For better or worse, Adobe has decided that Flash won't be playing a role on most mobile devices.