Valve has officially revealed that it plans to bring its Steam game distribution service to the Linux platform. The company is also working to port its Source game engine and its popular 2009 title Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2). The Steam port for Linux was announced this evening on the Valve website in a new blog that will chronicle the progress of the company’s Linux development efforts.

Valve says that it is currently working to refine the software, but declined to say when users can expect to see it launch. The company is optimizing L4D2 to ensure a suitably high frame rate. They are also porting other undisclosed Valve titles and putting the finishing touches on the Linux version of the Steam client.

The software will be available at launch on Ubuntu 12.04, the latest version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Valve wants to start by focusing on a single deployment environment, but will consider expanding support to additional distributions in the future if its efforts on Ubuntu are successful. In the blog entry, the Valve revealed that Ubuntu was chosen because it is popular and has high visibility among gamers and developers.

“The goal of the Steam client project is a fully-featured Steam client running on Ubuntu 12.04. We’ve made good progress this year and now have the Steam client running on Ubuntu with all major features available,” the company said in its announcement. “Since the Steam client isn’t much without a game, we’re also porting L4D2 to Ubuntu. This tests the game-related features of the Steam client, in addition to L4D2 gameplay on Ubuntu.”

The possibility of Valve bringing Steam to Linux has been a subject of intense speculation among Linux enthusiasts for several years. Linux hardware site Phoronix, which has kept a close eye on the story, finally confirmed that Steam is coming to Linux earlier this year after visiting the company’s offices and seeing the software in action.

Valve’s official confirmation of the port will be welcomed by Ubuntu users and Linux enthusiasts. It’s worth noting that Valve isn’t the only gaming company to take a recent interest in bringing its titles to Ubuntu. As we reported last month, EA recently launched several HTML5-based games in the Ubuntu Software Center. EA’s titles and a number of games by popular independent developers are now among the most popular paid applications in Ubuntu’s software store.

Although Linux has been slow to gain traction as a mainstream desktop operating system, there is no question that its audience of early adopters and technology enthusiasts offers a fertile market for game publishers. If major game titles attract a good volume of sales on Linux, its possible that a broader range of third-party software developers and hardware manufacturers will start to consider supporting the platform.