Could Linux users one day play native ports of Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 the same way they can Enemy Territory: Quake Wars today? According to Phoronix, that may very well be so. The site says it has "received information" that confirms Valve’s plans to port its Source game engine to Linux.

Valve first hinted at those plans last year, when it put up a job posting for a Senior Software Engineer. One of the items under the list of tasks required from the candidate was, "Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform." Since then, game studio Running With Scissors has announced that its Source-based shooter Postal III will come out for Linux and Mac OS X. Both of those operating systems have Unix-like underpinnings, and they would both require a version of the Source engine based on the OpenGL graphics API instead of Microsoft’s Direct3D.

As Phoronix points out, Valve could find a market for its games on the Linux platform, too. CodeWeavers, a developer that writes Windows compatibility software for the open-source operating system, ranks Valve’s Steam game distribution app first in its "top 25" of software Linux users wish to run. Microsoft’s Office 2003 is ranked second, with Apple’s iTunes coming in third.