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Like Adobe Flash with Linux, Valve's effort will suffocate on the need to support hundreds different linux distributions and configurations complete with crappy drivers and audio/video subsystems.

Three years is my estimate.

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That's more the distributors' problem. An Ubuntu package (well, .deb) and an RPM for Fedora are the only necessities and the other distributions will do the hard work themselves.

It's not like every distribution out there uses a different audio framework, graphics API etc. The fundamental components are all the same. Efforts to standardize a lot of things in the free-Unix/Linux world have come a long way in the last 5-7 years.

Also, realistically, the number of supported distros would likely amount to a small handful. Bigger distributions like SuSE, Fedora and Ubuntu.

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