I installed this on my netbook running Arch last night, really excited because I had steam keys for all of the linux-capable games in the current Humble Bundle.

Sadly, the ones I tried all said they're not supported on my platform. bubble.Burst();

Is your netbook powerful enough to run games?

Netbooks may not be equipped with the latest and greatest 3D, but a lot of indie games are essentially 2D, just using the 3D for compositing. There's no reason those wouldn't work.

Unless they need a hardware accelerated OpenGL implementation to run, because they don't have a software renderer?

I guess now I'll never know...

The linked Wiki article is about 4 years old. The section about (inofficial) native clients, on distributions other than Ubuntu, was added.

I really don't understand why (in terms of number of users) Debian-based wasn't the number 1 priority, let alone why Gentoo was given preference to it.

I'm most likely misunderstanding you, but a debian package (though I think geared towards Ubuntu) was the first thing released, in fact a lot of those listed in this wiki page are built _from_ the debian package. http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/

The linked website is nothing official nor are those builds. I have no idea why this is getting upvoted. Move along.

Valve actually focused on Ubuntu, logical choice.

All of the packages listed there are unofficial. Your question should be "why did a Gentoo user step up and make a package before a Debian user did" The official package is for Ubuntu.

It says "Inofficial ebuilds" under the Gentoo section.

Native? This is a guide to installing under wine.

Edit: oh duh. Completely skipped over that since I remember this page saying nothing of the sort.

The native part is in the first subsection:

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux#N...

Source code please.

<script type="text/javascript"> document.write('<blink>Steam Powered</blink>'); </script>