Late last night Valve made the Mac version of its Steam digital distribution service available, ending the relatively short beta period, and went on to confirm a Linux version of the service.

It looks well, even if the games list is a little underpopulated at the moment

For the moment, the games available to Mac users are fairly limited, with Portal being the first of the games built on Valve’s own Source engine to be made available, though we’re told we should expect others to follow relatively shortly. In the meantime, there have been a number of additions to the Steam Store that should see Mac users relatively well looked after, including the Telltale Games Steam Play Pack, built around the recent episodic remakes of both Sam & Max (freelance police) and Monkey Island.

While there are a raft of other games available from bigger names, including Football Manager, it seems likely that some gamers have been just a touch disappointed by the lack of Mac-based offerings from Valve itself, though it seems that those are well on their way.

Aside from that, the Mac version of Steam currently boasts an offers section, to be updated every Wednesday, with new Steam Play titles. Steam Play is Valve’s way of labelling any games where buying the game for one platform automatically grants players access to the same content for other platforms, meaning that Mac users who also play from Windows machines won’t need to worry about buying the same content twice to ensure that they’re able to play it from one OS or the other.

The other piece of good news that came out for non-Windows-based Steam fans is that, as Phoronix reports, there’s a Linux version of the service already in beta, though there’s been relatively little official word about it so far.

If nothing else, it’s a very interesting time to be a gamer who doesn’t use Windows as their primary operating system. Incidentally, if you grab to Mac version of Steam, you also get Portal for free until May 24th. Hard to say no to an offer like that. Portal is also free for PC users though the same link, so good news for everyone.