Hopeful applicants of Valve's Linux testing survey have much to rejoice today as a limited-access beta client for Steam's Linux version awaits testing starting today. Valve's official announcement states the studio received over 60,000 entries for its request for testers, and a slowly increasing group of players will receive access to the client going forward.

Steam Linux operates on Ubuntu 12.04. "An overwhelming majority of beta applicants have reported they’re running the Ubuntu distro of Linux,” Steam Linux team member Frank Crockett wrote. “We intend to support additional popular distros in the future, and we’ll prioritize development for these based on user feedback.”

Team Fortress 2 leads the pack of two dozen games available for Linux users which is viewable from the client itself. Valve still seeks more testers for future Linux betas, so head over to the survey page if you're interested.

Meanwhile, GOG's Trevor Longino recently criticized Valve for supporting only one distro. While GOG doesn't yet have Linux support, Longino says "...we want to try to get it where the majority of gamers, if they’re on Linux, will be able to get a game and expect it works."

For Valve's employees, working at one of the most secretive development studios around constitutes a once-in-a-respawn experience. The leakage of Valve's employee handbook earlier this year colorfully outlined a flat management structure culturing a counterintuitive emphasis on peer-driven independence. Speaking to Seattle Interactive Conference attendees yesterday (as reported by GeekWire), Valve Product Designer Greg Coomer said the same free-form philosophy governing the company's work ethic also factors into firing someone.

"I wish that we had covered firing in the employee handbook," Coomer said. "It was one of the things that we left out. We tried writing it, but we didn't feel like we were capturing how Valve thinks about (firing) in a well enough way. It was almost a wording problem. We couldn't get it done in the time that we wouldn't to finish the handbook. The short answer of how we handle terminations, really, is the same as we approach all other decisions at the company: It's a peer-driven process.

"If it turns out that we made a bad hiring decision, or that somebody is just not working out, there’s a method we use to get the people who are involved in the same room and to walk through the decision about what should really happen as a result of this person not functioning very well. Some of the details are kind of boring, but the main answer is that it's peer-driven, just like we evaluate each other as peers.”

I wonder what a caricaturized "Termination and You" chapter in the handbook would look like—probably the Pyro immolating an office chair or something. Still, Coomer attributed Valve's higher rate of self-fulfillment to the significant flexibility it bestows upon its workers, saying, “There are attributes that other companies have quoted about themselves that they allow their (employees) to spend some fraction of their time actually deciding on their own what to work on, but at Valve that percentage of your time is 100 percent. Every single person is responsible for deciding what they do every day."