I am building my first P.C. and had to buy Windows 8 for the Steam support, however I have been a fan of Ubuntu for a little while, and while searching for an ETA on Steam being on Linux, and came across news that at some point next week Steam will go into an open beta on Linux. Here is a link to the article http://steamforlinux.com/?q=en/node/141
I've been using it for a couple of days and have had no problem with it. I'm seriously considering making my linux installation my primary boot option. But I'll still be needing a couple of things from Windows.
I'm having problems getting it to actually install at all, but I'm using Ubuntu 12.10 instead of 12.4 so it's unsupported.
As a long-time Linux user, I'm excited for this, but I have some reservations:
1. Good God, installing drivers... I am unfortunate enough to have tried to use my laptop, which has a Radeon HD 4650 M, and installing just semi-functional drivers for that thing, was nothing short of a damned nightmare. I spent hours, I don't even remember what ended up working. And they boosted my 3D performance a great deal over the F/OSS drivers, but there is graphical corruption popping up randomly during normal OS use, and it's incredibly irritating.
2. Fragile like a butterfly. Every once in a while, I'll just reboot, and everything will be broken when I boot back up. My wifi just stopped working one day, and the nic won't work either, I booted back into Windows 8, and had no problems.
3. Command line oriented, I actually consider this one a plus, I love working in the terminal, I'm much more comfortable blowing through a shitload of tasks using only the keyboard, but this is going to be a downside for many.
4. It's just not Windows, it's not what I'm used to. I've been using Linux on and off for a good 8 or 10 years, but I'm still just not used to it. I don't know where everything is.
It installed just fine on mine. Did you add any non-official repository?