[amscanne]

I'm replying to myself to provide a bit more context for those asking questions about the games I was trying.

I'm very capable of debugging library and video driver problems. In this case, it seemed to be actual game-internal issues from a recent update. The specific game was built on the Unity platform, and they seemed to have resolved the issues for Mac and Windows but not yet Linux. I'm not annoyed at Steam or the developer (it's reasonable that Linux issues aren't their priority if it's only a tiny portion of users).

My intent was not to say that Steam on Linux is generally broken, just to share my own mildly-amusing experience. :)

On a positive note -- after the initial frustration, I eventually bought Counterstrike and it worked great. I think it's amazing that Steam supports Linux at all, so I wasn't really upset when things didn't work perfectly. I was happy to risk throwing good money after bad, I'm sure I'll be able to play those other games some day.