In some cases, Steam on Linux greets your with an error dialog stating:
OpenGL GLX context is not using direct rendering, which may cause performance problems
This is because Steam ships copies of several system libraries which may interfere with other libraries on your system that it doesn’t replace. This can easily be fixed. Just remove Steams copies and let it use your system’s default libraries. Here’s a simple script to accomplish that:
saschpe@festor:~ cat bin/steam-fix-opengl.sh #!/bin/sh rm ~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 rm ~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 rm ~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 rm ~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 rm ~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1
You can also download it here.