Digital distribution of software and games in particular has grown quite a bit in the last couple of years. I’ve checked out some of these services myself, such as Steam by Valve and Direct2Drive.

Being a Ubuntu user for much of the time these days, PC gaming hasn’t been much of a focus for me lately. However, I’m always on the lookout for interesting thing to take my mind of the more serious stuff. Today I stumbled upon Djl.

Djl? What kind of name is that?

Naturally, my curiosity got the best of my so I decided to check it out.

In a nutshell, Djl is essentially Steam for Linux, except that Valve has absolutely nothing to do with it.

If you’re not familiar with Steam, let me explain how Djl works.

Djl provides you, the user, with a client with direct access to a repository of games. To play these games, you select the game and click “Install” and after downloading the game, it’s installed through Djl and started through Djl.

Sounds simple, right? The question is, is it as simple as it sounds?

The answer is yes and no.

The Djl interface is easy to use and works as advertised I guess you can say. However, when it comes to playing the games, it’s a bit more hit and miss. All games I’ve tried to download seemed to download without problems. However, only half of the ones I tried actually worked.

The ones that downloaded, installed and ran as intended were a great example of what the potential of this product is. Unfortunately, the majority of the games I tried to install failed to run for a variety of reasons. In some cases due to incompatibilities with other software, in some cases without any real reason.

So, although Djl has a lot of potential, at this point there are just too many things that are not working. I do have to say that I have found a number of very interesting games I wouldn’t have known about if I hadn’t tried Djl. Since it’s also updated quite frequently, I expect I’ll continue to find new entertainment gems in the future.