By Alec Meer on April 22nd, 2010 at 1:38 pm.
So think codey types snooping around in the current closed beta of Steam for Macs. They’ve found explicit mention of Linux in the launcher, and claim there’s no reason for that to be in there if this was purely a Mac thing. Certain, hoofing the Source engine over to OpenGL for Macs makes it platform non-partisan, so there’s nothing other than business decisions really limiting Valve from supporting Linux. While there has been previous evidence to suggest Valve have been sniffing around the penguin platform (including a call for a Linux software engineer a few years back), it’s merely wild rumours and speculation until the house of Seattle thumps down a mighty hand and proffers answers. There’s a really good chance this is smoke on the Unix-water, but it would most certainly be lovely to easily play Team Fortress 2 or L4D on any personal computer.
Who here’s using Linux, then? How’s the gaming?
22/04/2010 at 13:42 jimmy says:
I’m using Linux.
And the gaming is painfully limited. But acceptable if you’re not picky. I want this. Everybody does.
22/04/2010 at 19:39 Arthur Barnhouse says:
God yes. I have a PC, a Mac, and a Linux netbook and it would be wonderful to be able to have some cross platform options available. Obviously the early games will be big brand, but two years down the road, having a Torchlight or something similar be cross platform and on steam is really a great image.
Also, they’re porting Source to be platform agnostic, but is there a possibility they’ll support some older games using WINE? It could really open up a lot of title availabilities to them on day 1.
22/04/2010 at 20:21 Joachim says:
I want this. Bad. I’d even shell out money for, and run a specific Steam distro just to be extra-compatible and not have to run Windows.
22/04/2010 at 13:43 pafnucy says:
Gaming, heh.
22/04/2010 at 13:44 eoin says:
Linux gaming?
# # # tumbleweed # # #
While games on Linux are certainly possible it’s such a vanishingly small % of the overall P.C. population that it’s only really possible if the cost to Valve is minimal. Which is may well be seeing as they’re porting to Mac now, which runs on a Unix variant (don’t ask me what).
Loki games were running for a while on the business model of porting games to Linux but they’re long gone. I haven’t used Linux regularly for a number of years though any time I have it’s a much much nicer platform, I’m limited by lock in to certain apps (just like everyone else).
22/04/2010 at 13:58 Mike Arthur says:
OSX is certified Unix. The kernel (Darwin) is partly based on BSD code (among other things). It tends towards using a BSD userspace/tools rather than GNU ones.
Linux is not Unix but is Unix-like. They are both POSIX compatible (which are the Unix APIs normally used for development).
22/04/2010 at 13:46 robrob says:
Finally, the year of Linux on the desktop!
25/04/2010 at 23:32 Josh W says:
As it has almost been for a third of my life!
22/04/2010 at 13:46 correnos says:
The gaming’s about the same as on a mac currently, which is to say unimpressive. It’ll be nice not to have to boot into windows for my Portal.
Maybe this’ll give graphics card companies reason to make decent drivers now (hey, we can all dream, right?)
22/04/2010 at 13:48 Alexej says:
played some quake 3 years ago, also nexuiz (same as q3 but free). Usually everything that is q3 derived will run. That’s all.
I’ve heard of people running steam and WoW with Wine, but it’s not the same thing.
23/04/2010 at 04:37 MD says:
This’ll seem like quibbling, but Nexuiz is actaully based on DarkPlaces, a Quake 1 engine mod. (Also it’s only ‘the same as q3′ to the extent that, say, street racing game x is the same as street racing game y.)
23/04/2010 at 04:43 MD says:
Man, I need to stop typing ‘actaully’. It’s probably my most frequent typo, but it always comes from the fingers rather than the brain. (Well, I guess I should blame the motor-control part of the brain. But not the language part.) I can’t work out why — it’s right-index-finger versus left-ring-finger, and lefty somehow keeps pushing in.
22/04/2010 at 13:52 Michael says:
Gaming is the one thing keeping me on windows (I can run a VM for desktop applications eg iTunes). I’ve done the WINE thing and it’s just been one debugging nightmare after another. I’m ready for native Linux binaries (again, I miss you Loki). I would re-buy my entire game library to get Linux support, and believe me, that’s not an inconsequential amount.
22/04/2010 at 13:55 Tei says:
Will be a “new thing” if Valve support Linux on Steam. But the market on Linux would be really limited, and maybe a burden.. but you never know. If Steam is remade to work in OS/X, having it to run in Linux seems feasible, still a long path.
What type of games would have a linux version? some FPS’s, lots of indie titles (lots of indie games already have a version for Mac and Linux). It may make sense for indie titles, like… the only work there would be to repackage these games exactly how Steam expect then to work.
I abandoned the use of ubuntu has a gaming machine because almost all “demos” and games on the brick and mortar shop, are made for windows, and making then run on Linux is a pain. There are lots of games for Linux, just not the games you may want to run. Having lots of games that are easy to install, would be really nice. And may be amazing good for the most casual linux users.
It could be that Steam is positioning itself has the “Indie shop”, and selling to Mac and Linux make commercial sense for indies. We don’t know if also make commercial sense for Steam.
22/04/2010 at 14:04 Mike Arthur says:
“If Steam is remade to work in OS/X, having it to run in Linux seems feasible, still a long path.”
Any basis for this? If they’re using any cross-platform GUI libraries for this (e.g. Webkit or Qt) then it’s actually not really much harder to port to Linux once you’ve ported to OSX. The harder part is deployment but it’s really not a lot of work.
22/04/2010 at 13:55 toni says:
i use ubuntu on an old pentium laptop, got myself crossover for free during a promotion. It has a one-click installation wizard for steam and popular steamgames. I can play Half-life, dystopia (mod), TF2 on it without crashes or problems. It just takes a little longer to start and I have to reduce quality settings but that’s more because my laptop sucks than WINE having any problems.
if you don’t wanna shelf out the money for Crossover or similar programs there are enough easy guides on the net to do it yourself. but as a linux user you are used to READ THE MANUAL instead of having some auto-install programs fuck up your installation.
22/04/2010 at 13:59 LewieP says:
id support linux pretty well don’t they?
22/04/2010 at 17:48 Collic says:
Yep, they have in the past. Theyve always been big proponents of Opengl. Now valve are releasing Opengl games too the task of getting them running under linux is largely done. Even if they don’t do it themselves you can be sure nix users will figure out a way to get the mac ports running under linux.
22/04/2010 at 13:59 Theory says:
Steam has been on Linux since day one for dedicated servers. It makes this kind of thing completely meaningless: it could be that the GUI client is being ported, or it could just be DS stuff. If anyone has an install of HLDS for Linux, can they do a comparison for us?
(The last time this site got all excited over Steam on Linux, their evidence was the Linux dedicated server files that came with Left 4 Dead.)
22/04/2010 at 15:06 Wisq says:
@Theory:
HLDS (at least for TF2) is already installed via a command-line version of Steam.
I don’t expect there would be much call for a Steam GUI to install dedicated servers, seeing as how they typically reside in decidedly non-graphical environments.
23/04/2010 at 22:17 Theory says:
Huh?
24/04/2010 at 17:58 Theory says:
Okay, I’ve been convinced.
22/04/2010 at 14:01 Mike Arthur says:
Yeh, you’re fairly spot-on here Alec. If the new Steam client has been written cross-platform from the ground up then there’s little reason it can’t move to Linux. Certainly, most OpenGL games use SDL on Mac which means there’s very little extra work on porting to Linux from here. As the GUI code is already non-native looking on Windows already (I’m guessing it’s based around Webkit quite heavily now) you don’t have Look And Feel issues on Mac or Linux.
This is certainly possible, if Valve want to. It makes sense, what with the rise of Linux netbooks.
To qualify my opinions, I do cross-platform porting/development for a living. Valve look like they are doing the cross-platform “proper” route for this (e.g. for the GUI, develop for both/all three major platforms at once). The last company I worked at, I did the original Mac/Linux porting and we saw Linux marketshare to rival that of Macs.
Interesting stuff!
22/04/2010 at 14:03 BonusWavePilot says:
Yeah, ‘nother Linux user here. The gaming is… well, not great to be honest. Mostly I either emulate it, or play things on my Windows scratchpad gaming partition. (OK, so that’s not using Linux exactly… got to say I recommend it as a way to use Windows though… Buggered up? Got a virus? Delete it and start again… preferably from a known image rather than going through the whole installation rigmarole.)
That said, we do have Battle for Wesnoth, World of Goo, Freeciv, Cave Story, the Introversion titles, Nethack, Frets on Fire, a crapload of emulators for various old timey systems etc. – its not *quite* as bad as ‘another tetris clone’ or ‘a shit puzzle game with graphics stolen from someone’s slightly less shit puzzle game’. Bit light on the recent big name titles as a general rule. WINE for emulation, particularly if you sign up to the Cedega service, does a pretty good job for a lot of stuff. Not tried it on anything too steamy, but have seen reports of such things working.
22/04/2010 at 14:03 Billy says:
It’s a really really really awful idea to base rumours off company job vacancies, there’s literally dozens of reasons why Valve would need linux software engineers, from internal distributed build engineering to networking to dedicated server applications. They could even have a job posting saying they needed a guy specifically to port steam to linux and it could just be for a feasibility study.
It’s also worth noting that mac and linux code will be relatively similar and code used from various tests could be refactored into a mac project, even if it references linux by name. That said if it is true then great, I personally don’t use linux a whole lot but i’m sure it would make a lot of people happy.
22/04/2010 at 14:03 KillahMate says:
I use it from time to time. Gaming’s… complicated.
The Great Equalizer, Flash, works more-or-less OK, so Web games are fine, and Wine emulation is up to snuff when it comes to most smaller games. Not to mention smaller games tend more and more to have native Linux ports (thank Chtulhu for cross-platform game libraries). But it’s still not nearly a given, and AAA titles generally take a few years to start reliably working with emulation. So, for example, C&C 3 works just fine, while Fallout 3 is tolerable. It’s partly a matter of how advanced the game is; Crysis still has problems.
You’ll note that was about emulation. Native AAA titles are a joke. id Software games and others using their engines tend to work natively and fine, everyone else… less so. Yearly major game releases can be counted on one hand, and not too many fingers at that.
To compensate slightly, there’s quite a strong Linux indie gaming scene, but it’s regrettably mostly focused on open source clones of classic games. Also it can be a bit insulated. There aren’t really any flagship titles (in the sense that they’re known outside the community), though the multiplayer FPS scene has advanced a lot in the last few years, and may yet surprise us.
Make no mistake, Steam (especially if followed by all the source games, like on the Mac) would be a seismic event.
22/04/2010 at 14:06 Doeke says:
I play TF2, and use Ubuntu. Now I am forced to reboot to Win7 every time I want to play games. Steam and TF2 for linux would make me very happy.
22/04/2010 at 14:10 Mike Arthur says:
I spoke to the founder of http://www.tuxgames.com/ at a open-source conference in London. He said that he’s yet to actually make any profit and is basically just bankrolling it himself.
I’m an OSX user now but did the Linux gaming thing for years. Used Cedega and Wine for a while, neither were good enough. Played only native games for a while, there weren’t enough.
I’m a KDE developer so I know a lot of Linux folks. Those who game all tend to either have a console or just keep a Windows partition around. I do the latter.
22/04/2010 at 14:10 mrpier says:
I think most of Valves catalog is already playable on Linux through Wine (and other games as well). The problem has been that not all of the features of a game or the game itself would work on Linux unless through considerable tweaking.
22/04/2010 at 14:15 Ragnar says:
Games I have played (with native clients) lots include:
* BD4 (a boulder dash clone)
* Neverwinter Nights
* Alpha Centauri
* Freeciv
* Ancient Domains of Mystery
Plus emulator-stuff and probably more that I have forgotten now. More gaming in Windows though, since most games are Windows-only.
22/04/2010 at 14:16 Niels Walta says:
Using Ubuntu on my home machine I have to admit to still booting into Windows whenever I want to get any gaming on. Even for things that run brilliantly on Linux, such as World of Goo or ET:QW, I’ll switch, though this mostly has more to do with driver issues rather than the games themselves. A quick round of UT2k4 however pops up occasionally without a reboot.
Bringing the Steam platform and (possibly) the Source-engine to Linux would be welcomed and a major step for gaming on the OS, but hardly anything earth-shattering when it comes to sales-potential. From a business standpoint however it is still interesting as Valve has the resources and technology to relatively easily step in and thus define what gaming will look like on such distributions as Ubuntu. Thus becoming even more synonymous with “PC gaming”: Valve, the go-to distributor one thinks of whenever someone mentions gaming on the PC.
22/04/2010 at 14:20 bookwormat says:
I’ve been using it as my primary operating system for the last decade, and of course many games I want to play require a Windows partition or a dedicated machine running Windows. Linux Distributions other than Android are not a very interesting market for commercial games obvioulsy.
But there are still a lot of great games running on my Ubuntu and Android PCs. All the web and flash stuff obviously, and many of the indie titles run with WINE ( including Frozen Synapse, juhu! ).
And then there are the free community projects like XMoto or Wesnoth, which are also a lot of fun.
And don’t forget Android (which is very different from conventional Linux distributions, but still running on Linux). Android is still very fresh, but there are a lot of games already, A few of them are even fun.
22/04/2010 at 14:21 Ali Pang says:
I’m on linux. I play StarCraft. :p
22/04/2010 at 14:23 Lars Westergren says:
“Who here’s using Linux, then?”
Me, as often as I can, for my daily work and surfing.
“How’s the gaming?”
…. wretched. Unless you count online games with Flash. Ok, some titles work fine via Wine/Crossover Office, but I just can’t be bothered these days.
I just keep a Windows partion to boot into when I want to play games.
Unfortunately I think this state is likely to continue. When it comes to cutting edge competition, graphics hardware companies and game companies are unwilling to risk their crown jewels by releasing crucial infrastructure as open source. And considering how eager the Linux community in general are to reverse engineer stuff (and skilled at it), I can understand companies hesitating to even release proprietary binaries for the platform.
22/04/2010 at 14:25 dwl says:
With all the tablets and slates and pads and net-books around these days I would be surprised if Steam doesn’t pop up on Mac’s and Linux. There is an obvious market for casual gaming and its clear those types are in abundance in the store. AAA titles? Probably not until ATI and Nvidia see value in it.
22/04/2010 at 14:31 Goose says:
Personally, I’m still on Windows, but would love to switch to Linux. The only things keeping me on Windows is a lack of games and a hatred of constant rebooting. If this finally pushes game development on Linux past the preliminary stages its been in for the last decade, then I’ll finally be able to switch and tell Microsoft to eat a bag of hell.
This also assumes I’ll find a way to make Sims 3 playable under Linux, because my wife would kill me if that no longer became an option.
22/04/2010 at 14:33 clippa says:
What if Valve were making their own linux-based gaming-geared operating system? Imagine that :D
22/04/2010 at 14:38 KillahMate says:
Well, that would make all kinds of no sense.
22/04/2010 at 14:47 Batolemaeus says:
Actually, it would make sense, kinda. It’s basically a locked distribution channel like your run of the mill console. Basically, they could employ drm at a system level.
While i thing that turning a pc into what it effectively a console would be highly perverse, i’m pretty sure someone thought about it already..
22/04/2010 at 14:37 Rockeye says:
I run Linux on my netbook, and do play games on it. The ones I’ve played most have been Uplink, Battle for Wesnoth, gnu backgammon, various emulator games (snes mainly). I did manage to get Solium Infernum working through Wine as well.
I have tried playing my Steam games through Wine, but haven’t really had the stability/performance I’d like when I’ve tried. I’d definitely use a Linux-native Steam.
22/04/2010 at 14:38 Batolemaeus says:
I have quite a few linux boxes, but not for gaming.
It’s basically like this:
Gaming happens on my server2k8 box that i also tinker around with.
My servers all run on debian.
My test box runs debian, ubuntu and gentoo. I’ve played on it, but honestly, windows is the better choice.
However, should valve actually release for linux, i think my time on windows will significantly decrease. L4d2, tf2, and cs are games that don’t run well in wine on my box, but if they run natively..mmh..me like.
22/04/2010 at 14:46 kikito says:
Writing from a linux system now. Willing to reformat my windows partition and kiss windows goodbye if this ends up happening.
22/04/2010 at 15:00 Quintesse says:
Indeed the state of gaming on Linux sucks. I’m waiting for the day that virtual machines have full hw accellerated 3D support so I don’t have to reboot all the time (because I think that 3D support in VMs is much more likely to happen than native triple A games on Linux)
23/04/2010 at 12:45 LionsPhil says:
@Quintesse: VirtualBox. Free, open source VM with 3D accelleration for supported guest OSes, which include Linux, Windows NT family (i.e. not 9x), and Solaris. OpenGL only with beta Direct3D “drivers”. (They seem to actually do it by overwriting D3D system files with bits of WINE. Ugh.)
Running Linux under a VM at least *mostly* avoids the hell of making X11 and audio work right. Although thanks to the great PulseAudio trainwreck one of my Linux VMs always boots up muted.
Gaming under a Windows VM…enh. TBH I’ve found the virtual 3D drivers troublesome, and why run the OS with the better hardware support (and, frankly, stability) under the virtual hardware?
22/04/2010 at 15:02 user@example.com says:
smooooooke on the Unix-water
and Linux on the desktop
22/04/2010 at 15:08 kororas says:
Id drop windows like a sack of spuds if most games could be played on it with no loss of quality or performance. Heres to a (potential) step in the right direction! Hurrah!
22/04/2010 at 15:11 DavidK says:
Linux user here. The gaming scene isn’t as dire as most make it out to be. There aren’t many recent games that run natively, but there are some titles with decent support (Eve Online and Quake Live come to mind), others might work with WINE (Valve’s stuff).
Indie games tend to fare better (e.g. Dwarf Fortress, Sleep is Death, Penumbra and Dominions 3 are native) and WINE seems to play well with most indie titles I throw at it (e.g. Solium Infernum, Frozen Synapse, Minecraft, some of Cliffski’s stuff and anything from Introversion, to name a few).
And remember that Dosbox, ScummVM and other emulators are all supported, which widens the gaming catalogue by an order of magnitude. Ditto for Flash/HTML5 games.
My point is, although it’s nothing like Windows, there’s more to it than just Freeciv and Nethack.
22/04/2010 at 15:13 elFarto says:
Koules forever!!!
22/04/2010 at 15:15 Phil says:
Linux user, but another one who eventually cracked & installed windows solely for gaming. I wanted to play TF2…(HL2EpX worked fine under Wine, but TF2 was too much for it at the time. I believe it works now…)
Linux gaming is for the dedicated at the moment & it’ll probably remain that way until (say) Valve & the Ubuntu people get together to deliver a kick-ass gaming platform & set of dev libraries for Linux.
22/04/2010 at 15:22 Wisq says:
My main problem is that whenever a dual- or tri-platform 3D accelerated game comes out, I’m always happy at the notion of Linux support, but I never actually use it.
Having a Windows machine for gaming alongside my 24/7 home Linux desktop/server has been a basic reality for so long. All the expensive hardware goes in there — even running Dwarf Fortress or DOSbox games benefit from the better CPU.
All that gaming hardware also runs a lot hotter than my quiet, passively-cooled server stuff, so it wouldn’t even translate well to my Linux server if I got better stuff and tried to do the hardware hand-me-down. And even dual-booting the gaming machine would be such a pain that I might as well not bother, unless some application really demands Linux.
So, if this is real, then it might be a while before I use it. A small island of Linux in a Windows gaming world isn’t the most useful thing just yet — but at least it’s a big step in the right direction, and I applaud them.
22/04/2010 at 15:26 pimterry says:
Linux gamer — but most of my gaming is on Windows (just moved from XP -> 7), because it’s a right hassle otherwise. You can get a few of the big name games (the major developer being ID, so Quake, UT, Doom etc), and Wine can now run most stuff that’s not too new or taxing (so Frozen Synapse is fine, eve online/wow is fine, but Bad Company 2 is not).
I would be very much into a linux version of steam + valve’s games.
22/04/2010 at 15:28 Andrew Oakley says:
I use Ubuntu Linux and run Torchlight under Steam using WINE.
It Just Works.
WINE is a compatibility layer between Linux and various MS-Windows libraries such as DirectX. WINE is not an emulator. You just type “wine programname.exe” and, for the most part, it runs. For really intense FPS/RPG stuff, it won’t cut it, but for casual games, arcade games, anything designed for a netbook, It Just Works.
It’s faster than an emulator but not as quick as running it directly on MS-Windows. I tried running Torchlight under Steam via WINE on my Linux netbook, and despite using netbook mode and low res textures, it ran at something like 8fps. Runs just fine on my Celeron 3300 Linux desktop, though.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a MS-Windows machine for playing proper grown-up FPSes like Crysis, Far Cry 2, Oblivion etc. But I don’t have my Windows machine booted up all the time. My Linux desktop also acts as a server, stays on 24/7 and WINE lets me jump on casual games just fine.
It’s also extremely nice to be able to run Steam on both platforms and to choose whether to play a game on MS-Windows or Linux without having to pay for a second copy of the game.
22/04/2010 at 15:34 Rohit says:
Installed Jolicloud on my netbook, and I can play Quake 3 and DOOM.
I’m happy for now.
22/04/2010 at 15:36 colinmarc says:
Linux? Gaming? hehe.
I use linux every day, and even when it comes to official ports like Alpha Centauri or Railroad Tycoon, they are a) ridiculously hard to find and b) don’t work half the time.
I will say that dork fortress works perfectly on linux! (except the new version hasn’t been ported over yet, boo)
For most of my gaming, I dualboot win7.
22/04/2010 at 15:37 Dolphan says:
As I’m sure others have said above – WINE is excellent these days. I used ubuntu for quite a while and never had any problem running games, other than (oddly) Bookworm Adventures 2, which had a few resolution issues.
22/04/2010 at 15:42 jackflash says:
I love the ‘nix, but stopped using it solely due to the lack of gaming. If gaming finally takes off on the platform, I will happily ditch Windows 7 to go back to OpenSUSE or ‘buntu.
22/04/2010 at 15:45 durr says:
Don’t know how related this is, but remember there already IS Linux support for dedicated servers, which I think includes a barebones version of Steam. Before we have script lines confirming PLAYING games on Linux being supported, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
The OpenGL port for MaxOSX is a huge step towards, Linux, though. I guess the only think truly holding them back is that they would need to “officially” support Linux if they ever released a Steam client for it, which includes having a team dedicated to it with all the additional time and money needed spent on maybe 0.5% of the mainstream gaming community. It would probably be easy to just throw out SOME quick Linux port, but that’s not really an option for a big, commercial software like Steam.
22/04/2010 at 16:04 Sagan says:
My Laptop is running Linux. (Ubuntu) You can get most games to work nowadays using Wine. Even though sometimes you just have to be lucky. Here are some statistics about how people are reporting which applications work and which don’t. And you get some interesting behaviour in there. The Sims 3 for example appears three times in the statistics. One guy reporting it as working rather well, (Gold) then another guy says it doesn’t work at all, (Garbage) and then a third says it works perfectly. (Platin)
My personal experience for that game: It didn’t work right when it came out, but there was a patch out within a couple of days. If you know how to apply a patch to the source code and compile the program, you could play it from that point forward. A month later the patch was included in the main version of Wine, so everyone could play the game. (all the reporting that I mentioned above happened AFTER that) After that I never had any problems with The Sims 3. Well, OK, that’s not perfectly true. I had to use a no-CD-crack because the DRM wouldn’t work, and the launcher didn’t work properly, so I couldn’t log in and download the second city. But actually playing the game was flawless.
I would say roughly half of the Windows games out there work right out of the box. A lot of others you can get working with some effort. The great thing is, that it is improving constantly, and if something is fixed for one application, then it is also fixed for all future applications. It doesn’t always move ahead in a straight line, for example for the last couple of months, sound doesn’t work in a lot of applications unless you change a setting, but it is noticeable how more and more new games just work.
I fully expect, that soon we will start using Wine to play Windows games that don’t work in Windows 7 any more.
But then on the other hand, I haven’t switched to Linux on my main desktop PC yet. Because sometimes you just want to know that stuff will work. I don’t play all that much on my laptop anyway, so I can deal with having problems occasionally there.
22/04/2010 at 16:21 jon_hill987 says:
I have not come across anything that won’t work in Windows 7 unless it also won’t work in XP. I tried Wine for a couple of these (set it to 98 settings) and it wouldn’t run them either.
22/04/2010 at 16:17 Karel says:
I use windows only. I have a lot of games, and don’t want to reboot everytime I want to do a different thing.
But I hope that, one day, we will give up windows for other OSes, so i cracked my version of win 7 .
22/04/2010 at 16:19 Ben says:
Gaming on Linux, or a lack thereof, is what has me returning from Ubuntu to Windows time and time again. While I can play some of my favourite classics such as Diablo II comfortably under wine, most games are pretty badly handled. My first thought when I heard of the news that Valve games were being ported to OSX and presumably utilizing OpenGL was that I may finally be able to play some more popular games on Ubuntu, which is a great OS and keeps on improving with every release.
22/04/2010 at 16:19 Don says:
Well gaming on Ubuntu I mostly limit to a bit of Dwarf Fortress. As I got a cheap copy of W7 and booting from one to the other doesn’t take long I don’t really miss games on Linux and it’s kind of good discipline, I only play games when I’ve finished doing the other stuff. And I only boot W7 to play games, really not missing Microsoft when it comes to my working OS.
As to Steam on Linux well it would be a start and maybe Valve will port some of their own games over to see how it goes. But the Linux share is really too small to make it worthwhile unless there’s something to make it more attractive.
So perhaps Valve are playing a long game. Fairly soon every gamer’s machine will easily be able to run a virtual OS without a major hit on performance. If Valve created a Linux image to do that job for a useful subset of the PCs/Macs out there (which they already know lots about via their hardware survey) they could offer developers the equivalent of the console platforms. That is one where the hardware is a known quantity and the OS and drivers are always patched up to date. And perhaps do something to combat piracy at the same time.
22/04/2010 at 16:23 Sarlix says:
Linux user. Only played natives, flash, and emulated games. Would love to see steam on linux though, especially since ATI have upped their driver support it. Good news I say. :)
22/04/2010 at 16:32 James G says:
Dabbled in Linux on an off over the past ten years or so. The general userfriendliness has improved dramatically in that time, but I find myself using Windows most of the time. Games are one reason, but also just general software/hardware compatability (although the latter is hugely better now than when I first started). Also, as someone with only rudimentary coding skill, the benefits of an open system don’t have a direct impact on me, even if it does appeal idealistically.
But ultimately any increased support for Linux is a good thing for everyone except Microsoft. Even if I stick with the proprietary ship Windows for the time being, a good bit of competition should keep things fresh.
22/04/2010 at 16:46 Kornflakes says:
Yes please.
22/04/2010 at 17:13 Vinraith says:
Personally I work in Linux, but play in Windows. Exterior of the occasional game of chess or the like I don’t play games in Linux, haven’t tried to run anything under Wine (or whatever they’re calling it now) in better than a decade, and don’t personally feel a lot of need to game under Linux as I’m comfortable with my present arrangement. That said, more choice is always a good thing, so I’ll join others in hoping this goes through even if I rather doubt I’d use it much myself.
22/04/2010 at 17:37 Frye says:
Linux is not for the desktop. Not now, and not within 5 years at least unless some big commercial player steps in.
Linux had its litmus test when a lot of netbooks had it pre-installed a few years ago. Consumers returned the linux versions more than 4 times (!!) as often as the very same hardware with a MS OS.
Linux keeps breaking (when in the hands of an inexperienced user). I personally lost a lot of my employer’s money on those.
On the other hand, it can be extremely pleasing to have a custom OS/software tailored for your hardware. For me, this is where Linux truly shines. Of course your average Ubuntu installation will simply use generic binaries (granted, in both x86 / x64 versions) and throw away all this. But for those willing to recompile everything (which takes about 70 hours on my box) it can be very gratifying; really feels like YOUR operating system. 2x framerates for (native!) linux versions are not uncommon. Not something that overclocking can ever do for you. But which large gaming company would ever give it’s source code out for free like ID did with Quake? It wouldn’t make commercial sense so we’re stuck with generic crap binaries, compiled to run on any PC. Might aswell stick with windows then.
Linux is my toy, but whenever I try to use it commercially for anything other than servers I bump into far more problems than anticipated, mostly due to end-user’s inability to maintain their systems. I would not recommend the average user even installing simple Ubuntu. Not yet.
23/04/2010 at 11:01 Mr Labbes says:
You do realize that the Linux versions pre-installed on netbooks and laptops are only an alibi so they could say “OS pre-installed”. The one my laptop came with, called “Linpus Linux” was horrible, and I was happy to replace it with Ubuntu.
Saying that customers don’t like Linux because of that would be like saying that nobody likes Windows because nobody uses Windows 95 anymore. If today’s computers came with 95 pre-installed, I bet a lot of people would return it just because they are too stupid/lazy/inexperienced to install a new OS.
Edit: I agree with you on the rest, though: Linux is not for the inexperienced user, and it’s probably not the best idea in a corporate environment for something other than servers.
I installed Ubuntu on three systems up until now: On one, it ran without a hitch, on one it took a bit of time to get it running properly (3-4h), and on one, two years of tinkering couldn’t fix it. I’d say everyone with a little experience and patience should give it a try, because if it doesn’t run, you can still go for Windows…or OSX.
Also, hurray for Steam on Linux! The only game I played on my Ubuntu laptop was BG2 (with addon!) with a touchpad. Good times.
22/04/2010 at 17:40 nibu says:
I am a Ubuntu user and I play Steam games in Linux with crossover games – the most valve games do work like a charm with it. :) However I can not wait for the steam for linux.
Ubuntu Lucid RC is out – the best Linux ever! :)
22/04/2010 at 17:40 Stanto says:
This could bring the PC closer to a dedicated, streamlined, gaming OS.
Imagine, you boot up and all that’s presented to you is STEAM. It has net access support, nothing else is running.
How well would that work out?
23/04/2010 at 12:53 LionsPhil says:
You should work for Apple. They like your restricted way of thinking.
22/04/2010 at 17:43 Sp4rkR4t says:
Gaming is the ONLY thing that keeps me on windows, I would be much happier living in my Fedora box.
22/04/2010 at 17:44 Collic says:
Those in the know will already be aware that official support may very likely not matter so much. We will have Valve games that run in opengl; from that point on it’s just a matter of getting them to run under linux. Compared to what you have to go through to run directx games through wine, this should be a little easier. If it is’nt easier the results will likely be a lot better, and it can almost certainly be done.
Everyone who uses/likes linux that I know is already rejoicing because we’ll have opengl native Valve games. That’s the most important thing.
22/04/2010 at 18:22 Justin says:
I daresay they wouldn’t be looking at game porting, just platform porting. There’s all sorts of games sold via Steam; if the developer has Mac and Linux versions, they would probably want to be able to move those versions through Steam too.
Wasn’t that one of the reasons for playgreenhouse.com – multiplatform? I doubt Valve would be able to make money on selling games on Linux (or BSD, ahem) but they’d be happy to have that access for developers who were targeting the platforms already.
22/04/2010 at 18:43 Niels Walta says:
Oh, news: a Steam Linux client actually exists. Phoronix got it to run but no signing in yet: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODE3Mw
Also mind you that this hasn’t been announced and Valve may just as well decide to nix (pun intended) the whole thing to simplify support or if performance doesn’t prove optimal.
22/04/2010 at 18:53 Bob says:
A Virtual Assistant bring reliability, competence, creativity and other great characteristics to your business without the insane costs.
22/04/2010 at 19:08 Phil says:
Linux had its litmus test when a lot of netbooks had it pre-installed a few years ago. Consumers returned the linux versions more than 4 times (!!) as often as the very same hardware with a MS OS.
According to an article I read somewhere (but don’t have a link sadly) this was pretty much confined to the US; Asus said that their netbook Linux sales were fine in Europe. Maybe it was more about retailer management of customer expectations?
Then MS made XP / Windows 7 netbook free, so the network effects won out anyway. Never underestimate the power of the dominant monopoly to crush the opposition :)
22/04/2010 at 19:18 Nobody Important says:
Failed troll is failed. Stop spouting oft-quoted myths that have been proven wrong for years; it’s better for your health.
22/04/2010 at 19:34 Tyler says:
The problem with being “POSIX compliant” is that a LOT of POSIX is optional. I did a port of some code from Linux to OSX, and in some places, the Windows code and Linux code had quite a lot more in common. Particularly noticeable when you get into synchronization primitives, which I’d guess Steam would make heavy use of.
23/04/2010 at 12:59 LionsPhil says:
There’s also that OS X completely ignores the UNIX philosophy. Key example: the X11 model separates window management from the actual window server, so that an end user can run a different process to change how the movement of windows around the screen is handled. OS X? It’s all one monolithic part of the graphics server. Hell, you’d think the dashboard would be a new, separate process, right? Nope, they kludged that functionality into the Dock.
It is UNIX in that there is BSD at the bottom, but none of the UNIX philosophy gets to extend anywhere near useland. Hell, you can confuse the Finder/Disk Utility if you dare to use the command-line mount/umount commands. (Oh, and all these tools are not only BSD, but hilariously outdated—if you’re used to the popular GNU variants, you’re in for a surprise.)
Of course, GNOME are doing their damndest to drive Linux in the same direction. The “Linux on the Desktop” crowd have moved on from trying to ape Windows 95 badly into trying to ape OS X badly these days.
22/04/2010 at 19:50 Megadeth dude says:
I’m trying to use Linux as much as possible but games always bring me back to Windows.
There is a hugely impressive game that I’m playing on Linux and it’s Heroes of Newerth (www.heroesofnewerth.com), with very good graphics and gameplay. It runs perfectly on Linux.
There’s also Enemy Territory – Quake Wars which is really really good.
2D Boy reported a great amount of users buying World of Goo when they released the Linux version.
Then there’s the Russian Unigine engine with their Heaven benchmark that runs seamlessly on Windows and Linux, and it’s absolutely top-notch graphics, you should check it out.
So all in all there is something good in the Linux gaming too, albeit very very little. I think things here are about to thaw. They will especially if Steam would come to Linux.
And http://www.phoronix.com is an absolutely terrific site that does substantial efforts in promoting the trio of Unix-graphics-gaming.
22/04/2010 at 20:26 The Dark One says:
The last game I played on inux was probably psuedodoom on the slackware linux my dad installed on the family’s 486. Still, encouraging support for multiple platforms like this is a good thing. Open standards, and all.
22/04/2010 at 20:45 Devan says:
The first thing I did when buying a new gaming lappy last month was to dual-boot it with Ubuntu. The only reason I run windows is for games, and I would definitely love to eliminate that dependency. Porting source and steam would be a huge benefit, and could certainly remove the last caveat that has been keeping a lot of people from switching.
If Valve pulls through with this, they’ll earn my undying gratitude (and sales, likely).
22/04/2010 at 20:57 James says:
Linux gaming isn’t amazing at this point. Graphics drivers and 3D acceleration are probably the biggest issues. There’s just not a vast amount of games, either. Let’s just say there’s a reason World of Goo sold so many copies of the Linux version. Oh, well. At least indie developers support us.
22/04/2010 at 21:02 DaveP says:
I use Ubuntu at work, on my desktop, laptop and the wifes netbook. Wine has been great for WoW, Starcraft and Warcraft 3, and others I’ve got running too. I’ve played native games too (World of Goo!) These days I end up using a Windows partition or my console. My problems in Wine tended to be the layer that Steam adds, or a games DRM. Steam on Linux would really start a revolution.
22/04/2010 at 21:16 karthik says:
Using Linux. Gaming is, well, restricted to ScummVM games and Dwarf Fortress right now. Haven’t played a 3d game in Linux in… ever.
22/04/2010 at 21:45 Collic says:
Doom 3 has a native client. It is rare though, yes, unless you’re prepared to dick around with wine, youre largely out of luck
22/04/2010 at 21:48 bobince says:
Man, I’m torn.
Yeah, I’d love to see more Linux gaming. Games are the last thing I keep the vestigial XP install about for. I want to see choice of OS become much less relevant to gaming. So I’d have to support any move to put Steam on Linux.
But at the same time, I can’t stand Steam. I hate its model of tying many game downloads to a single online account whose permissions may be revoked at the whim (or demise) of one controlling company. I’ve always refused to buy any software with an internet activation component, so my experience of Steam is limited to trying to fix it on friends’ computers when something’s gone wrong with it (which is hardly an encouragement either).
Ah well. It will have to start small anyway; I can’t see Linux AAA games any time soon. Quite apart from the slow process it will be to persuade vendors to port their software (even to OS X, much less Linux), the situation with graphics card drivers is still pretty bad and that’s not something Valve are going to want to support.
(Well, Intel’s drivers are smooth, but you’re not going to be playing many modern games with an Intel chipset…) And then there’s the 64-bit fragmentation (which is going to affect everyone, but Linux got there first).
23/04/2010 at 13:10 LionsPhil says:
“Going to affect everyone”.
Well, no, Microsoft have kind of been dealing with this kind of thing for years, so the 64-bit Windows transition has been pretty damn smooth.
The only issue I’ve had so far, ONLY, was a game demo that decided it wanted to be authoritarian about insisting that I had Service Pack 2 installed before running. Since the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows don’t follow the same service pack numbering, this was impossible to satisfy. Unsurprisingly, that demo did not result in a sale.
They DID drop the ball with 16-bit support, but that’s still reaching much further back than Linux or OS X do (yeah, good luck with your ALSA 0.9 API code), and it’s from lack of willingness to write a transparent software 286 emulation layer. (Inability to get to 16-bit mode from 64-bit is a hardware limitation.) They possibly didn’t feel it was worthwhile, unlike the Apple PPC/x86 Rosetta transition (which was also pretty smooth).
As for graphics drives, well, nVidia try. And for their efforts? They get a constant stream of bitching that they’re bypassing the (broken) mechanism Linux tries to set up for 3D drivers, a constant stream of bitching that they’re not open source, and, in the last year or so, large changes to X that broke all their legacy drivers. So if you have a GeForce, mmm, four or so downwards? i.e., a card still quite adaquate to drive DF’s OpenGL interface, UT2004, Doom 3, you know, a lot of native Linux games? Well, no 3D driver for you unless you’re running old X. And that means no modern distro for you. And that then means outdated libraries and thus outdated software due to dependencies unless you end up compiling everything from source yourself and effectively running Linux from Scratch.
This is not a fun way to spend your time.
22/04/2010 at 21:52 Downsider says:
Nexuiz, as well as Source, are both Quake 1 based, not Quake 3.
Well, Source is based off GoldSrc, which is in turn based off Quake 1. Nexuiz runs on a highly modified yet still backwards-compatible Quake engine. In other words, you can play Quake 1 on Nexuiz’s engine, which goes by the name of Darkplaces.
22/04/2010 at 22:07 Frosty says:
There’s a little partition sat on my computer, waiting for me to install Ubuntu. Now I might finally get round to it.
All my source based games, except Half life 2, are currently failing to work on Windows 7. I’ve followed Valve’s tech support to no avail! Here’s hoping they do port it to Linux and it does suddenly work on my computer. Hurrah Valve!
22/04/2010 at 22:53 Fazer says:
I use Kubuntu and hate dual-booting only to play games. If Steam was on Linux, I believe I could wipe Windows out entirely.
22/04/2010 at 23:42 Cymbals says:
I think you can see a pattern emerging here. Lots of gamers use Linux but boot into windows to actually play games. Personally I use Ubuntu for any “serious” work and boot to Windows 7 for games. I do buy native Linux games to support the developers but I don’t actually play them.
Now that the Mac steam client has been confirmed and a Linux client is actively being developed, it is great news for all pc gamers, Linux, Mac and Windows. The competition will encourage the Mac and Windows developers to improve their systems so that games run better on them.
Interesting idea about Valve going after the indy market on Linux, I think you could be on to something there. The Android market share is exploding and valve do sell a lot indy titles from their store.
My dream of a universal open source operating system which I can buy closed source games for is getting closer!
Anyway, back to the RPS server to play some more BC2(which barely runs on windows 7 incidentally :P)
22/04/2010 at 23:49 Bib Fortuna says:
Linux is the reason why I quit gaming.
23/04/2010 at 00:07 williambraski says:
Mike Arthur: Mac OS X uses bash for it’s default shell. Bash is GNU software. It would seem to me that means they use GNU for userspace tools.
23/04/2010 at 04:13 Xikuan says:
This has come up before. Although it may be that they are prepping scripts for use on Linux systems later. Much more likely it’s due to the Linux dedicated server they support.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be over the moon for Linux support, but I’m not holding my breath.
23/04/2010 at 05:26 Supertonic says:
Linux gaming mostly sucks but Wine is pretty damn good these days. Most Valve stuff works very well in Wine, one gets the feeling intentionally so, just as Microsoft make a point of making it difficult to run office in wine (ie office 2010 is a bastard). I’ve got football manager, spelunky et al working so i’m happy.
Btw choice of video card is important. NVIDIA proprietary drivers will do anything, ATI proprietary ok but not amazing, ati open drivers coming along well but not yet ready for gaming and nvidia open drivers are terrible.
23/04/2010 at 10:39 Guildenstern says:
Well I’ve tried running World of Goo demo on my new Mint install. It caused my monitor to shut down and PC to become completely unresponsive. Didn’t try anything after that.
23/04/2010 at 12:31 LionsPhil says:
Well, actually…
Ugh. Slashdot waz ‘ere.
Flawed (or absent) design top to bottom, largely inferior in every way except pricing and a few UNIX remenants they haven’t finished undermining yet (although GNOME VFS is getting there), the “community’ is made entirely of fanboys and consider backwards compatability a bad thing, because old things are ooooooollllllld, as if they go mouldy.
Do you remember having to fiddle with conventional memory in DOS? Right, now imagine you’ve got to do that, but every couple of months they rewrite the whole way CONFIG.SYS works, and tell you that your problems are because you’re doing it the old way.
Oh, and a few people keep saying “Works for me! Works for me!”. Some of these will be “you should have used distribution ${FOO} instead of ${BAR}, that’s your problem”. If you actually reinstall with ${FOO}, you will fix one thing, and break another. At which point, people will start telling you that you should have used ${BAR}.
Linux is exactly what you would expect to get from the the Internet’s attempts to play software engineer—a psychotic mess.
23/04/2010 at 12:58 Cymbals says:
Riiiiiight……
Anyway, for those thinking these Linux strings are related to just Steam’s Linux dedicated server, there are also Linux references to be found within friendsui.dylib, gameoverlayui.dylib, and steamclient.dylib, among other files. Also note this file on Steam’s servers.
If you go to this file there are references to all the components you need for the Steam Linux client. They can then be extracted and assembled by-hand by following the same layout as the Mac OS X Steam client. You can then proceed to launch the Linux-native Steam client, but it will have problems connecting to the authentication/update server. However, good luck signing into your account as it’s setup similarly to the closed Mac beta program where only those accounts of the authorized gamers can partake in the testing process on that platform.
Most of this info is from
23/04/2010 at 13:05 bobince says:
LionsPhil: do you see fanboys here? The comments from Linux users above seem pretty balanced, acknowledging that Linux gaming is currently a mess.
The only fanboy-style ranting is from the I-Hate-Linux-Everything-About-It-Is-Crap trolls.
23/04/2010 at 13:13 LionsPhil says:
Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong on that one. Keep being above-average, RPS.
23/04/2010 at 15:11 Cas says:
All our games work on Linux and always have :) Might even get them on Steam, too.
23/04/2010 at 18:50 Forceflow says:
Time to plug a very good blog article:
Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX
23/04/2010 at 20:33 Megadeth dude says:
There is a hugely impressive game that I’m playing on Linux and it’s Heroes of Newerth (www.heroesofnewerth.com), with very good graphics and gameplay. It runs perfectly on Linux.
There’s also Enemy Territory – Quake Wars which is really really good.
2D Boy reported a great amount of users buying World of Goo when they released the Linux version.
Then there’s the Russian Unigine engine with their Heaven benchmark that runs seamlessly on Windows and Linux, and it’s absolutely top-notch graphics, you should check it out.
http://www.phoronix.com is an absolutely terrific site that does substantial efforts in promoting the trio of Unix-graphics-gaming. So all in all there is something good in the Linux gaming too, albeit very very little. I think things here are about to thaw. They will especially if Steam would come to Linux. I’m trying to use Linux as much as possible but games always bring me back to Windows.
24/04/2010 at 01:28 LionsPhil says:
“Very good”. The funniest thing about that blog article is the notion that it’s taken until Vista for Microsoft to try to undermind OpenGL.
Apparently nobody can remember the refresh rate furor when XP was released, and it takes until the end of the article to pick up that Direct3D was widely profesionally panned when it first appeared (and was a badly-designed college project that Microsoft bought up and rebranded).
There’s also the gross miseducation about OpenGL in that most places still teach the simple, easy immediate mode, whereas apparently these days you are supposed to be rewriting everything from first principles. Personally I consider this bonkers, and based on a very limited sample indie developer response to it appears to be mixed*. (Those who are employed to work on graphics engines full time have no reason to complain, as there whole job exists mapping between a complex yet powerful API and a nice scene graph.)
While I do ultimately agree with their point, it’s also a bit undermining that their games…well, the screenshots of Lugaru and its “two sprites at ninety degrees” trees do not shout “we know what we’re doing with modern computer graphics”. It’s like trying to give cooking advice while standing around eating leftover takeaway pizza.
(*Of course, Johnathan Blow tells us that DirectX has useful debugging features that OpenGL can only dream of.)
25/04/2010 at 10:13 atanok says:
I was a Windows-only user up until about two years ago.
I used to spend countless hours devoted to gaming almost every day.
Then, two year ago, I was prompted into installing Linux on my desktop, for the purpose of doing assignments for college. I was still extremely hooked on Windows gaming, so the times when I used my recently installed Ubuntu were few and far between.
Then, about an year ago, I got myself a laptop with Intel integrated graphics.
Not much that could be done on the gaming department, there.
So I begun using Linux Mint (Ubuntu derivative) intensively, as it was required for college and I couldn’t do much gaming on Windows.
Ironically, I now recognize that having this shitty laptop was one of the best things that ever happened to me as a computer user.
Put simply, I’m hooked.
My gaming desktop was converted into an always-on Ubuntu desktop, which I mainly use as server when not at home, the laptop is still running the Linux Mint installation I initially installed. Both are multi-booting: the desktop with XP, Ubuntu and OpenSuSE, the laptop with XP and Linux Mint.
Windows is kept around for gaming, specially for the desktop which has an ATi X1650, a model that was dropped by ATi’s drivers well in its useful life.
As a funny aside, I recently noticed that the desktop’s XP installation was not working properly, at which point I realized I hadn’t really used it in well over six months. I did not bother to fix it.
As for gaming, I have my hands tied by the low-end laptop and backstabbing ATi (un)support, but I did get a handfull of doujin (japanese indie) games running on the laptop through WINE, particularly Touhou 7, 8 and 9.5, plus Dwarf Fortress, Nexuiz (with simple graphics) and the typical web-based games.
Also got a couple of Visual Novels working, but those hardly count as gaming because they are almost entirely narrative.
25/04/2010 at 19:31 Colin says:
I use consoles for gaming, Linux for everything else. Though I do look longingly on at all the games released for Windows, I realise that I haven’t got the PC power, the money for upgrading (my sole box has an AMD 64, integrated graphics and a whopping 1 Gb RAM), nor the will to keep individually updating the graphics drivers, searching for no-CD cracks (I hate swapping CDs), updating the anti-virus etc. etc.
Besides, I didn’t go to Linux for gaming, I did it because it treats my computer as my computer. That’s worth a lot. Even giving up games.
Having said that, I do play Ancient Domains of Mystery a lot. Katawa Shoujo is worth a look as well.
26/04/2010 at 11:11 Slamelov says:
You can play in Linux to many great games, most of them using Wine, which allows to play Windows games in Linux, but there is some “native” linux games:
- Doom 3
- UT2004
- Penumbra Overture and Black Plague
- Savage 2
- Neverwinter Nights
- Machinarium
- Alpha Centauri
- X-Plane 9
- Darwinia
- Dominions 3
- Aquaria
- World of Goo
- The Gish
- Eschalon Book I
- X2 The Threat
26/04/2010 at 15:34 atomic-penguin says:
26/04/2010 at 23:49 easysauce says:
linux/win xp dual boot here. i use linux for everything but gaming, that is the only reason i keep a windows partition. and oddly enough almost every game i own i purchased from steam. i really do believe that game devs underestimate the number of linux users because most of us dual boot. im not holding my breath, but if steam comes to linux i will buy everything i can afford to try to convince valve that a linux version of steam is worthwhile. I have personally set up my parents with linux since they do only basic computing, but converting my gamer friends is impossible right now. however if valve puts steam on linux i think this may change and could really be the tipping point for linux on the desktop.
12/05/2010 at 22:13 Ken says:
Please port Steam to Linux.
17/05/2010 at 16:39 Roxas-x2 says:
I’m a linux user and gamer. I still have windows vista but strictly for after effects. I wouldn’t have it by choice.
I play doom 3, Urban Terror, Open arena and Warsow native.
I use PlayOnLinux a lot to install my windows stuff. I’m playing Counter strike source with no problems through wine. I play a bit of FEAR, Starwars jedi academy, Call of duty 4 and some others too. Steam through wine is a bit flakey but nothing too problematic.
Left 4 dead 1 and 2 dont run too well under wine but work flawlessly under Crossover Games.
Native Steam would be an absolute godsend though. It’s where linux has its biggest downfall imho.
24/06/2010 at 04:30 Vulpes says:
It wouldn’t make sense to turn a PC into a console. They essentially wouldn’t be releasing games on Linux, but instead they’d be making a fourth operating system to run games on. I wouldn’t want to take the time to partition my hard drive to allow this new operating system for me to play games on. If I’m running a Linux and “gaming console” dual boot, I don’t want to have to reboot the computer just so I could play a game. You might as well be running Linux and Windows, you get to use Linux for everything but games, and then reboot so you can play your games in Windows. There are a lot of reasons why making a DRM operating system is a bad business idea (nobody would use it).
27/06/2010 at 08:35 ibloat says:
Being the first to serve a market can’t be a bad thing so Linux Steam is a good idea.
Even if Valve decides not to port their games at first it will raise awareness at other publishers of the potentially lost profit that can be made off of linux gamers. Also it will enable indy devs to reach a broader audience.
I don’t think it will turn into a support nightmare either, they could limit official support to specific versions of certain distributions (like they do with osX).
02/11/2010 at 16:22 Richard says:
Wouldn’t be nice to say I want game X and not care about what OS is used.
I dislike microsoft with great intensity, yet I’m relistic and bought windows 7 for my wife. Windows 7 is pretty good for gaming.
When It comes to games I use Wii or Xbox (which is a flavor of linux and windows respectively).
06/11/2010 at 23:11 Richard says:
well thinking about it I have a few games on steam and would love to run them on linux, and I would purchase games the would run on linux. there are a lot on steam and I know that I would buy some of them.