I loved Half-Life 2. I loved Counter-Strike 1.5 (and 1.6 too). I loved Portal. Valve has done a good job of making games. But I reeeeally wish some other developers would step up to the plate and port as well. I'm thinking Borderlands, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and others. Those two already have Mac ports so I doubt it's unfeasible to move things over. Wine typically works well enough --assuming you're willing to either fiddle with it for hours or else pay for an out-of-the-box solution like Crossover-- but nothing beats native :)<p>Edit: Been playing the Portal Beta. The horizontal tearing without vertical sync is annoying. Mainly because, with vertical sync, there is substantial input lag. But hey, it's called "beta" for a reason.
Wow, I'm going to go try this! Portal runs "surprisinly well" (eg. great performance but it has occasional graphical glitches) on my machine (Arch x64, Intel HD 4000), so I'm curious to see how HL2 runs.<p>I understand Valve hasn't gotten the bugs out quite yet, but this is an excellent start.<p>Edit: Oh man, "Half-Life 2 (Beta)", "Half-Life 2: Episode One (Beta)", "Half-Life 2: Episode Two (Beta)", and "Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (Beta)" are all in my steam library. It's like Christmas all over again.
You know why I'm going to download this? Because I never played the game and when I finally downloaded it to play, there were major graphics engine or driver issues that made it dirt slow and unplayable on my m11x R2. And I couldn't figure out how to fix it so eventually gave up. Coincidentally, I have Linux on my m11x R2. Maybe it'll work on Linux.<p>What a silly reason. But true. Wouldn't it be ironic if the Linux beta was more bug free in my experience than the Windows version...
Will not buy, HL1 is still full of bugs: <a href="https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues?labels=Half-Life+1" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues?labe...</a><p>They should at least fix the bugs which affect gameplay, so I won't end up with a library of broken games.
Do they also have Portal?<p>Because I never played it, and if they release it for Linux, I could be this guy:<p><a href="http://xkcd.com/606/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/606/</a><p>Even the date is about right :)<p>(I do play modern games as well, but due to the rebooting to another OS required for that it's a commitment which I don't make for every game)
They also added VR mode if you opt into the SteamPipe beta.<p>See more info here: <a href="https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=957" rel="nofollow">https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=42&...</a>
Tried HL2 on linux yesterday. Very impressed to see that HL2 still does not look too bad even many years later. At full details on full HD, it's still very decent graphically speaking.
valve said last yr they would start porting to linux to avoid microsoft 8 store plans where they want to restrict software sales to the "microsoft app store" and shave 20% fees from all sales. this would destroy the steam delivery model so makes sense they are diversifying