Half-Life 2 released for Steam on Linux

Half-Life 2 released for Steam on Linux(steamdb.info)

209 points by jeffisabelle 13 years ago | 57 comments

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 :)

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.

ShawnBird 13 years ago | |

Doublefine just ported their entire catalog: https://www.humblebundle.com/

Shorel 13 years ago | | |

Wait, Brutal Legend runs on Linux???

kayoone 13 years ago | |

Many developers dont even port their console titles to the PC, or do so much later. Porting to Linux does not make any sense financially (yet), so its more or less good-will. You also need to have the resources to do it and many Devs are under heavy time pressure from publishers.

mtgx 13 years ago | | |

Porting from consoles to PC's is much harder, though, not to mention that they'll also have to upgrade the graphics in a major way to make it a "competitive" PC game. By contrast, porting to Linux should be much easier.

Also porting old games is one thing, but these days most 3rd party game engines support Linux, too, and it should be even easier to support Linux at launch with new games.

Considering Linux users buy about the same amount of games (in revenue) as Mac users right now (from the surveys/research I've seen), it should be a no-brainer to support Linux if you're already going to support Mac. I could see some not wanting to bother with Mac either, though, but for those who choose Mac, they should also choose Linux.

shardling 13 years ago | |

I don't know about Borderlands, but the Deus Ex mac port was not done by the main devs; it was a separate company that specializes in that sort of thing.

The catch is that the mac version isn't available on Steam.

ekianjo 13 years ago | |

Yeah, surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, depending on your POV) there have been very few major players stepping in to convert their historical or recent titles for Linux. They are probably waiting and wondering if there's any good reason to do it... If the Steambox ever sees a release based on a Linux environment, I would expect things to change, though.

jiggy2011 13 years ago | | |

Most games make most of their money very shortly after launch so the ROI to do a port probably isn't there unless there is a very compelling display of demand. There are some AAA games that don't make it onto the PC at all, let alone Linux.

The best hope here would be that valve could take some of the games that are known to work flawlessly with WINE and package them up with Steam handling all of the WINE config so it becomes transparent.

It will be interesting to see if a popular AAA franchise (elder scrolls, COD etc) announces a Linux release alongside the Windows release. As game devs have to think more about crossplatform I guess this might become more likely.

MattDL 13 years ago | | |

I think the weirdest thing is that id Software have all their games ported for Linux (Excluding Rage) but haven't released them yet.

BuddhaSource 13 years ago | |

Sorry little off topic : Is anybody working on HALF-Life 3 ?

I was really looking forward for this, I am old now but not old enough for HL3.

gcr 13 years ago | | |

Between the Steam Box, porting everything in their catalog to Linux, Dota 2, and scrambling like madmen to make the ten thousanth TF2 hat, I assume Valve has a lot on their plate right now.

prawks 13 years ago | | |

It's presumed (and pretty much a given) that it's being worked on. However there has never been a full confirmation from Valve/Gabe Newell on anything specific.

pingvinus 13 years ago | | |

Half-Life Forever

barbs 13 years ago | |

Valve indeed has done a good job so far, though I'm hoping they do the same with DotA 2 soon...

akama 13 years ago | | |

Dota 2 seems like it's something that would be a flagship title for Steam for Linux. Dota 2 already uses the source engine though, so maybe it is coming soon. One can only hope.

mindstab 13 years ago | |

Serious Sam 3 from Croteam :)

gcr 13 years ago |

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.

I understand Valve hasn't gotten the bugs out quite yet, but this is an excellent start.

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.

nathanb 13 years ago | |

I assume you have 32-bit (multilib) support installed in order to install Steam?

Or is there some trick I'm not aware of to get native x64 Steam going under Arch?

gcr 13 years ago | | |

Honestly, I don't remember. A native steam package is available in the 'multilib' repository, which should be enough to at least start Steam. To play games, I remember having to install some 32-bit Mesa packages. I also had to install libtxc_dxtn and lib32-libtxc_dxtn, which are texture compression libraries. Without these two, textures didn't appear.

pmh 13 years ago | |

While I agree that it's nice to have native (assuming it's actually native) ports, HL2 and most of the other Source engine games have reportedly run great via Wine for a while now: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application...

ajross 13 years ago | | |

There's a big gap between "can be made to run under wine by following a recipe someone posted to appdb.winehq.org" and "click on Download, then Plan".

I fiddle with messy integration issues on embedded Linux and Android professionally, and am about as qualified as anyone could be to make that work. I never once bothered trying to get wine running. I installed Portal last week without a moment's thought.

wtallis 13 years ago | | |

These ports are a little bit more native than linking to winelib - there are still some translation layers in place, but you do run an ELF file.

nickzoic 13 years ago | |

Portal worked great on Wine / Linux for me right up to (what I think is) the last level, when the frame rate suddenly plummeted to barely playable. Now it's out for native Linux I'll have to see if the same thing happens.

PakG1 13 years ago |

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.

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...

brokenparser 13 years ago |

Will not buy, HL1 is still full of bugs: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues?labe...

They should at least fix the bugs which affect gameplay, so I won't end up with a library of broken games.

gcr 13 years ago | |

Half life 2 works OK on my Intel HD4000. The only bugs are graphical glitches, and they're not very noticable. (Keep in mind that Half Life and Half-Life 2 use completely different game engines; one's bugs don't necessarily translate to the other.)

brokenparser 13 years ago | | |

Half Life and Half-Life 2 use completely different game engines; one's bugs don't necessarily translate to the other

Yes, but that doesn't mean there won't be bugs in HL2. And Valve not fixing HL1 before releasing HL2 doesn't bode well.

jsalinas 13 years ago | |

You should try HL1, most of the bugs are just visuals and don't affect gameplay. I've played the game and it never crashed.

brokenparser 13 years ago | | |

It hasn't crashed for me either, but I cannot complete it until they fix lambda core. That's a show-stopper for me.

Shorel 13 years ago | |

I wonder if the Black Mesa mod works instead.

workbench 13 years ago | |

Way to support your niche platform

Aardwolf 13 years ago |

Do they also have Portal?

Because I never played it, and if they release it for Linux, I could be this guy:

http://xkcd.com/606/

Even the date is about right :)

(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)

jsalinas 13 years ago | |

Yes, portal is already on Linux: http://steamdb.info/app/400/

jzelinskie 13 years ago |

They also added VR mode if you opt into the SteamPipe beta.

See more info here: https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=42&...

KayEss 13 years ago |

I wish I had the time to support this better by actually playing some of the Linux games I've bought.

chii 13 years ago | |

to support them, you only need to buy their games. Playing them is not needed!

ekianjo 13 years ago |

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.

kwijibob 13 years ago |

I know this is only HL2 beta - but unfortunately it doesn't run nearly as fast as HL2 on wine. I'm on ubuntu 12.10, 2010 mac mini (nvidia graphics)

pezz 13 years ago | |

Steam on Arch Linux here, old Core 2 Duo 3 GHz, but I added a nVidia GTX550Ti (2GB) card a few months ago and HL2 is running amazingly.

Playing it on a 46" TV at 1080p. Smooth as hell and looks fantastic.

moystard 13 years ago |

I am waiting for DOTA 2 to be ported on Linux; this would really help the Linux Steam platform taking off.

hexonexxon 13 years ago |

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

Yuioup 13 years ago |

Erm. Wasn't Half-Life 2 already out? Pretty sure I've had it in my library for months.

gcr 13 years ago | |

For linux? It wasn't in my library last week. Perhaps you got lucky and were chosen for a fancy linux beta test period?

Yuioup 13 years ago | | |

Ah that explains it. I was indeed selected... I assumed that everybody had it when it came out of beta...

kbar13 13 years ago |

almost thought they released half life 3 exclusively for linux or something. Wouldn't that be fun?

thejosh 13 years ago | |

It's almost like it's a BETA or something.

Murk 13 years ago |

Looks like my weekend is set, then.

goggles99 13 years ago |

Isn't this game like 10 years old?

OrsenPike 13 years ago | |

It may be almost 10 years old but it is still one of the best FPS games ever created. Hell I still play Deus Ex as it is my favourite game ever made. Just because a game is not brand new does not mean porting it to a new platform is not worth it.

gcr 13 years ago | | |

It also helps Valve keep excitement for half-life 2 going strong when they choose to release episode 3. Then their story won't be "Hey, remember when we released the last chapter to this one back in 2007? Well go play the new one!" Instead, they can say "Hey, remember Half-Life 2? Now you can play it all over again and reacquaint yourself! Then you'll remember why you want episode 3 so bad!"