Gaming on Linux
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The year of the Linux desktop never came, but server side a lot of games supported Linux. Today, multiplayer games use either P2P or the server farm is under the control of the publisher or developer so dedicated servers are rare now. Valve committed itself to port their own products and they released not just a Steam client but a server side command line console called SteamCMD as well. But we are going to get back to them later.


If you want to play on your distribution of choice the first obvious option is to go with free and open source games. Even in this category it is not just cheap clones of games for other platforms featuring Tux anymore. There is a good selection of FPS games for example. A big factor behind this is the fact that id Software opened up their engines one after another. Sadly this trend is going to die out. Warsow, Urban Terror, Alien Arena, Xonotic are all using id Tech previously called Doom and Quake engines. Ryan C. Gordon a.k.a icculus used to work for Loki Software - a former company specialised in porting Windows titles to Linux - now runs icculus.org, a community project incubator site for similar projects. The second option is to run them in Wine but can be quite buggy and I do not recommend it. But there are numerous console and DOS emulators out there. The good news is that there is a future for native Linux games. With the new game engines like Unity and Unreal 4 supporting the operating system and Valve's release of its Ubuntu fork dedicated to gaming called SteamOS which is free to download and 3rd party companies already released out of the box solutions with custom hardware. On top of that indie developers started to release their games on Linux too. And let us not forget that there are companies out there like Feral Interactive, porting AAA commercial games to Linux.