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WineX 3.3 Out - Now Supports Steam
AstroDrabb writes "WineX 3.3 has been released, with more impressive support for your favorite Windows games from within Linux.
According to the Release Notes, Valve's Steam content delivery system, including the latest versions of Half-Life, CounterStrike, Day of Defeat and other mods, is now supported.
The list of games supported by WineX is getting pretty impressive. So head over to Transgaming and sign up for a subscription to help further development."
I think it's a better idea not to buy WineX and support native ports by buying native Linux games instead. Supporting WineX just lets them talk about their "compatibility technology"(or whatever they call it now) more and more, while developers use that as an excuse to make Windows only games.
Announcing that WineX 3.3 has support for Valve games that were written on the Quake 2 engine back when the 3DFX Voodoo2 was new and nVidia was pushing their soon to be released TNT2 cards really isn't that amazing to me. In fact, it kind of underwhelms me.
The mean time between WineX releases is slowing and the gap between the stuff they can support and the stuff being done on current and modern games is always widening. The utopian dream of being able to install any Windows based game you buy off the shelf at BestBuy on your Linux box and run it seamlessly won't, imho, ever become reality.
Huh?
Your friends have a OS that "currently supports all their games, comes free with their machines, and is user-friendly and familiar." and they want to dump that to pay $5 a month for a service that helps them play those same games on a different OS than the one they have, when they can just stay with their current OS and save that money?
Wow, you have stupid friends.
Windows doesn't actually come 'free' with the machine. The cost is passed on the manufacturer who include it somehow into the general price of the computer. Now an open-source OS on the other hand, may truly be a 'free' piece of software for the consumer.
The copy protection is the part Transgaming cannot release, but other than that they do give back to the community. After WINE changed to the LGPL, they're doing it thru ReWind but I'm sure the changes finally trickle back to the main wine tree if they're any good.
TransGaming is not such a bad company. I don't agree with what they're doing, I feel it may eventually or has already hurt GNU/Linux as a gaming platform. Still, it's nice to have games such as Warcraft 3 or Half-Life which enjoy a large following and would probably never be ported supported. It helps when someone considering switching just has to have that one game.
Winex is neet and all and I'll give them credit for not adding game support for games that are actively being ported to Linux. But if your trying to decide between a couple of games try to get the one that has a Linux port before chosing one with emulation (ok, wine is not emulation..ygmp).
;-)
Between inhouse porting and Icculus a lot of the major releases are coming out with native Linux ports. The developers are doing their part to support a Linux market that we've been clamoring about it for ages, so...buy something from ID Software or try out Savage, Neverwinter Nights, MOHAA or Unreal Tournament. Or save a little money and try America's Army. I'm playing a hell of a lot of Postal 2 STP and its *addictive as hell* and I haven't even touched Tribes 2 in months. Supporting WineX is just begging to go back to playing Tetris clones and Solitare natively under Linux.
Quack, quack.