Slashdot Mirror
Portal Now Available On Linux
alancronin writes "Valve have released Portal for Linux through the Steam platform. If you have a copy of the Windows version you will automatically have a copy of it for Linux in your account. There are also rumors of Portal 2 coming soon."
Linux users now can do cake jokes.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I wish I could get my games 6 years after everyone else!
Up next: HURD!
I saw this article and fired up Steam on my Linux box. There isn't any sign of a Linux-friendly version of Portal. Even following the link in the linked article shows Portal as available for Windows and Mac only.
Valve is a single entity, not a plurality...Jane, you ignorant slut!
Since Phoronix claimed originally it was both just to clear it up only Portal 1 is out for Linux, there are no hints about Portal 2 despite this article stating it and linking to a source for Portal 2 (the source of that info is an idiot). Daily linux gaming news can be found on www.gamingonlinux.com by the way :) where we actually check facts properly ;)
You mean I can now play a six year old game on Linux? Wow, that's a totally worthy of a headline. As open source types, we should not only be thankful for the meager scraps being thrown our way, but treat them as though they were earth shattering advances.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I was getting a bit bored of Tux Racer, so this is great news!
"Released" is a bit strong a term; the port is still marked "beta."
Left4dead 2 (beta) is also in there. That's a new game.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Valve should consider Portal and Portal 2 along with a few other AAA titles to give away with SteamBox. That would give gamers an incentive for giving it a shot.
A major gaming company ports one of the most popular games of all time to native Linux, and it's not worthy of a headline on Slashdot to you? Would you rather someone ported some more modern, crappier game like Warfighter instead?
Excellent news - more and more reasons to stay in Ubuntu and less and less reasons to boot to Win7. Hats off to the devs that have ported this. Does this mean that we can expect HL2 etc to follow shortly, given it's the same engine?
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS
Whilst you are insisting, Valve, that an agreement to an EULA really is an agreement, rather than a load of bollocks, I can't agree to your terms and conditions.
If I can't agree to your terms and conditions, I can't use Steam.
If I can't use Steam, I can't use the games that are Steam only.
If I can't use Steam games, why the hell do you think porting the program (as opposed to CHANGING YOUR FUCKING EULA) is going to make anything different?
I'm going to be a crybaby and point out OpenGL won't play my Portal copy on Steam with my crappy Intel GMA 950 graphics in Ubuntu 12.04. Mod me down. Using the worst in computer hardware since 1997.
And NT only got a subset and that version isn't one you could get off the shelf, pre-installed.
Merely pointed out that the package management on Linux is ahead of Windows, always was and is currently apparently accelerating away.
THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO with whether Microsoft should use RPMs or whatever. They can make their own damn package manager that works as well as any of the ones on windows.
Do you "come back" to someone saying US cars are badly made compared to foreign ones with "So should they use Toyota engine blocks or BMW ones"?
"So the windows posix subsystem still exists and is not slow as hell (or why does cygwin fork suck)?"
Because windows fork() calls suck.
"AMD/ATI having a linux driver that does not suck (being open source is no excuse)?"
Their Windows driver sucks too. Being closed source is no excuse.
"Weren't OSS, PulseAudio and Alsa involved in some kind of deathmatch behind the scenes?"
What about DirectSound/EAX/Protected Path involved in some kind of deathmatch behind the scenes? And didn't a lot of games, especially when DirectSound got shitcanned in WinVista, use OpenAL?
And most of the features of DX aren't used any more (deprecated or just not used). Hence not in there.
Looks the same, plays the same, but a little lag when PackageKit ran. Interesting that GNOME Shell notifications appear over the game. Can't wait for Portal 2 to be released so I can finally try two-player (I only have one machine that has a Windows install capable of running it).
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
So it's not their problem if they don't sell stuff? And if this is true, then piracy (other people not buying the stuff they're selling) cannot be any more of a problem.
Right?
(PS: There are other things I can do other than play games on the PC, so not playing games I'm interested in (but not that interested) isnt my problem either, is it)
why russian, not chinese?
Great of Valve to release Steam for linux and to port their games - but bloody surprising all the Steam engine, Valve made games weren't ALL read at the actual time of launch of the product. I'm sure it's not a 5 minute task to port their engine - but once they did so, one would've thought the other products would be, somewhat trivial.
Good work but not a flying start for what some speculate may be Valves long term future.
Let me know when there's a DRM free version; preferably FOSS.
Look at your post, for example.
But also if my political point was "pirate the games", then they not only care a great deal but are butt-fucking over every paying customer to appear (and it is ONLY "appear") to do something about it.
Advertising: spending a lot of money to get people to want to buy their product. Apparently they DO care about someone's "political point" over what they do to choose purchases.
Seems the only one clueless about the opinions of customers and how they matter to business is you, troll-child.
Because in Soviet Russia, everything made in China!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Played Portal on Ubuntu last night - crashed on the tutorial and I needed to reboot. Maybe it was a one time thing. Left 4 Dead 2 was also released and it runs amazing. Just wish Guild Wars 2 would be released on GNU/Linux.
In an ideal world, code is 100% portable, and not a single line of code ever needs to be changed when porting. The reality of software development, however, and especially game development in my experience, is that software deadlines don't generally give the programmers the luxury of testing for every single platform. Producers expectations are nothing more than "make it work", and "make it work on time", without any regard for what might really be under the hood. Writing code that is portable and extensible is just not a luxury that some game programmers are given in the first place. And so when the time comes to even consider a port, the task is quite commonly either infeasible or else a whole lot of time is going to put sunk into it. Even on so-called "portable" platforms like Unity, because a codebase may not be actively developed on all of the platforms simultaneously, machine-dependencies can still creep in... and often in no small number, as programmers are simply compelled to just make do whatever they have to just to get it to work on the platform being tested.
And this blind charging (because that's all a smaller game studios ever seems to have the time to do) turns the effort of porting something that is supposed to be platform independent into one long grievous headache that requires a huge amount of developer time.
And so is it worth it for Linux, accounting for perhaps only 2% of the total desktop computing marketplace?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'