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Comment by kmarc | Hacker News Reader

We organized a LAN PARTY (oh my, what a flashback) in 2005 in our student hostel, where we played CS / Half Life on wine, under Linux.

I thought we were already there, 19years ago

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UT2k4 supporting Linux was so progressive back then

> UT2k4 supporting Linux was so progressive back then

Will we ever get UT2k2X?

I don't see Epic making anything that will take players away from their golden goose.

Fortunately UT2k4 is still fun and plays well, even on an ancient PC, and looks decent enough.

> Fortunately UT2k4 is still fun and plays well, even on an ancient PC, and looks decent enough.

I’ve heard there’s still some folks on some self-hosted servers playing it, maybe I’ll have to look into that.

Unfortunately when they pulled official servers they also yanked the game off of most storefronts, and now what few community servers still exist suffer from a complete lack of new blood. Sure, you can still play it, but I'll still miss its heyday.

There was a UT reboot, but as the other poster mentioned, when Fortnite eventually took off, they removed everyone from the project around May 2017.

Website is still up, but only partially functional. Check out the character design for Samael.

https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/en-US/

https://www.youtube.com/unrealtournament

> There was a UT reboot, but as the other poster mentioned, when Fortnite eventually took off, they removed everyone from the project around May 2017.

Yeah, I guess I was always holding out some futile hope that they may reboot it at some point.

I'm not using Wine, it's all native. That's the big deal for me: it took zero effort from me, it Just Works.

Well, if this is steam, isn't it proton, which is wine underneath?

I'm not discounting your experiences at all, btw. My 11 year old has been using Ubuntu as his main gaming rig, and the NVidia drivers work incredibly well and Steam games just work. It's still mind boggling to me that it works so well.

And, I no longer have to troubleshoot removing Windows virii from his computer.

Sure, I didn't want to belittle your experience at all. It's great that vendors think about Linux as first class citizens on desktop , too.

My understanding though, is that most of "steam games" are still windows binaries + wine + patches (proton, etc). It's well hidden behind a nice GUI, but the tech couldn't exist without the legacy of pure old wine.

Hahaha not belittling at all, I'm just old enough that "running X with Wine" means "spending hours upon hours pulling your hair out until X barely works" to me. Getting it for free feels like cheating :)

Yes you are :). You just no longer have to set it up yourself. Steam runs Proton (their own WINE fork/distribution) under the hood for windows games.

Well sure, but the point is it's done for me, and more importantly, actually tested by the developer in many cases.

Developers don't care, they target Windows as usual, and let Valve do the needful.

Some game developers do test under Proton. Saying that because I'm in the discord server(s) for a few, and they mention stuff they're working on/support/etc over time.

Likewise, some do write GNU/Linux games, yet that wasn't in a number relevant enough to keep the original SteamOS going as businesses, until translation of Windows APIs was added.

Sure, but I think the point is that that doesn't matter anymore. Not sure what you meant by restating this, seems irrelevant.

Yeah that part is lovely. Having steam games “just work” for the most part is absolutely phenomenal.

That was back when I still believed, eventually I decided running Windows with Virtual Box/VMWare or macOS UNIX, was less of an headache.

Just a couple of months ago, yet another motherboard where UEFI and Linux distributions don't get along without some gimmicks.

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