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Comment by craftkiller | Hacker News Reader

I have a special place in my heart for UT2004 because it was one of the very few games that had an official native Linux version at the time. I think I enjoyed the fact that it was running on Linux more than I enjoyed the game itself.

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Yes! I remember at the time I had just gotten linux to reliably work on my dual Opteron workstation so that I could migrate away from Win2K64. UT2K3 and UT2K4 were just about the only games I could run because Wine didn't work very well back then.

In retrospect, I have a much greater appreciation for Windows 2000. User experience was really front and center in a way that we seem to have gotten away from since Web 2.0. It basically never blue screened. Games ran well. Personal computing seems to have taken some steps backwards since then.

There are big companies, that are actively doing harmful things to undermine personal computing, in order to farm engagement, attention and show us ads. Phones become more and more locked down, except for very niche products. Many people don't even have a PC any longer, and only have phones, with none of the freedom of personal computing that we enjoy(ed). Only people in the know are able to and willing to put in the effort to run an OS that includes freedom. Trying to help a friend or family member with a computer or phone problem, one will quickly notice the efforts that big tech makes to undermine freedom respecting solutions.

I'll never forget installing ut2k4 on my linux box and having it Just Work. Magical.

Not just working, but it actually ran better in Linux for me -- my university-mandated laptop could only run it at 1280x800 in Windows if you wanted to hit 60fps, but the Linux client was able to run at the panel's native 1920x1200.

I had it working without issues from Steam (I bought UT 99 and 2004 before Epic de-listed from Steam)

Yes! I had both a Linux (main) and a Windows box in my office back in the day, and a friend came over frequently and we would "kill things!" for hours :-)

IIRC, I bought the metal case for UT3, but the linux binaries never appeared ...

i remember playing it on linux on my dell inspiron 8k which was a beautiful machine.

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