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Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

What black magic do they use to make the games run under Linux? Wine?

Are all Steam games now compatible with Linux, or only a few titles that the developers are willing to support Linux? Is there a list anywhere?

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There's a list, found here: http://store.steampowered.com/search/?os=linux

Very few games are compatible, but Team Fortress 2 is one of them.

And Amnesia, which was already supported -.-

Left4Dead was also going to be available, not sure what happened.

My impression was that they started the project by porting Left4Dead, but decided to release TF2 (probably because it's F2P and so anyone can test it).

TF2 also has microtransactions so it will also earn them money in the short AND long run as well.

Quite a smart business decision and I'm glad they brought TF2 over - I always thought this would be the first game to publicly release.

It was also the first game they brought over for the mac port, though I think that was before the in-game store.

Wasn't that Portal, which I got for free at that time?

My understanding is that the plan is for all Valve Source Engine games are going to be ported (and should be relatively simple now that TF2 is working).

Everything else is up to the various game studios, though all games in the Humble Indie Bundles support Linux so hopefully they are added to Steam soon.

> so hopefully they are added to Steam soon

Many are already available.

> though all games in the Humble Indie Bundles support Linux > so hopefully they are added to Steam soon

Darn. This what I'm waiting for as most of my games are from humblebundle. Well at least uplink+defcon should work :)

uplink works. defcon doesn't, unless you some manual "patching" (download the demo, fire up defcon in wine/windows to get your steam key, activate it on linux). It'll eventually come though.

Hopefully id get all their old games up on that list soon, they put in a lot of effort over the years when not many others were, a shame that changed recently though.

I'm interested in TF2 and Red Orchestra but look forward to my old favs...HL and HL2! I might even buy a new system so I can play the whole L4D series too!

I don't think they ever ported HL1 to Mac, though, so I wouldn't hold my breath for a Linux version. :(

Weird that they never even gave OSX Half-Life: Source.

The latter. I suspect the list will be similar to the list of games that work on Mac. It's a small subset, but it's growing.

The games are native ports, according to their Linux blog.

So far. Nothing stops game publishers from shipping a Windows game with Wine strapped on the side if it results in a working game.

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