Linux



Not much here yet. Linux isn't really a gaming platform, despite what some neckbeards living in basements will tell you. Still, it's catching on: when people RAGEQUIT from Windows and don't have the money to buy a Mac, Linux is free and lookin' pretty darn good these days.

This page is for the games that run natively in Linux; not stuff that runs under WINE or ZSNES or whatever. Many of the games mentioned over on Freeware Games might show up here, since damn near everything for Linux is made free on purpose.

Until Valve gets off their asses and makes a native version of Steam, you can use Desura.

Stuff that comes with your Linux distro
The "Distros" column in this section is for known good packages, mostly so you know which repositories to hit up for a copy of the game. If you have a different flavour of Linux, even a different package management system, you can still port the package over but you might need to puzzle out some missing dependencies. For those of us who love to tinker on the engine more than driving the car, you can get the source code for each of these and compile it by hand.

Distro-Agnostic Packaging
These are still typically free software (or at least freeware), but do not use your easy-peasy package manager to install itself deep in your system. Most of the time, they are just binaries (or executables in Windows parlance) in downloadable tar.gz archives (which work like .zip files). Though, in some more rare cases, these may also include games that come as source code only -- you need to hunt down the right libraries through your distro's package manager, compile, and install manually (while trickier, this has the added bonus of increased optimization for your computer hardware, however marginal).

Stuff you Buy
Software companies don't really make games for Linux, which is ironic considering how often they're developed on open-source tools that have duplicates on Linux. Around the year 2000 it was "cool" and "hip" to release a Linux edition of your game at the same time as you published the PC version, so you'll see some overlap here with the Windows/DOS games.

For the indie stuff, try Desura. It's too young for /v/ to have any reviews yet.