Linux



A person who prefers Linux on their home computer is like a person who prefers to be under the hood of their car instead of driving it. -- this is probably why /g/earheads prefer Linux, but we're abo/v/e that. Linux has been a favorite of neckbeards everywhere since the 90s, but now it's really been catching on: when people do a 360° and moonwalk away after seeing the unholy abomination of Windows 8, yet realize they can't afford an iComputer, they look at Linux and say, well, why the fuck not.

This page is for the games that run natively in Linux; not stuff that runs under WINE or ZSNES or whatever.

Although the amount of commercial games is still small, there are a bunch of online stores that offer them, such as Steam, Desura, Gameolith, and don't forget the occasional Humble Bundle.

As a sidenote: free software purists tend to call it GNU/Linux, but really, that's a minority in what's already a minority.

Websites
With the iTunes/ Steam/ GoogleChromestore interface that's getting popular Game app store interfaces (that don't try to own your ass)
 * Desura
 * Valve's Steam
 * PenguSpy not an appstore, but not a review site either
 * Linux Gaming Tome DEAD died of old age.

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
For a very short time in the '90s it was cool to release a Linux version for Windows games. That got old fast. But in 2012, when the world got to see the shit twinkie that is Windows 8... and Apple locked out the umpteenth game from their app store for bullshit reasons... well.