Great news for gamers! GOG.com announced plans to support Linux:
We’re initially going to be launching our Linux support on GOG.com with the full GOG.com treatment for Ubuntu and Mint. That means that right now, we’re hammering away at testing games on a variety of configurations, training up our teams on Linux-speak, and generally getting geared up for a big kick-off in the fall with at least 100 Linux games ready for you to play. This is, of course, going to include games that we sell which already have Linux clients, but we’ll also be bringing Linux gamers a variety of classics that are, for the first time, officially supported and maintained by a storefront like ours.
Source: http://www.gog.com/news/gogcom_soon_on_more_platforms
GOG.com should complement Steam nicely with a different catalogue of games and with DRM-free titles.
Whether you’re playing Free Software games, using Steam, native titles or Windows compatibility layers/tools, if you’re interested in gaming have a look at GamingOnLinux: http://www.gamingonlinux.com
We don’t cover gaming much and it’s hard to provide access to commercial or non-Open Source titles to you directly with the Software Manager. Gaming is getting better and better though. Linux is still far behind Windows, Playstation and Xbox of course, but we’re seeing more and more AAA titles running natively on our platform, a growing number of superb indie games, compatibility with market leading development platforms (Unity, Game Maker etc..) and with GOG.com the arrival of another great distribution platform.
Great news for gamers. Will Mint consider adding few games by default, even installer should talk about availability of games in Linux. (IIRC it does not atm). I know, it bloats ISO size still…
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=225&t=161970
Edit by Clem: Well ideally you want gamers to find out how/where to get great games, but you don’t want to annoy non-gamers with it (it’s irrelevant to them) and there’s also the fact that the gaming industry is very similar to the movie industry and that indie game development is similar to art somehow, so it’s an area which is a bit different than software and where developers/makers traditionally need to rely on commercial models.. and that clashes a bit with our culture and our promotion of Free and Open Source. So it’s not always easy to mix all that and to promote gaming efficiently. I definitely wouldn’t want to have games installed by default for instance, free or not. We can do a lot on our side to improve life for gamers but we need to be careful not to alienate anyone when doing so.
Good news.
I absolutely agree with Clem’s remarks. I hope to be casting WindowsXP aside any day now and it has always annoyed me that it has carried what I regard as a pile of rubbish (games) by default. However, it would be a great pity if the user base were to split into warring gamers versus non-gamers. We’re all just Linux users!
Great news. I agree that it would not be appropriate to have games installed by default. It would, however, be nice to see some of the free games show up in the repositories. Since we utilize some of Ubuntu’s repos, this just may happen.
Quite good news. Although I am wondering how many will actually be ports of originally windows games and not just old dos games that they were already using dosbox for to run on windows.
Looking forward to this. Hopefully there will be support for the new nVidia “Maxwell” GTX 750 series GPU’s in this release. Probably an upstream kernel/Nouveau issue but when trying to boot the Mint 16 Live image, the GPU would just display scrolling lines of gibberish because the OS was trying to use the (now outdated) version of Nouveau that shipped with Mint 16. I was forced to remove the GPU and drive my monitor from the Core i3-4340’s iGPU just to get to the desktop to find a solution. This was a new PC I built and Mint 16 was the 1st OS I tried to boot on it. You can imagine my frustration!
Basically I had to reinstall the GPU, immediately past the BIOS hit CTRL+ALT+F1 to boot into Recovery mode and proceed to the desktop. Go to Terminal and proceed with the instructions on this website:
http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2014/03/install-nvidia-driver-334-21-ubuntu-linux/
Is there any way at the beginning of the boot process to offer the user (in a low graphics environment) a choice to continue the boot with either Nouveau or the nVidia driver? I understand this problem occurred because the Maxwell cards came out in February (Mint 16 released in November 2013) but let’s make sure Mint 17 provides a seamless boot experience for those of us using these GPU’s. Besides, more Maxwell cards are coming. Mint needs to be ready for them.
Oops! Wrong blog post. This was supposed to reply to the Mint 17 article.
“with the full GOG.com treatment for Ubuntu and Mint.” Woo Hoo! Will we be getting a GOG client for Linux? This great news. Hopefully the full GOG catalogue will come over to Linux. 🙂
The way I see it games=entertainment. Linux does have pure FOSS games and there are free to play games, that are not FOSS. Now in the sense of entertainment, it has nothing to do with an OS functioning or doing work on an OS. Entertainment is a different issue, a choice to do or not to do, plus your particular flavor or type you like. It is similar to purchasing a movie ticket or DVD, it really has to do with entertainment only. Bottom line, make a purchase or not, but it does not effect your OS. Just my 2 bits. Cheers. 🙂
If GOG are willing to include Caesar II and Red Alert amongst their Linux package, they’ll have me for life 😛
Good news!
This was the driving force for me to install Linux on my old Dell 1501 Inspiron laptop and also what brought me to Mint. Can’t wait!
Oh man!! The fact that my favorite Linux distro is aware of my favorite gaming site is awesome! Thanks for sharing the word fellas! 🙂
great news but as always they are way to late
there already should have been a great variety of choices especially after so many developers tend to go to linux
Great news!
I am a gamer, but “I definitely wouldn’t want to have games installed by default for instance, free or not.” (as Clem said)
If someone is a gamer that doesn’t mind that he/she loves all games.
Live that choices to end users
Also since there are millions of games it would be technicaly imposible.
Currently, it will be much better to focus on (currently) basic thing for gaming and that is wine, which is BTW v.1.4.1 in LMDE, and not everyone is so geek to figure out how to upgrade it to current version.
🙂
This is great!! I’m going to repost this article on my forum! Hooray!!!
Well, I don’t think that this issue is relevant for me, because I’m a little bit old. I love to use Linux Mint for many other reasons. Nevertheless, I would like to state here some difficulties that have arisen with Facebook games based on Adobe Flash Player. The support team of the Songpop game sent me a message saying explicitly that the Facebook based games are not intended to be played on Linux platforms. I know that these are not the kind of games that is being commented here, but I wonder why simple games like these can’t be accessed through Linux. I think some kind of trouble exist with Adobe.
Now thinking about expanding Linux possibilities, this detail does matter, because I know a lot of people that uses Facebook daily. I would like to make the point clear. Several months ago, I was able to play any of those Facebook games without any trouble at all. Now it’s impossible. Of course, I found a solution mounting a XP virtual machine. But I would like to play directly through Linux Mint.
Luis, the “Adobe” flash player has never been good. Like is always the case when a company buys another’s codebase, they break it every couple of releases. Break free from the evil and uninstall it completely.
U can use Tor browser’s default HTML5 feature to watch Flash videos. youtube’s HTML5 enabler is here:
https://www.youtube.com/html5
Thanks for the shout out Clem, owner of GamingOnLinux here and I love the work everyone does around Mint keep it up!
Edit by Clem: Thanks Liam. Same here, keep up the great work! 🙂
where can I get some help loading a binary driver ?
I asked a question – someone else provides an answer
Thanks Yuri for your kind joke (?). I’ve got no problem at all with youtube videos. Tor is for anonymous web browsing, something that I’ve never needed, by the way. The point is that the Adobe Flash Player should be installed and updated for playing those tiny games that Facebook offers free for common people like me in order to achieve Linux Mint completeness and a minimum of convenience for everybody. The joystick lovers like you, of course get warmer with more sophisticated games like those referenced here. I’m looking for a simple solution for a bunch of simple games. Nothing more.
Luis, the best solution i can advise is just to use Chrome for flash stuff. I switched to it for this very reason. I’ve never used Chromium if you are concerned about privacy and google knowing too much, my reasoning is that they already probably know everything about me and I really doubt they care about me as an individual. 😛
Good news. I’ve got to get that second hard drive dedicated just to booting Linux(Mint, of course) so I can try using Steam and eventually GoG for Linux as my main gaming platform. Right now, I can’t get rid of Windows 7 due to all the Windows exclusive games I play that I can’t really get working well with WINE, but I’m definitely ready to start supporting the future of Linux gaming with my time and money.
Best news I’ve heard in a long time. The only reason I duel boot right now, is because I love games. And most of the games I love happen to be available through G.O.G.
Great! I am so happy to finally have some gaming on Linux!
Does anyone know where I can find proprietary Linux graphics drivers for Intel Integrated Graphics 4000? I’ve been looking all over, and there is nothing to be found for Mint users. 🙁
Love it!
Luis: The problem happens because Adobe has ended support for Flash with Linux. You can still get security fixes for it, but you don’t get the same version Windows and Mac are getting, so some websites get messed up. The Chrome (*not* Chromium!) browser from Google has the latest Flash built in so you can use all the websites that require that. Its not an open-source solution, but its the best option we’ve got right now. Just remember you have to get Chrome, not Chromium for the inbuilt Flash, so you have to download it manually from Google.