[CupricTea]

I still remember when Valve first showed an early alpha unreleased version of Steam running natively in Ubuntu for the first time in the early 2010s. It blew my mind that a major company, especially an entertainment company, was targeting Linux at this scale.

Of course, Wine was very lackluster in those days, and for a while I was worried they'd eventually give up with the monumental effort that would be involved in getting it up to snuff.

It's now over a decade later and they're still at it and have made monumental leaps. Valve truly was and still is playing the long game here.

Imagine if Microsoft had never threatened their business with the Windows 8 store and the anxiety of Microsoft locking down their platform.

[gorgoiler]

Halflife2 ran perfectly under WINE. At the time I assumed that it was a win for WINE but with hindsight — and typing this out makes me feel so naive! — was HL2 optimized for WINE in order to make WINE more successful? Of course it must have been!

It’s a shame the connotations are negative because this ironic comment otherwise works quite well: This large wooden horse is such an extravagant gift, it has to have some subversive purpose, right?!

[amlib]

It ran fine as in not crashing, but you were limited to dx8 or maybe dx9a feature set which limited many visual effects and there were significant performance issues originating from wine's reliance on translating dx to opengl, lack of offloading cpu grpahics "command lists" (or whatever it's called) to a deditacted thread and the disjointed state of linux graphics at the time... It took until about 2013 for wine staging to run hl2 properly with multi core rendering and with all bells and wistle, but performance was still inferior.

I think linux graphics were only good when paired with the right version of red hat and nvidia drivers on a supported workstation dedicated for running proprietary 3d/vfx software packages as an alternative to the aging SGI workstations. Every other use case was pretty rough... until about 2017 when things began to change massively, and finally now, where you can actually get better experiences than freaking windows on most use cases.