Yes! Gaming has finally arrived in Linux! If you have no experience with or knowledge of Linux, it is operating system software like Windows XP, Apple’s Mountain Lion, or Android for phones and tablets. It is the computer software that supports all your other applications and hardware devices. Unlike these other systems, Linux is the work of many. It began as a kernel, through the work of Linus Torvalds. After he announced his experiment, and released his code under a “freedom” license, allowing anyone to contribute to the project, his work expanded to a larger group on the Internet, incorporating projects like GNU and others into a complete system. Today, hundreds of thousands of international contributors work on the Linux OS. This has resulted in Linux becoming one of the major operating systems in use today. Much of the Internet is driven by machines running Linux, along with many “hobbyists” using the system on their desktop machines.

Until now, though many hardware manufacturers are delivering machines with Linux pre-installed, no commercial game developers were porting their games to Linux. Then in the middle of February of this year, Valve, a major game producer, released their Steam ™ powered game engine, along with a large number of games. The game engine is free, and they provide “Team Fortress 2” as a free to play game, and many of the other games are under $10.

I found the graphics very nice and the interface is fairly natural in Team Fortress 2, so I branched out and bought a game called Solar 2. This is a strange little game where your avatar starts out as a planet which evolves into a star that collects planets. The system may grow to more than one star. There are several levels to the game play, and the universe is forgiving enough that you can learn the rules and goals by playing. I haven’t yet gone looking for the story line, but eventually I expect I will need to do that.

Several new games are being developed using crowd sourcing. One of these is being produced by ThreeGates called Legends of Aethereus. As I came late to the party and was unable to contribute during the crowd sourcing, I didn’t feel bad about buying a beta version. While the concept art and game graphics are pretty spectacular, the game play is abysmally slow on a dual core machine that runs Steam games just fine. Understanding that this is beta software and I don’t have any high powered graphics card in this machine, I’m still expecting to see improvement in the play speed of this game. It could be awesome.

A short time after I thought I had completed this article, I ran into Linux Lite. In the Games menu was a link to the Humble Bumble site, so naturally I investigated.

At this point, I must disclose that I am not a gamer, in the pure sense of that word. I like games (spent a great number of quarters in the Asteroids machine) but I don’t play that much these days, using my computers for other things. That said, my interest in Linux is what drives my interest in these new games for my favorite platform. So, yes, I know there have been games for Linux for a long time. What sparked the interest in writing this article was the fact that the major gaming companies are beginning to embrace Linux as a game platform. As someone who has participated in Linux since 1994, I find this to be a major positive milestone in the adoption of this OS.

I just learned about Linux Game Tome at happypenguin.org a few days ago, only to discover that it has shut down! You can still take a look at this site by going to the WayBackMachine. Just enter happypenguin.org into the search bar. The first page is lots of statistics, and a calendar. Those dates on the calendar that have blue dots over them are links to snapshots of the website. As time passes, the WayBackMachine is going to become a more and more valuable asset for the web. You should take a look even if you are not interested in games.

The lack of depth in this article only brings home the need The Network Post has for contributors who can write about subjects where they have experience. The Network Post would love to publish an article that points out all of the important detail that was missed by this article. Please send submissions to reporter@thenetworkpost.com or thenetworkpost@gmail.com. It does not even need to be an article. Any comments appreciated.