[gcr]

Wow, I'm going to go try this! Portal runs "surprisinly well" (eg. great performance but it has occasional graphical glitches) on my machine (Arch x64, Intel HD 4000), so I'm curious to see how HL2 runs.

I understand Valve hasn't gotten the bugs out quite yet, but this is an excellent start.

Edit: Oh man, "Half-Life 2 (Beta)", "Half-Life 2: Episode One (Beta)", "Half-Life 2: Episode Two (Beta)", and "Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (Beta)" are all in my steam library. It's like Christmas all over again.

[nathanb]

I assume you have 32-bit (multilib) support installed in order to install Steam?

Or is there some trick I'm not aware of to get native x64 Steam going under Arch?

[gcr]

Honestly, I don't remember. A native steam package is available in the 'multilib' repository, which should be enough to at least start Steam. To play games, I remember having to install some 32-bit Mesa packages. I also had to install libtxc_dxtn and lib32-libtxc_dxtn, which are texture compression libraries. Without these two, textures didn't appear.

[pmh]

While I agree that it's nice to have native (assuming it's actually native) ports, HL2 and most of the other Source engine games have reportedly run great via Wine for a while now: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application...

[ajross]

There's a big gap between "can be made to run under wine by following a recipe someone posted to appdb.winehq.org" and "click on Download, then Plan".

I fiddle with messy integration issues on embedded Linux and Android professionally, and am about as qualified as anyone could be to make that work. I never once bothered trying to get wine running. I installed Portal last week without a moment's thought.

[chongli]

Just use PlayOnLinux. It makes handling of wine configuration very easy and automatic.

[wtallis]

These ports are a little bit more native than linking to winelib - there are still some translation layers in place, but you do run an ELF file.

[nickzoic]

Portal worked great on Wine / Linux for me right up to (what I think is) the last level, when the frame rate suddenly plummeted to barely playable. Now it's out for native Linux I'll have to see if the same thing happens.