It's still beta-ish right now, but finally CS:GO is available natively on Linux!
This was really the one reason I've been hanging on to Windows, and it is such a relief to finally be able to ditch MS for good! CS:GO on Linux is still a bit rough around the edges, but it is definitely playable! The graphics are visually impeccable, frame rate is about the same as on Windows, didn't notice glitching or stuttering even when moving from the fullscreen game to the desktop and even moving the game from one monitor to the other. Sound worked as well. What didn't work: I had to try the download a few times, perhaps an update was rolled out in the middle of my download. Steam overlay doesn't work. Browsing community servers just leads to a blank screen and you have to exit the game to get out of it, but you can just browse servers from the Steam interface and it connects in game just fine. I wasn't able to download custom maps for some reason, the download just stalled at 0%. The mouse disappears when the console is open.
I'm not sure how much of the issues I encountered had to do with running on Arch x64 rather than a supported Ubuntu release. In all it was not a bad experience, and I anticipate updates will be rolling out steadily to iron out the wrinkles.
I did notice most of those issues, I do have another that is making it quite tricky to play. For most of the time the other players are just black. No textures at all! I have to identify friend from foe by silhouette. Not the best way to play a reaction run and gun game like Counter Strike.
Actually, Valve caved under pressure to separate the linux and windows servers. The servers for linux clients are probably not on the best hardware Valve has, and there will be a lot of analysis going on on those servers, which is normal for a beta, and which will probably kill server performance.
ESEA, FaceIT, and other commercial servers, that are actually playable without all of the cheaters that make playing on the Valve Windows servers impossible, will not be offering any linux servers, so there you go.
Another thing is that Valve has most probably nerfed the linux clients. There is a lot of commercial money at stake in the CS:GO scene. Guess we'll see about that when the final version is released, but I'm betting they'll do the same to linux versions of windows games as what they do to windows versions of xbox games...
I don't play competitive matches, so maybe they have separate servers for linux clients there, but I was able to connect to the same community (vac secure) servers that I always play on.
Are you using integrated graphics? (Do other Source games have this same issue?) Close Steam and try restarting it with force_s3tc_enable=true steam and start CS:GO. I've had the same issue with TF2 and other such games.
Is the linux client nerfed then? What pings did you get? Did collisions register OK? Can you log into 128 tick servers?
I'm not going to be able to try it out until the weekend myself, because I have to set up a system with binary blobs for Steam, but I'm curious, because with CS:GO on linux, if it works good enough, it could be possible to play that instead of urban terror on the next LUG-LAN lol...
ATM I am running Fedora 20, on a Macbook Air (2013). It runs really bad, no sound (only other gun sounds) many (very many) glitches, many stutters. It is playable though, I got 3rd on a TDM server :D
I blame this performance on my integrated GPU (HD 5000) and those drivers, as CPU usage never exceeded 25%....
I think I am going to dual boot with ubuntu for a while then, just for fun....
Edit: I am very happy about this step from valve, hope they keep support for other distros high in the future...
Edit2: BTW does someone know a good tool to record gameplay in Fedora?
Didn't seem nerfed, just a bit unfinished in regard to the UI. I was able to get in 128 tick servers, iirc. My pings were not unusual. Graphics seemed at least as smooth if not better than on Windows. I didn't max them out, just used the default settings. Shaders defaulted to low I think, pretty much everything else on high, motion blur off, fsaa on (from memory; I only glanced at what the defaults were, I'll be sure to dig in to all the options when I have time). I didn't notice anything funky with collisions, but I wasn't specifically testing them. I only had time to play a couple of matches, so I was mainly just seeing if it would perform well enough for me to have fun playing, which it did. I'll try examining more thoroughly tonight.
Just want a nice UI...Elementary OS comes close with dark themes.
Its so hollow but I want to enjoy a minimal UI that I can tweak with learning of course.
Gnome, KDE and Unity annoy me....funny to say that when there free and I pay for the crap I have now.
For me its down to me building a NAS for my stuff and then I can pave and trash my machine and my stuff is on the network and not on a Dynamic drive that linux can not read.
Kernel 3.17 has added the ability to patch USB devices (like storage) through TCP/IP. You don't even need a separate NAS anymore with a bleeding edge linux distro lol, you can use standard USB storage, and with USB 3.0, that's not bad in terms of performance at all.
Not integrated graphics but a pair of 7970's that say they are in crossfire but I she is still only using one (different problem) No other Valve game is having the same issue. It's at the point now after a few restarts and such that the missing textures isn't an issue. However the game doesn't feel good right now. Hard to describe the problem. I'm not the greatest player these days, I'm getting old but I'm better than this... My kdr is well down and the game just feels wrong. In time I'm sure they will get it sorted, they did with the other Source games. They all felt hincky at first. I'll go back to Day of Defeat for a bit till CS:GO gets some love from the valve guys.
CS:GO hasn't been feeling right for some time now, with the flood of cheaters and crazy people and the dumb changes made by Valve in the gameplay, but that's how that goes. CS 1.6 became so popular because it was so consistent and simple. It seems like Valve has this compulsion to pimp CS:GO beyond reasonable levels. In CS, it's all about the gameplay, it's not about the bling, but Valve obviously wants to boost the bling because they literally make a couple of million dollars per month on the sales of cosmetic items (gun skins and stickers).