id's idTech game engine has a long history of running well on Linux-based machines. Games such as Quake were one of the very few really big PC titles that found themselves installed on all the many flavors of Linux out there.
Naturally, Linux-lovers were hoping to hear that id Software's next generation of games running on the idTech 5 engine -- such as the upcoming mutant-shooting Rage --- would be receiving a Linux port. These hopes were all but dashed when id forefather John Carmack recently said that it was unlikely to happen, as it would be hard for id to "be able to justify the work."
But now it seems that there is hope after all. According to id's Timothee Besset, anyways. Writing on his blog, a recent entry discussed the situation, and Besset's champions the Linux cause:
"In the past few years I am pretty much the only one who has been involved in our Linux versions, and most of that work was done in my spare time. It worked out because I spent significant time working on each of those projects to get them shipped (Doom3, Quake4, ETQW), and making sure we had working Linux builds was a natural part of that process.
It is unlikely the new Wolfenstein title is going to get a native Linux release. None of it was done in house, and I had no involvement in the project. QuakeLive offers a lot of challenges and eats away everything else right now.
As far as idTech 5 (the Rage engine), it runs on PS3 and Mac already. Setting up idTech 5 to run on those platforms early on in our development cycle was a direct result of carrying Linux/Mac support in idTech 4 beforehand. It is likely i will be involved with idTech 5 in the near future, I'll be damned if we don't find the time to get Linux builds done."
If/when the Linux version does come out, it'll be great advanced game to test out Linux performance against the Windows (7) version. Historically, the Linux ports run at slightly higher framerates on the same hardware as Windows machines, but have been at times much trickier to get running (especially with ATI cards.)
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