A small selection of games has been and still is available for Linux. Recently, Steam for Linux has added an interesting series of indie titles; but, as far as the really big, popular games are concerned, in most cases, you still have to hope the Windows version somehow works with Wine.

A really laudable exception is the game Minecraft [1] from the Swedish developer Markus Persson [2] and his company, Mojang. It's completely based on Java and OpenGL, so it runs splendidly on Linux (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Minecraft 1.7.2 brings new landscapes – and it runs flawlessly on Kubuntu 13.04.

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