Second Face Software have announced that their incredibly popular Portal: Revolution mod for Portal 2 has dropped the Native Linux build.
They've had a Native Linux build for a long time, but it became quite problematic and they weren't able to solve the issues players kept encountering. So instead, they're going to ensure it works with Proton where the issues didn't happen.
As they mentioned in their announcement on Steam:
Portal: Revolution, from the start, has included a native Linux build. As some players have recently reported, it was broken because of recent Steam updates. To fix this we have decided to remove the native Linux binaries in favour of Proton. Don't panic.
Our native Linux build sucked. You may have experienced frequent hangs and stutters related to gel rendering or other strange bugs. This stems from a bug in our multithreaded rendering code for gel blobs, and despite our best efforts we were not able to fix it. To make matters worse, it only happens on the native Linux build. Windows and Proton are not affected.
Because of these two reasons we'll ditch the native build and run the game through Proton. Performance should be comparable, if not even better at times and stability is definitely improved.
Valve rated it Steam Deck Verified with the Native Linux version, so this means it will need to be reviewed again with Proton by Valve, otherwise it will cause problems on Steam Deck. For now, you may need to manually opt into using Proton for it in the properties -> Compatibility menu for the game on Steam to run properly.
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In related news, earlier this year they also announced Portal: Revolution 2 is in development, so there's more fun to come for Portal fans.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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You can also find comments for this article on social media: Quite true, but I suppose the difference is it puts some distance between them and "real" FLOSS Linux applications.
We get tens of thousands of games that run and run very well, and developers can spend more time actually building their games instead of focusing on fixing up issues for our (let's face it) tiny user share. Proton is a good great thing for gamers.
Yes, YES!!! Keeping our (gaming) future tied so closely to Microsoft it's
TheSHEEEP 1 hour ago
So is that a statistic or an anecdote? Because my anecdote is, nearly all the games I play are native, and I never have any problems. When I have problems it's nearly always with a Proton game not working, even though I play far fewer Proton games. Although lately my main annoyance is for some reason my Dosbox Steam games are just not starting at all. I haven't played MOO2 in ages now because of that.You can go to any gaming-based forum with some Linux users and you will always see many people say that they've had issues with native games that were solved by switching to the Proton version.
So I'd be wary of this kind of generalization. We both have anecdotes pointing in different directions, but I doubt either of us have data.
Last Epoch, TW Warhammer (the Feral versions just performs straight up worse, is months behind thus destroying mod support, etc. ), tons of Adventure Maker games (or Adventure Studio? You know, the one everyone and their mum use to create point & click games) have severe issues on Linux especially with windowing and input, Ark, Rust; and the list goes on and on.
That's not anecdotal but confirmed by all the error reports you see for issues and the suggested solution 9/10 times being "switch to Proton".
It is also confirmed by devs shutting down their Linux version because they don't want to deal with the Linux-specific issues (meaning they did have enough of those to be bothersome).
"Works for me" is always anecdotal and no argument when obviously lots of people are having issues.
Funny enough, one thread I've seen throughout all of this is that often the issue isn't actually in the stuff related to graphics (which is arguably the main focus of the work being done on Proton, dxvk, etc), but in the native libraries used for windowing & window refreshing, input, etc.
Surprisingly often, it comes down to usage of ancient SDL1 (which, please devs, just don't. Ever.).
So switching to Proton will solve the issues not because of some graphical bug, but because the native libraries used for the native Linux version are, frankly, crap - or outdated.
There are undeniably lots of cases where it does not work well for people - and then Proton becomes an option.
The other way around just doesn't happen because if Proton is the default already, there IS no native version to switch to.
When you look at ProtonDB and the games that are reported to not work there, they are overwhelmingly of the multiplayer variant. That's probably 70-80% of the less than 10% of games that are reported as worse than Silver - and we all know the issues there are not Linux, but devs opting for the blunt hammer to their cheating issues.
In other words, the chance that your (non-MP) game will work fine on Proton is way over 90%.
The chance that the native version will work just fine? Hard to say without official data (which I doubt anyone has), but given the amount of reports and sentiments you generally see, I doubt it is better than the Proton stats.
Of course I wouldn't recommend going for Proton straight away if there is a native Linux version - because most likely that will work just fine and it will also perform better in that case.
But the approach to just switch to Proton always to get a higher chance at having no issues at all seems at least understandable to me.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 7 Aug 2025 at 7:57 am UTC
TheSHEEEP 58 minutes ago
Yes, YES!!! Keeping our (gaming) future tied so closely to Microsoft it's good great!Just a reminder to people that this forum has an ignore feature, in case you want to get rid of sideline ragers who never contribute anything of value to discussions they inject themselves into, are really just annoying everyone and should probably go outside to take some deep, relaxing breaths.
Click on the profile -> block button.
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