Black Mesa, the fan-made recreation of Half-Life has a fresh brew available for Linux gamers that should make it a better experience.

The new public beta version for owners of the game aimed to address these issues:

Mesa drivers with OpenGL 3.0 showing black screen

Black props and NPCs on closed driver for NVIDIA

Inadequate memory usage on big maps and/or long playthrough

They've also pushed a couple of updates to the new beta since it went live, which they say adds in full support for Shader Model 3.0 in OpenGL mode, reduced memory consumption, libtcmalloc_minimal was added for supporting distros other than Ubuntu and other bug fixes.

To access it, you need to opt into the "public-beta" branch on Steam. To do so, right click on the game and go to properties, from there select the beta tab and pick it from the drop-down menu. They're asking for feedback in this Steam forum post.

Find Black Mesa on Steam.

Have tip to x_wing.