Wine allowed me to re-live a gaming experience I had from when I was a child on Linux

That game looks super badass

Wine is a rather heated topic at the best of times

The only people who have a problem with Wine are the narrow minded ones that only care about their games and nothing else ;)

There some Linux gamers who can't imagine that Wine isn't only made for gaming. It's much bigger than that and I guess the most important (brings money to the table) branch is office software + support.

And yes Wine is a amazing technology. I'm glad that the developments is profitable for Codeweavers, even when the code is under a copy-left license. I need wine for my work flow and wouldn't have switched to Ubuntu without it. :)

Wine is a rather heated topic at the best of times

The only people who have a problem with Wine are the narrow minded ones that only care about their games and nothing else ;)

Well, I'm glad you winked that, but it doesn't much take the sting out of a cutting remark! I don't have a problem with Wine except when it's touted as the solution to a gaming problem. Or indeed, any nearly modern problem.

The one non-game case I'd use Wine for is Office 2013 support, since my work mandates its use. However it gets a bronze rating on Linux and doesn't even install fully. However, funnily enough, Crossover have just (last week) announced full support for Office 2013 in their next release (date tba). I might finally have a reason to buy Crossover again, after my initial purchase back in 2009 lapsed, since my experience with it, like Wine itself, was so tainted by complete inconsistency.

I agree with Liam - it's awesome software, fully deserving of the greatest respect... but I'd never recommend anyone use it. It's a complete crap-shoot if software works and even the AppDB reflects this - multiple reports from near-identical distributions with results varying wildly.

Only one issue in-game that I could see was that water had some weird flicker on it, but I could easily ignore it for a beautiful bit of nostalgia on Linux.

No! Don't do that! If there is an issue that you think might be related to Wine not working as it should, please file a bug report instead of just ignoring it.

Only one issue in-game that I could see was that water had some weird flicker on it, but I could easily ignore it for a beautiful bit of nostalgia on Linux.

No! Don't do that! If there is an issue that you think might be related to Wine not working as it should, please file a bug report instead of just ignoring it.

Of course, I meant in regards to playing it right now though.

@liamdawe
"One issue I would like to figure out, is why some fullscreen games break when I alt+tab. They become completely unresponsive after this is done forcing them to be stopped."

In my experience this is mostly fixed if you run wine in virtual desktop mode and set the "desktop" size to your actual resolution.

If it wasn't for Wine I probably wouldn't have switched to Linux and would still be clinging to Win7; it would have meant abandoning a 20+ year library of games, plus some other software I needed that wasn't available natively for Linux. These issues are primarily what stopped me switching to Linux back when Vista came out - fortunately by the time Win8 forced a re-evaluation the situation had drastically improved (getting a free 1yr CrossOver subscription at the time was very helpful too).

There are three conditions that must be met when I consider buying any Windows games now:

1- Must be DRM-free. I despise DRM and won't tolerate it in general (the most I'll tolerate is Steam, but only for games that officially support Linux and only at a very deep discount), but it's especially important when it comes to Wine due to the potential impact on performance and stability.
2- Must have a good chance of running well in Wine (so no DX10/11/12 stuff atm).
3- Must be older/very unlikely to get an official Linux release and be sufficiently discounted. I'll only consider paying full price for something if it's both DRM-free and supports Linux natively.

I do agree that WINE is an awesome piece of software and I have nothing but respect for the developers who put so many hours in it. However, I also do not see as as a viable means to get recent games to run in Linux. Honestly, as great as WINE is, but there is barely ANY newer game that just runs in WINE, like that. Either the game will require some serious tinkering to get to run, or it will have more or less serious issues, or both. Let's just say the "Platinum" list on WINE-HQ is rather short for a reason. I rather dual-boot than try running newer games in WINE. It doesn't matter anyway - in both instances I am playing a Windows copy counting as a Windows sale. But one works reliable, the other does not.

For older games - completely agree. These games won't otherwise be ported and usually DO run in WINE with minimal hassle.

BTW, those random errors that our installers throw up near the end are just related to the whole "Game Explorer" functions from Windows so you need not worry about them at all :) You should be able to see what I mean by just observing the terminal output during the install process.

Also, one useful trick to know about Unity and DX11 games: Unity games sometimes have a DX9 fallback mode so if you disable the d3d11.dll in Wine's configuration utility, you can then force any Unity game that has a DX9 fallback mode to run in DX9 :)

Last but not least, our very own GOG community has a nice thread with quite a few games catalogued that are known to work with Wine and you can find that thread here: GOG WINE thread

Wine is often used as an excuse. That's the only problem and it's not wine's fault. It has it's place. But eventually, it's going to be used for really old games just like this article and some software.

It will take too long to catch up as the renderers become more complex on the Windows side. Starting with DX11.

Wine is often used as an excuse. That's the only problem and it's not wine's fault. It has it's place. But eventually, it's going to be used for really old games just like this article and some software.

It will take too long to catch up as the renderers become more complex on the Windows side. Starting with DX11.

Well the thing is, with DX12, aren't things supposed to be simpler? So it won't take something like Wine as long?

I do agree that WINE is an awesome piece of software and I have nothing but respect for the developers who put so many hours in it. However, I also do not see as as a viable means to get recent games to run in Linux. Honestly, as great as WINE is, but there is barely ANY newer game that just runs in WINE, like that. Either the game will require some serious tinkering to get to run, or it will have more or less serious issues, or both. Let's just say the "Platinum" list on WINE-HQ is rather short for a reason. I rather dual-boot than try running newer games in WINE. It doesn't matter anyway - in both instances I am playing a Windows copy counting as a Windows sale. But one works reliable, the other does not.

For older games - completely agree. These games won't otherwise be ported and usually DO run in WINE with minimal hassle.

Provided you have a powerful enough machine to compensate for the overhead, most of the newer games are working very well and without much fuss especially with the newer versions of Wine (1.9+).
There's rarely a game that I tried recently that didn't worked with Wine. Now, depends also on what "newer games" means, but at this point anything with a DX9/GL renderer has a very good chance to work with Wine.
What gives Wine its "it doesn't work" label are of course the exceptions, and when you bump into one of these game that you desperately want to play (and the damn game doesn't work) is hard to have a good impression about Wine. With enough bad luck, repeat this experience few times and that's it, probably you'll never try Wine again and the bad impression about it is definitive. It resembles what you often hear in various places about Linux itself; "I've tried Linux and it doesn't work".

Wine is often used as an excuse. That's the only problem and it's not wine's fault. It has it's place. But eventually, it's going to be used for really old games just like this article and some software.

It will take too long to catch up as the renderers become more complex on the Windows side. Starting with DX11.

Well the thing is, with DX12, aren't things supposed to be simpler? So it won't take something like Wine as long?

Simpler?

The pipeline behavior is actually more or less the same with some operations having more emphasis and multiple concurrent operations. DX11 is a one way pipeline even Lo Wang and Hoji can't get through without fucking Kyokogami literally.

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/GPU-Pipelines.jpg

So no, it's not simpler. It's just more efficient.

Wine is an amazing piece of software which should be loved by everyone, partially it's thanks to it that I'm now a full time Linux user as there are some games (Guild Wars 2 being one of them) which I wouldn't do without.

I only reserve Wine for old Windows games of which are most likely never going to get ported over (and occasionally Free2Play MMOs), It's nice be able to re-play a favorite old game of mine without needing Windows for it. That said I don't intend to buy any new Windows games regardless of how good they run in Wine, I believe there are enough cross platform tools to make a Linux release happen these days.

I have found some games listed on Wine-AppDB to be outdated and do not reflect how the game runs in Wine today. For example BloodRayne has a Silver/Garbage rating, however after a full playthrough last week I'd easily give it a Gold/Platinum rating.

Wine is an amazing piece of software which should be loved by everyone, partially it's thanks to it that I'm now a full time Linux user as there are some games (Guild Wars 2 being one of them) which I wouldn't do without.

I only reserve Wine for old Windows games of which are most likely never going to get ported over (and occasionally Free2Play MMOs), It's nice be able to re-play a favorite old game of mine without needing Windows for it. That said I don't intend to buy any new Windows games regardless of how good they run in Wine, I believe there are enough cross platform tools to make a Linux release happen these days.

I have found some games listed on Wine-AppDB to be outdated and do not reflect how the game runs in Wine today. For example BloodRayne has a Silver/Garbage rating, however after a full playthrough last week I'd easily give it a Gold/Platinum rating.

You should check the GOG Wine thread as that has more up-to-date info :) GOG Wine thread

One issue I would like to figure out, is why some fullscreen games break when I alt+tab. They become completely unresponsive after this is done forcing them to be stopped.

Sometimes this is due to the window manager you are using. I found that latest KWin (from KDE 5.8) has lots of problems with games: not bringing the window on screen, disabling video playback or showing a blank/corrupt window. Games that suffer from this are, for example, "The Last Remnant" or "Skyrim". KWin is also "broken" with native Linux games, like "Tomb Raider (2013)": you have to run the game in windowed mode then go to fullscreen.
I don't know if this could be related to my Mesa version, I have to investigate.

For me, WINE is no different from having something like the Steam Runtime. I'd be happy if games officially supported "Windows + WINE" as targets rather than "Windows, Mac and SteamOS".

I dual booted windows for a long time, it was mainly because of certain games that didn't work well under wine I would have to use windows for. mainly the early MMOs like Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, Guild Wars/2 and the like. although they all work fine on Wine now. I don't play them anymore, so it's not an issue. it did take awhile before wine was able to run those games well. but since Steam came to Linux all this has changed for me.
these days there's only some older titles I might want to play for nostalgia and then there are the other Blizzard games I can't live without which are D3 and Hearthstone.
Wine allows me to use Linux all the time without a need for dual booting or even a windows partition. it would be nice if the big companies would port their games to Linux, but I highly doubt it will happen until the Linux market share is at least the same or better than OSX/MacOS.

I dual booted windows for a long time, it was mainly because of certain games that didn't work well under wine I would have to use windows for. mainly the early MMOs like Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, Guild Wars/2 and the like. although they all work fine on Wine now. I don't play them anymore, so it's not an issue. it did take awhile before wine was able to run those games well. but since Steam came to Linux all this has changed for me.
these days there's only some older titles I might want to play for nostalgia and then there are the other Blizzard games I can't live without which are D3 and Hearthstone.
Wine allows me to use Linux all the time without a need for dual booting or even a windows partition. it would be nice if the big companies would port their games to Linux, but I highly doubt it will happen until the Linux market share is at least the same or better than OSX/MacOS.

Soooooo, never? :D

It's up to them, to port those games, I would never dual-boot for just certain games, I play what I have availible here and if it works through Wine it's great and games like D3 and HS will always be supported, as of new games I only buy ones that have native Linux support and it's looking quite good lately, the amount of titles :)

I also prefer not to use Wine if I don't need to just so I don't build up virtual Windows marketshare that they don't have :)

Well the thing is, with DX12, aren't things supposed to be simpler? So it won't take something like Wine as long?

Simpler?

I bet what he meant is that the D3D 12 API has a very similar, in large parts almost identical design to Vulkan. D3D 11 and OpenGL are quite different. Thus it is reasonable to assume that translating D3D 12 to Vulkan might be much more straightforward than emulating the previous versions of DX with OpenGL.

Sorry if that's not what you meant, Liam.