Hiya, I'm the Pike who keeps getting pageviews from the link on the first page of this thread =P (Thanks Saanlem!)
I do indeed run WoW on Kubuntu Linux (yes that's KDE, I've had no problems with it and I much prefer it over GNOME ;P ) via Wine. My first toon was level 70 before I ever played on Windows. Although I ran Linux exclusively on (all my) systems for a few years, as of last year I now dual-boot Linux and WinXP on my main computer for one reason: I can't get Ventrilo to work on Linux. (Trust me, I've tried eeeeeverything.) So sometimes I do have to pop over to Windows for raids or hanging with the guildies. I try to use Linux for my WoW'ing as much as possible though.
WoW on Linux runs near-flawlessly for me, and while I have noticed no framerate differences between that and the Windows version, one thing I have noticed is that for some reason that I haven't quite ascertained, I have little to no lag on Linux. There was a day last week when I was constantly getting disconnected and booted from the game on Windows, I hopped over to Linux and the problem was solved. Quite epic!
Now I get lots of e-mails and the like from people with questions about this sort of thing, typically what I tell everybody is firstly that everybody's computer produces different results, and secondly that you will probably have be prepared to do a little Googling and digging around and get your hands dirty a bit. It takes me about two days to get WoW working and fully functional on a fresh Linux install of mine (granted, that's between eight-hour work shifts, and sleeping, but ya know). The point is that after you install WoW it's not ready to play out-of-the-box, you've gotta mess with the settings and tweak stuff, and it can take a while.
Also you do have to keep in mind that sometimes you will run across issues and Blizz can't help you on them. Much of the time these are Wine issues that will be solved in the next update. Regardless, you can typically find answers to these in the Official Ubuntu Forums. A recent example was a bug that made it so you couldn't get past the Terms of Service when installing WotLK. There were a few workarounds to this (one of which was detailed in
my blog when I was installing beta), for me I simply wound up installing on Windows first and copying the whole shebang over to Linux.
TL;DR VERSION: It's not for everyone but it worked well for me and it might work well for you too, just don't go rushing into it thinking everything will work 100% perfectly right out of the box! I mean, it might, but... come now, it's Linux. It wouldn't be Linux if you didn't have to mess with it, right? =P
Originally Posted by Dreadlorde
Free software isn't about price, it's about freedom.
|
I agree with this comment. Much <3