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Comment by MrVitaliy | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, Linux is my favorite gaming platform already. I remember trying to play the original Diablo and WarCraft games on windows 7 with no success. Diablo II works ok in virtual box running XP with 3d acceleration enabled, WarCraft III pushes the virtual 3d acceleration to the limit and just runs super slow.

All of those games run flawlessly on Linux with latest wine. It might take few minutes to play with wine config and winetricks but if you're playing games you have the time to waste anyway.

Also I've played all the latest Blizzard games flawlessly under linux + wine setup (World of Warcraft, Diablo III and Star Craft II). You do need a beefy video card for those however.

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I like the "time to waste" comment. I've been universally disappointed every time I try to get wine running, and frustrated that the listings in appdb.winehq.com seem to be lies. Generally I'm willing to tinker with stuff (and pretty successful at it), but here I always give up.

"I don't have time for games anyway" is what I end up telling myself.

It's kind of like debugging two programs at the same time. On one hand there is wine, wine configs, winetricks, loading directX, etc. On the other hand it's the game you're trying to run.

For example, it turns out StarCraft II needs an update process running before the game runs. So you have to find and start the correct Agent.exe --nohttpauth and only then start the actual game.exe as a different process. Then the game dumps segfaultish error saying some 3d surface wasn't initialized, which means it requires later version of directX, back to playing winetricks...

I hear this should make it easier to use Wine or something:

http://www.codeweavers.com

"It might take few minutes to play with wine config and winetricks but if you're playing games you have the time to waste anyway."

I completely disagree with your assignment of value here. Playing games is fun. Configuring wine is an incredibly frustrating, bash-your-head-against-the-wall-repeatedly process that is commonly measured in hours, not minutes - if it works at all.

"an incredibly frustrating, bash-your-head-against-the-wall-repeatedly process that is commonly measured in hours, not minutes"

s/head/axe/ s/wall/monsters/

Sounds awfully like video gaming ;)

If hitting monsters with an axe sounds as appealing as bashing your head against a wall, I guess I can understand why you wouldn't enjoy gaming.

Try http://www.playonlinux.com/ its a little GUI that sits on top of wine and gives you a list of preconfigured wine settings to play in a lot of modern games

>Configuring wine

Well, it has become much better over the past few years and if the game you want to play is well supported it's almost painless. Not sure if you tried recently?

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