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Wine can run most popular games surprisingly well these days. Many even run better than they do under Windows.

Wine requires knowledge of what you're doing and a fair amount of fiddling for most things - this raises the bar too high for general consumers, probably more in terms of effort than skill required.

There are only 141 applications in Wine's 'platinum' list, and a heap of those are multiple entries for variants or DLC of the one game. Things not on the 'platinum' list require further configuration.

I agree with you that there is a level of experience required for using wine on the command-line and tuning it to work for certain games. However, the PlayOnLinux project abstracts the details of setting up wine and configuring wine for games by having a list of popular games with predefined wine configurations and an intuitive GUI for installing and running games. While there are compatibility issues and performance issues with wine that are a legitimate issue, tools like PlayOnLinux allow anyone to play wine games to the best that wine can. I've had some luck with it in the past, but I personally don't mind just using wine on the command-line (if I have to).

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/

Cool, thanks for the info. Previously when I've seen 'just run it under wine', the hand-waving casualness of the comment didn't gel with my experience in actually using it. Having a library of canned configs is a step forward. I don't mean to disparage wine at all, just that it's not been 'general-public' ready.

I would say that you are wrong: its definitely ready for the general public, when that general public is using a modern, decent distribution, and not trying to fiddle so much. Less fiddling, more playing: thats the current state of the art with Wine.

>Wine requires knowledge of what you're doing and a fair amount of fiddling for most things - this raises the bar too high for general consumers, probably more in terms of effort than skill required.

I've been running games in WINE for years and years, and I can now say that as of today, with my WINE setup being maintained entirely by my distribution (Ubuntu), I don't even think about WINE when I use it. So I don't really think its as difficult as you infer; this is a huge generality, like saying "MS Word requires knowledge of what you're doing and a fair amount of fiddling for most things". Its true, but fascetious, because obviously, in spite of the massive investment required, users are able to produce documents ..

>There are only 141 applications in Wine's 'platinum' list, and a heap of those are multiple entries for variants or DLC of the one game. Things not on the 'platinum' list require further configuration.

This only means that the list is incomplete. It doesn't mean there are 'only 141 applications'. Those are just the ones that have made it to the list so far .. but it doesn't, in any way, reflect the current state of the art. Lists get stale.

There's still plenty of popular games that don't run well under WINE and it's a PITA to set up not to mention having 2 versions of Steam installed.

Not really something you can sell as an easy games experience.

Everyone I say to myself "Gosh darn it I'm switching my main desktop so that it boots Linux by default today!" it never ends well. Example: I like to play LoL, I got it to run under wine (though nowhere near Windows performance) and just say screw it and go back to Windows. That and the fact that patches like to break things a lot. I am really hoping that Steam for Linux pushes a lot more companies to port their games to Linux so that I can finally switch over.

I play LoL through Wine on Lubuntu. It runs perfectly without any configuration. It was the first thing I tried after 'apt-get install wine'

In fact, it runs better than it does under Windows 7, probably because Lubuntu uses 2GB less RAM and considerably less CPU than Windows 7.

That's interesting, I didn't know that! That makes the option of using an HTPC as a 'true' gaming platform (in addition to being a media center) a lot more likely.

Do most of the recent games (Need for Speed, Counter Strike : Source, Far Cry 3, Assassin's Creed 3) run well, or is it mostly older games?

CS:S has a native Linux version that runs very well! Assassins creed 3 has "garbage" rating on WineHQ (http://appdb.winehq.org/) and Far Cry 3 has "silver". So the answer for those is probably no.

Not sure about NFS, guess it depends which one.

FYI, CSS isn't recent :P CSS even runs natively on through Steam for Linux :) You can check how specific titles run under wine here: http://appdb.winehq.org/

@jiggy2011 Thanks, that's very helpful! I meant NFS: Most Wanted, which came out in 2012.

CS:S on Linux is definitely awesome news, and makes me more confident of Linux gaming becoming viable in the near-term. I think the Steambox/Steam Linux, Ouya and other such systems are definitely helping improve adoption.

To be honest, I wouldn't spend much time trying to get something running under Wine unless it had a very high probability of success, and a moderate number of (easy) steps. After all, I already have the game running under Windows, and gaming's meant to be a casual activity I undertake after work :)

It's awesome that the option is available for Linux enthusiasts, however!

Edit: Ah, damn it, I meant CS:GO, not CS:S! I see that it's running fine under Wine, however!

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