[shkm]

Unless I'm blind, I'm quite surprised to be the first person to mention that Linux just doesn't work as a modern (post-Diablo II) gaming platform--at least, never as well as Windows currently does and is likely to for a long time.

Now don't get me wrong: I love Linux and I've tried many times to get rid of my Windows partition in order to do everything under my favourite OS. I've tried different distros and different machines, all with different problems and the same conclusion: it's just not good enough.

WoW does run OK under Linux, though. It doesn't run great, but it runs playably if you're just checking on auctions or popping on to help a friend or do dailies for an hour. The biggest problem is the lack of hardware mouse acceleration when your FPS drops even the tiniest bit, and of course the FPS fluctuation itself. Running on an 8800GT, I went from a solid 75FPS to a very unstable <60, sometimes dropping to 20-30 for no visible reason. While some people claim to play WoW under Linux just as well as on Windows, it's something I'll believe when I see.

So I've been keeping a Linux and Windows partition on my gaming machine in order to play games (Windows) and have a usable desktop where I could get some work done (Linux). The end solution was to purchase another exclusively Linux machine.

Don't expect it to work well and you won't be disappointed. Hopefully the Linux/gaming situation will change sometime in the near future.

PS: Arch & wmii here, though looking to try ratpoison, dwm and ion.

PPS: If you're interested in quickly checking how WoW runs, just apply the registry tweaks (found on WoWWiki's Linux page), mount your Windows partition and run 'wine Wow.exe -opengl'. I found this to have exactly the same performance as a copy installed on a Linux partition.