After months where my wife was patiently playing WoW with appalling graphics
because WoW doesn't really support OpenGL any more, and an even worse frame
rate despite really low graphics settings, I finally got fed up with the fact
that I cannot, under any circumstances, get sound out of Mangler and WoW at the
same time even though the Wine audio test works fine, and was getting zero
support on the issue from anyone, so I re-installed Microsfot Windows XP.
I fired up WoW and you know what? The graphics, on much higher settings, are
much much better - this despite the fact that one chap on this or a related
forum tells me that he gets just as good graphics performance under Linux as
under Windows and it must be my dated graphics cards. I had told him that I
remembered having had better performance under Windows with an older
motherboard, and less ram and MUCH slower CPU. Turned out I was right.
And the sound just works. It just does. No extra effort required at all. For
that matter it didn't take any extra effort to get fantastic graphics right
off the bat without having to muck about over-riding the default Wine
repositories or installing manufacturer proprietary drivers directly (which is
actually easier than installing through the Ubuntu package manager).
Much as I hate Windows, I am now going to go buy a license and pay my hard
earned cash to a company I loathe. Because, let's fact it, these days I do
naff all programming, I'm not running a server, I'm running a desktop
and all my wife wants to do is play computer games and browse the internet. Me
too pretty much, but I do that on my PC.
So it sounds like I'm just whinging right. Just another sad loser whining on
the forums? Yeah maybe, but I'm computer savvy, professional software
engineer, who hates Microsoft with a passion. So if I am going back to Windows
it must really mean something. And what it means is this.
Linux still cannot compete with Windows in the home.
Despite all the effort that has gone into making Linux desktops more user
friendly with more features, and easier to manage, the one failing is this: Most
of the world's desktop home PCs run Windows because most of the world's
desktop home PC users want to play games and the games manufacturers write their
software almost exclusively to run on Windows because....most of the world's
desktop home PCs run Windows.
The ONLY thing breaking this vicious cycle is right here - Wine. But until the
graphics and sound support, and support for running multiple applications with
sound simultaneously actually works, and works easily out of the box, Linux will
never break into the homes of the mass population as a desktop OS.
This partisan in-fighting between sound systems is stupid. FFS make Wine support
PulseAudio. Don't argue about it, just do it. My Mangler install says it is
using OSS, but I'm fairly sure it isn't because I uninstalled every spec
of OSS in my system that I could find and it still works. Winecfg says it is is
using the ALSA driver and I'm sure it is because the sound test works -
untill I installed the PulseAudio sound server and the OSS stuff in a somewhat
desperate attempt to get it all working.
Graphics is a tricky issue I know. Reverse engineering DirectX and getting it to
run using OpenGL because the driver manufacturers only support OpenGL on Linux -
that's hard. But there are free open-source drivers for my graphics card,
and nVidia are very good about supporting Linux. Is it not possible to install
the Windows nVidia drivers via Wine and use the actual DirectX DLLs from Windows
or something? I did read somewhere about someone using DirectX using that
mechanism, but I suspect the post was about 5 years old. Most of them seem to
be. I'm fed up of people saying that they get as good graphics frame rate on
Linux as on Windows. What are they comparing? OpenGL on Windows? My aged 4 year
old twin SLI capable graphics cards run just fine thankyou - under Windows. They
have more than enough processing power. Maybe someone else gets 50 FPS with
graphics card hardware that costs 4 times as much as mine cost when new. But
given a choice between spending ?90 on a Windows license, and ?300 on new
graphics cards with enough oomph to provide decent graphics (I spent less than
that on my new Windows PC a few months ago and get AWESOME graphics) which do
you think I choose? Me and everyone else with any common sense.
So something needs to be done. I appreciate, from reading posts about Wine
dating back over 7 years or so, that Wine has vastly improved since the old
days. Apparently you can now run it in parallel with PulseAudio, although the
sticky post on the forums still says that you cannot.
Anyway. I'm back to Windows. Been nice meeting you all. Have fun and good
luck. Let me know if you finally get Wine working.