Gaming on GNU/Linux!

Guess what? GNU/Linux is great for playing games!

It is an operating system that has a totally fair multitasking system to divide processing power smoothly to various processes that are running so that nothing gets all the processor's power while some other task gets it in fits and spurts.

As an example; for those that like to dual-box(running multiple instances of a game at the same time on one machine) it is normally much smoother to do than it is on windows. This is straight-up, not fan-boy stuff.

It was designed from the ground up for smooth network access at all times so no matter what the computer is doing, or what other things you have running while playing the game, your game client will not boot you due to dropped packets, nor result in network lag. My ping time in WoW was normally in the teens being a west-coast player on an east-coast server, and I can have a lot of things going on in the background.

I can: transcode a video from a native format to MP4 for uploading to YouTube, fileshare Several Linux ISO disks via BitTorrent, run Rythmbox(a music player) drawing the music from the local NAS, have my E-mail client up polling for email, plus I have a full LAMP webserver running on this machine, and while in Dalaran in World of Warcraft I still get 50+ frames of video with no network lag. Granted, I have a quad-core 64bit proc and a smoking video card, on a high-end motherboard...but this kind of thing would be difficult for any machine to pull off if the operating system is not properly allocating the resources so everything operates smoothly.

Also, unlike the windows operating system; no matter how many applications you install, or how many updates you apply, the computer will not slow down over time. This may be fixed in more recent releases of windows, but I am told it was still a problem as of vista.

Games that are written to run natively on GNU/Linux will perform the best of course, but as of now very few major releases have native clients for any distribution of GNU/Linux. The Ubuntu distribution is changing that fairly rapidly, but as of now the vast majority of games that people know from advertising and such are written for Windows...but many of these games will also work quite on GNU/Linux because of the use of an application called the WINE project. WINE is, as with many GNU/Linux projects, a self-recursive anagram that means {W}INE {I}s {N}ot an {E}mulator.

WINE is best called an 'application compatibility layer'. It places itself in-between a game or any other Windows application, and GNU/Linux. It intercepts various system calls from the application, and performs the equivalent action inside of GNU/Linux. The Windows program running this way has no idea it is not running in a Windows environment. A full list is available on http://www.wine.org, under the AppDB tab at the top right-hand corner of the main page.