Linux Basics

Off-Topic Games, Gaming and Hardware
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I thought I’d share my experiences with WoW on Linux since it’s a bit esoteric and you’re basically on your own.

A useful video to watch to make sure your file system is what it should be:

  1. Linux is open source and since Blizzard has spent a lot of time and money on its code, I doubt that they’d be willing to just open it up for the world to see for free.

  2. There are a lot of opinions on which distro to use but a lot of youtubers who tell you how easy it is to run the game on Linux don’t offer much in the way of context. That is, they don’t tell you what their level of experience with Linux is, or which graphics card they use (that one’s important) and what their computer set up is.

  3. I’m not an expert by any means but I’ll tell you what worked for me. First, the graphics card issue. If yours is Nvidia, they’re they only one that doesn’t have open source drivers. You have to download it, which is a laborious exercise in patience and persistence. When being installed, every Linux distro will default to the open source driver which just doesn’t work. The preference for Linux users is AMD which is open source. If your video card is AMD or Intel, you shouldn’t have any problems since Linux distros already have the latest drivers.

However, my gaming computer has an Nvidia graphics card and I didn’t feel like buying a new card so I had to find a distro that has Driver Manager that allows you to select Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. The distros that I know of that can do that are MX Linux, Nobara, and Linux Mint (Ubuntu). There are probably others. The only middleman software you need is Wine and Lutris. Once those are installed, open Lutris and add (plus sign at the top left corner) Battle.net. If the login box appears during installation, close it. Once Battle.net is installed, login to it and add World of Warcraft. If the display settings are showing higher resolutions available then you know that you’re going to be successful getting WoW to run.

When starting up WoW for the first time, you might encounter a black screen with no activity for a minute or two. Give it a little time and the game will come up.

  1. Yes, the game on Linux runs better, at least for me. But it’s not so much better that I’d switch to Linux just for that. I’ve come to use Linux more and more as time has gone on, I’ve found it to be a lot of fun to use and prefer it now which is why I worked so hard to get my favorite game to work on it. Hope this helps people who have found this issue to be so exasperating.

12/05/23 - Just a follow up on game performance with Linux. I was participating in the Superbloom event this afternoon and there were A LOT of players doing it too, as you’d expect on reset day. Massive participation. At the end, somebody mentioned how bad the lag was and I hadn’t noticed any lag at all throughout the event. None.

12/26/23 - I’ve been distro hopping for almost a year now and from all that experience, if you’re a beginner and want to use Linux as your OS, I recommend Linux Mint (Ubuntu version, currently 21.2 Victoria). It’s just the easiest and fastest option for getting back to playing WoW. Also, there’s very little interaction with the terminal.

01/19/24 - Linux Mint 21.3 (Virginia) is now live. It’s easy to upgrade. Follow the instructions from the link below:
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4629

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Hey did the latest battle net update bork your game?

I’m running lutris using Wine 8.0.2 and I can’t seem to get the client to load. It was working fine a few minutes ago before it updated.

I found some other relevant info

Found a fix if you’re just stuck in the logging in screen

“If you already have an existing installation that already worked, delete the /path/to/prefix/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Battle.net/Battle.net.14542 folder and don’t update again until a fix is found.”

For anyone who might wander by take note of how old this info is before you try it. It did work for me though.

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This worked for me:

“right click bnet launcher in Lutris > Configure > System Options tab, scroll down to environmental variables and add a variable with the key WINE_SIMULATE_WRITECOPY and value of 1. Save the changes, launch bnet, it should allow you to log in now.”

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Thanks, I’ll give this a try.

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THANK YOU!

I missed out on 6 hours of SoD leveling thanks to the pre-launch loading realm list kick a ton of people got which subsequently crashed my bnet. Restarting it must have applied whatever little patch they made that broke the login button.

Lutris was even crashing just running the WoW.exe in it instead of trying to use the full launcher after the update. But trusty Steam had my back and ran the game flawlessly (it couldn’t figure out bnet launcher either though).

Your fix got it working the same as before the update.

For anyone that may have also done the Agent.exe swap in the past and made their previous version of agent immutable, welp, I did that as a first step right after the update and it didn’t help one bit. Buuut, I didn’t have to revert it for the environment variable to work. Just figured it was worth mentioning for anyone still using that trick on their Agent. Also the issues it was causing were patched in Proton last month.

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Thanks for sharing the info Hennimore.

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Linux being open source has nothing to do with the applications running on it. It just means the OS is open. It does not mean that it can’t run proprietary applications like WOW, because it does it just fine.

But as far as performance, due to Windows bloat things run under Linux/Wine usually faster than they do in Windows. Linux itself is thousands of times more efficient than Windows is.

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