Why don't you support Linux?

Community General Discussion
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Why don’t you support Linux, or at least WINE?

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Linux player here since 2019, currently on Garuda Linux.

Wine is not supported officially, but nonetheless WoW is one of the games that runs better on Linux via Wine than on Windows. I agree with you, it would be nice to have official support. The effort required by the devs would be minimal (just don’t break anything, basically).

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I’ve run a lot of Windows games under Steam with that Proton thing they got which is based off Wine. I imagine getting WoW to run on that wouldn’t be to bad of a thing…hic!

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Because it makes up less than 3% of the market share, and an even smaller number than that would play WoW on a Linux box.

Why would you invest time and resources to support such a niche OS?

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Officially supporting WoW on Wine actually would require close to 0% effort from the devs…

The game already runs better on Wine under Linux than on Windows, actually. But it would be nice to have official support.

I don’t believe they will ever do this, tho.

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1.9% and only a small fraction would be wow players. It’s just not viable.

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Why would they ?
The answer really as to why they don’t is that it has no benefit for them to do so , those that want to play WoW on linux are already doing so.
Adding a Linux client would not increase the subscription rate.

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Or DOS 3.1

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But that’s that particular Linux build; there’s literally hundreds of others, and hundreds more in development. There’s no homogenization with the OS to be able to feasibly offer compatibility support.

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I disagree, Wine is Wine no matter the distro. It is the same software. If your distro runs Wine (all of them do, btw), then your distro runs WoW. That is why it would be very easy to support, imho. I know about dependency hell, but this is not the case.

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Correct and Wine lets linux run Windows apps, what the OP is asking for is a Linux client, what distro would they make that client for and how many new WoW players would it bring to the game to allow for them to regain the development costs ?

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OP also said:

A Linux native client, I don’t support. It is a bad idea imo, the game already runs well on Wine and even with less problems than the Mac native client, it seems.

But supporting Wine? That is different.

I said I don’t support the idea of a native client, but I want to point out that distro hell can be avoided with flatpak or appimages, if they where to make a Linux client. Not a problem anymore really.

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He’s a bit of a big baby carrying that blanket around all the time…

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FreeDOS is an option…hic!

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What’s linux?

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Well, in linux…

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You’ve said this a couple of times now. How does it “run better”? I am asking out of curiosity.

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All 6 people that play WoW on Linux want an answer!

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Well, it’s hard and boring to play a game by typing actions into the terminal…
Are you guys still using Fax?

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Just to add a little note about it costing nothing to do, well, that’s not entirely true.

First you need agreements, then you need to advertise it. You need to alter websites and graphics. You need to alter the coding of the game.

Then you need to pay all the people and all the people in between. The sheer man hours spent would cost thousands alone, if not more.

For an extremely small portion of the playerbase who are already playing the game right now without them spending a cent. What would you do? I sure as heck would invest my money elsewhere,

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