The Wild World of Linux Or "How I Stopped Worrying And Learned to Love the WINE"

[Virgil0211]

I keep thinking that we should have a separate section for technological discussions, but these topics may be a bit few and far between for something like that.

So, anyway, after building my new desktop, I made it a dual-boot with Windows 7 on one partition and Ubuntu on the other. Thankfully, unlike my laptop, the video tearing problem I was having seems to not be an issue here. Normal video files (as far as I can tell) seem to play horizontal movement fine. Flash videos have some tearing (a noticeable amount more than I observe on Windows), but not to the point that I can't enjoy the videos I tend to play in flash. The way things are going, .flv may be replaced by HTML5 anyway (IIRC).

Anyway, after reading a lockergnome article about the best programs for Ubuntu, I installed WINE and decided to check out what programs they were able to get to work. I was a bit surprised that they were able to get quite a few popular games, such as WoW, to work through WINE. They were even able to get the SWtOR beta to work back in October/November (The current version doesn't work, hanging at the splash screen. The team currently thinks it's a problem with communicating with the server, but there still haven't been any workarounds.). So, I went ahead and installed Steam and Portal 2. To my surprise, it actually seemed to work at first. It started up, updated itself, played the company logo videos, went to the main menu without any apparent problems.

And then I pressed 'new game'.

I don't know if I did something wrong with configuring WINE or something, but the game stuttered for almost 2 minutes before I was able to move very much. The graphics settings were already lower than in Windows 7, though modifying them up or down didn't seem to have a whole lot of effect on the frame rate (this was late at night, so I had to retire before I was able to run it for very long which may be why I didn't notice that much of a difference when changing the graphics settings. I'll run it again tonight and see if there are any differences.). What really seemed to slow it down was when I moved to a new part of the building and when I created portals. There was a noticeable pause each time I fired the portal gun and moved the portal. I'm guessing that it may be a problem with either the memory or the CPU, though I'm not quite confident enough to be sure.

Anybody know what I might want to look for to confirm whether or not I'm correct? I mean, I typically see Ubuntu as primarily a business/productivity focused OS, but it'd be great if I could figure out a way to get it to play games reliably as well.

Also, anybody else have any interesting experiences with WINE? It's kind of fascinating to me that they've managed to get a program that's able to translate .exe files for a completely different operating system.

[MrBogosity]

If you're going to be using games with WINE, I recommend installing PlayOnLinux. It lets you set up a prefix for your game and it has a whole WINE environment all to itself, complete with its own settings, so you can mess around with the settings there without affecting anything else.

[Virgil0211]

If you're going to be using games with WINE, I recommend installing PlayOnLinux. It lets you set up a prefix for your game and it has a whole WINE environment all to itself, complete with its own settings, so you can mess around with the settings there without affecting anything else.

Alright, I'll try that.

From what I described, what would you guess is going on? I mean, it seems like the physics calculations are what are causing the most problems (while there was heavy stuttering at the beginning, that seemed to smooth out a bit until I started using portals), and (IIRC) the CPU is what usually handles those, right?

EDIT: Howdja like the topic title? :-P

[MrBogosity]

Love the title! Don't know much about games to tell you specifically. I would expect if CPU cycles are the problem, then it would run better under Linux/WINE than under Windows since Windows has far more overhead. How well does it run on the Windows side?

[Virgil0211]

Love the title! Don't know much about games to tell you specifically. I would expect if CPU cycles are the problem, then it would run better under Linux/WINE than under Windows since Windows has far more overhead. How well does it run on the Windows side?

Very well. Far better than I was expecting it to, considering that I was using a mid-grade graphics card (Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti) and semi-mid-grade CPU (AMD Phenom II Black Edition four-core at 3.2 Ghz). It's smooth, never slows noticeably (except for an occasional random stutter that lasts less than a second and has no apparent pattern that I can recognize). That's why I'm a bit confused. At this point, I haven't done much in Ubuntu (aside from playing videos, browsing the web, downloading Portal 2 on steam, and updating in different desktops, and that wasn't for very long) that would seem to tax the CPU that much. For all I know, something in the settings is bottlenecking (sp/grmmr?) the CPU and I just haven't noticed it in other applications yet. I doubt it, but it's still a possibility. Or perhaps WINE is just having trouble translating the physics calculations.

WINE is still pretty impressive, IMO. Just getting something like Steam and Portal 2 to run under Ubuntu at all is an accomplishment. I guess I'm just a little frustrated that I always seem to run into trouble when I try to use Linux for recreation rather than productivity. Ironically, this means I could probably still install and use Microsoft Office on Ubuntu (which I still prefer to various Open Source alternatives, nice as LibreOffice is).

Although, alot of this has made me contemplate the possibility of getting a workstation computer to play around with high-level calculations as a hobby in the future (if I ever get rich enough. :-P).

[MrBogosity]

Have you tried Google Docs? It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but it works great for what I need Office for. Nothing to install, and you can access it from anywhere, and even collaborate over the net if you want!

[Virgil0211]

Have you tried Google Docs? It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but it works great for what I need Office for. Nothing to install, and you can access it from anywhere, and even collaborate over the net if you want!

I've tried office online (didn't like it too much), but I'll certainly give it a try. The problem is that just about everything done in the economics department here (in spite of having the biggest concentration of Linux users on the campus) is done primarily in Microsoft Office, so it's easier to stick to (I'm also a bit more familiar with the various features). Microsoft Office's main drawback is the expense, which is just exorbitant.

[MrBogosity]

And the bloat. Star/Open/LibreOffice isn't much better in that regard, unfortunately.

[Virgil0211]

And the bloat. Star/Open/LibreOffice isn't much better in that regard, unfortunately.

Yeah, that's the strange thing. I'm used to open-source projects being a bit 'leaner', so to speak, but LibreOffice has always taken longer to start up for me than other office suites.

[evensgrey]

Yeah, that's the strange thing. I'm used to open-source projects being a bit 'leaner', so to speak, but LibreOffice has always taken longer to start up for me than other office suites.

The open office suites are trying to have all the same bells and whistles (and flaws, as well, BTW) that Microsoft Office has, and with that comes the bloat.  The reason that a lot of open source projects are leaner than closed source counterparts is that they tend to follow the UNIX design philosophy of stringing together a collection of tools to perform a complex task, rather than creating a single complex tool.

[Virgil0211]

The open office suites are trying to have all the same bells and whistles (and flaws, as well, BTW) that Microsoft Office has, and with that comes the bloat.  The reason that a lot of open source projects are leaner than closed source counterparts is that they tend to follow the UNIX design philosophy of stringing together a collection of tools to perform a complex task, rather than creating a single complex tool.

That reminds me of a couple of arguments I've gotten into over the years where people conflate capitalism/free market with cash exchange in every transaction and open source projects like Linux with communism/socialism. I mean, a free and open market is part of the reason we have all of these options available to us. I love having the option of booting up in either Windows or Linux, using either google docs, MS Office, Libreoffice, etc.