WoW on Linux?

Community General Discussion
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I’m using my laptop mainly for programming and until recently i only kept Windows on it so i can play WoW sometimes. This doesn’t work well with the programming stuff since a lot of libraries i’m using do not work well under windows.

I want to fully switch to a Linux distro but afaik WoW is not officially supported. Sure, there are things like wine, but i’ve heard that running WoW through it may break some Blizzard policies. I assume it falls under “modified client” thing but it’s just a supposition.

What’s the staff’s stance on this issue? I don’t wanna find myself banned because i accidentally broke some policy i didn’t know about.

Also, dual booting is not a preferred option (since i have to restart the laptop to switch platforms) and my storage is pretty small (SSD 256GB).

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You better ask in the “Technical Support” section.

General Discussion is only for bowl of fruits talk.

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Have done so myself back in BFA and a friend who has and still does since legion.

It was rough to begin with but with the updates to wine actually get reasonable FPS.

Never been banned nor received a warning myself or my friend. But yeah to be safe might be best asking.

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World of Warcraft is fully compatible with Linux, even if it is not supported. World of Warcraft even has internal Linux builds, revealed to us by the fact that META exists as a modifier key in the game’s code.

Blizzard have officially said that using Wine does not break their policies for any of their games and I’ve been doing it for many years.

To install it I recommend using Lutris. I think there is an installer, but I can say that latest version of wine and dxvk (and vkd3d depending on setting) all works without modification.

No raytracing though!

So go ahead and have fun!

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Any blue post stating that ?

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It’s on the Overwatch forums, but applies to WoW just the same.

I’ve been playing WoW under linux since Vanilla, always worked like a charm, often better than under Windows on the same PC. Install Lutris, and have at it.

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There’s Ancelyn’s message.

And then there’s the thousands upon thousands of people doing it and not getting banned.

This mistake happened:

It got overturned because Blizzard actually did care.

WoW was developed by Slouken (among others obviously) who made a Linux port of 0.5.3 and a few versions after that. You can still find it zipped up in a tarball out there. He now works on Proton, which is Valve’s Wine modifications.

Video of it running:

The internal references to it such as meta keys.

Game literally makes a few anticheat hooks into Linux, such as checking for xdotool being used to double-click in the game.

They say they don’t support it, but it always mysteriously works flawlessly except in early betas and the game is full of references to it in its codebase. It even had an OpenGL renderer back in the day that you couldn’t use except if you knew it was there and set it in the command line, and this renderer was maintained for 12 years. And before you say “Well that’s because of macOS!” - anyone who’s working with OpenGL on macOS knows that it’s janky as hell. The Windows OpenGL implementation would never have worked on it anyway.

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