For a long time I wanted to switch to Linux and try it out (not a linux experienced person) as Windows is becoming more and more disappointing, however the biggest stopper for me is WoW.
I did quick research, nothing too deep, so sorry if I have missed something “obvious” but officially there is still no WoW on Linux, however officially and actually working are two very different things so I wonder is there a viable way to play WoW + addons on Linux.
As a fairly noob Linux person , I tried it last year and managed to get it working on my old laptop , running Manjaro with proprietary Nvidia drivers .
From what I remember , I installed BNet client from Lutris and it was fairly smooth sailing after that . I also used Ajour for addons .
There was a slight difference in performance which I noticed , but not sure if that can be helped .
You can try with dual booting Linux along Windows . If you like it , you can remove Windows later , if not , you can stick to Windows without breaking anything .
As far as I know , Blizzard does not have any plans whatsoever to develop a Linux client for WoW .
Unfortunately they’ve not said if they intend to do this so I’m going to assume for now its still no.
I can totally see why there are people who want a Linux client but I’m not so sure Blizzard wants another platform to support for WoW because there would be potential for Linux specific issues.
You should try different DirectX settings within WoW itself, on my old PC I found the DirectX 11 setting within the wow Client to work smoother than 12 when running it through Linux.
I would also download the up to date Battlenet launcher from the website and direct Lutris to that when installing because it would spend some time updating the older one suggested by Lutris itself which took longer.
Been playing WoW on Linux for 3 years, and a few other times before now as well.
WoW works very well on Linux. You lose raytracing but otherwise everything works. Addons, battle.net, raiding, PvP, you name it.
There is no official client but frankly there might as well be. You won’t be able to tell the difference.
One thing I would strongly recommend you to do is to install Lutris.
You will find it in your package manager most likely, depending on your distribution. There’s various app stores as well like Discover on the KDE desktop, or Pop!_Shop on Pop!_OS, etc.
If all else fails, check your distros from here and put the commands into a terminal, but probably not necessary: https://lutris.net/downloads
Once it’s installed you’ll have the ability to search for games. Search for Battle.Net and you’ll get a wine install with battle.net in it that is compatible with all your Blizzard games (careful with Activision games though. Anticheat issues!) and from here you just install and run the game.
Addons will be located in $HOME/Games/battle.net/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/World of Warcraft/_retail_/Interface/Addons
Where $HOME is probably /home/yourusernamehere.
I might have made a mistake in the above but it should be broadly correct. Shouldn’t be too hard to find.
Lutris also has many, many other installers for various games. It comes with Retroarch so tons of emulation possible, it does battle.net, Steam, GOG, Epic Games, and many more. It’s kindda like a game manager that also happens to have install scripts to make it easy to install non-native games.
And not only does it run, it runs well in DirectX 11 mode especially: (DXVK is for DirectX 11, VKD3D is for DirectX 12)
On my old machine I was getting similar fps in DXVK in Linux and Direct 12 in Windows 10, the only difference was that I got stutters every now and then (nothing major) in Linux and playing it in Windows was sharper.
I haven’t placed Linux on my new system and not sure if I will for the time being.
