Take the 2-minute tour ×

I seem to remember hearing about a special version of Wine that was optimized for games. What is this Wine called and where can I get it?

share|improve this question

5 Answers 5

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Here are your options:

  1. Free Wine built into Ubuntu. If this works for the application in question (which it often does) then there's no reason to go to any extra effort.
  2. Wine betas from Wine PPA. Add the Wine PPA (note that in 10.10 Administration->Software Sources is now inside Software Center as Edit->Software Sources). Then install the wine1.3 package and you'll be on your way. Doing this will also get you winetricks, which can help many applications work more quickly -- if you see instructions on AppDB, for instance, they often suggest commands like "winetricks vcrun2005"
  3. Codeweavers Crossover Games. It's paid software, but it has a one month trial. Note that unlike Transgaming's Cedega, Codeweavers actually contributes to the Wine project and bases their product off of the mainstream Wine -- they just include a few specific hacks for their supported applications.
  4. Dual booting, native games, virtual machines, and various other non-answers.
share|improve this answer

You are probaly looking for PlayOnLinux, which is a front-end to wine, that allows you to use the wine version and settings that has been confirmed to work with a certain game.

share|improve this answer

Codeweavers's got a version of their wine-based Crossover that is specifically for games. They've got a trial version: http://www.codeweavers.com/

I have bought their crossover office version and can vouch for it to work really well -- it's easy to install and managing the windows apps is really smooth, and most importantly: office (and other windows apps as well) works!


share|improve this answer

There is a commercial wine respin called Cedega and it is available from http://www.cedega.com

They focus on patches to make games run flawlessly and provide support for certain games.

I am not going to advertise for them here, so check out the site if you want to know more.

share|improve this answer
Cedega is terrible these days compared with the free Wine, don't recommend it. The reason is that Cedega is proprietary software based off a 5-year old branch of Wine (before it went LGPL) -- Cedega thus hasn't been able to keep up with all the recent Wine development, and it's finally starting to show. –  Scott Ritchie Oct 22 '10 at 21:14
Sorry but Cedega really REALLY SUCKS!!. I have been testing Wine since 2007 i have to say, after 2008 it changed a lot. Using the ppa by Scott Ritchie (The super guy that just commented above. Hi Scott ;) ) you can have the latest version (Right now the 1.3.8) which i can vouch it makes the following games work better than cedega: WoW, Cs Source, Half-Life ALL of them, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2. The have better FPS and better performance overall than Cedega and in the case of WOW all my clients, ALL of them have said that WOW runs better on wine than on Windows. In my case i gained 15fps more. –  Luis Alvarado Dec 9 '10 at 16:09

There is another project: http://vineyardproject.org/. You might want to check out that too.

share|improve this answer
Vineyard is about usability more than gaming support. If you can get the game to run in free Wine, it's no different with vineyard. –  Scott Ritchie Oct 22 '10 at 21:15

Your Answer


