On a previous post I went a long and discussed a bit how the gaming on Linux was at the moment. I've mentioned about Steam and WINE. But I missed something that was clearly as important, and a friend of mine pointed it to me.
PlayOnLinux, seems to be the next thing on Linux gaming. But what is it?
What is PlayOnLinux ?
PlayOnLinux is a piece of software which allows you to easily install and use numerous games and apps designed to run with Microsoft® Windows®.
Few games are compatible with GNU/Linux at the moment and it certainly is a factor preventing the migration to this system. PlayOnLinux brings a cost-free, accessible and efficient solution to this problem.
Few games are compatible with GNU/Linux at the moment and it certainly is a factor preventing the migration to this system. PlayOnLinux brings a cost-free, accessible and efficient solution to this problem.
So, yeah, PlayOnLinux, is a software that allows users to easily install their Windows games on Linux. It does however uses WINE on the background, but saves all the hard work for rookie users (like me) of configuring every thing on it.
There's a fairly big list of games already supported and (someone heard my praying) lots of GoG.com are supported on it.
The few three I've tried, two worked fine (mainly because they are already supported). They were all GoG.com versions. One was Magic Carpet and the other one was Might and Magic 7. The first one was install and go, and the second one I needed to tweak something on setup of the game, but it worked fine too. The other title I tried, was Heroes of Might and Magic (the first). It did worked, but there are some issues with the shortcut, because when I tried to go back to it, I couldn't. But I assume it's easily fixed, just need to know how.
See here, Magic Carpet running.
This can be a great piece of software, for a rookie Linux user like me. At least it saves me the trouble of trying to configure WINE on every game I want to play (as long as it works on Linux of course), since it configures everything I need for me.
Of course, if you want to get deeper on it, there are several options on it. From what I've understood, there are scripts associated with each game, so that's what the program executes to install what's needed for each game. And these scripts were created by different users, depending on the game they were working at.
For me it's already fine enough, it does what I need.
