My roommate downloaded the Doom 3 Alpha that was leaked nearly a year ago and tried to run it on his Windows XP machine with a GeForce FX. When he ran it, he could hear sound but the screen turned grey and we could not see anything. He was unable to solve the problem.

I fired up Samba and copied the alpha over to my Linux system w/ Geforce 4 4600. I entered "wine doom3.exe" wondering what kind of strange error messages I would see. To my absolute shock the Alpha actually ran! A windows program that had failed to run on windows ran succesfully through wine! Needless to say I was very impressed.

Of course, bump mapping didn't work and the lighting (arguably the most impressive part of Doom3) was off. However the fact that the buggy leaked alpha ran AT ALL after not running on a windows system really says something good for the wine developers.

Wine has come a long way over the last few years, and hopefully those interested in Linux who are sticking with Windows so they can run their favorite apps will reconsider.

Edit: Of course, when the retail Doom 3 comes out it will probably be available in a native Linux version just like Quake 3. I'm not suggesting wine will be needed.