I understand many like to play the latest and greatest but if you are not a hardcore gamers gog.com is a great option to pick up some older titles that work as well on wine as they do natively on Windows.

I like to watch the sales and grab titles when they are like $3 bucks. At that price if it entertains me for more than hour or two its a win. If I can't make it work I am not out much; that has not happened yet because I check first at winehq in the app db, but if it does no big.

Actually, they measure a lot about computers used to play games. I believe they measure what platform you play a game on by which platform got the most hours of playtime the first day you played it.

Steams data is not measured automatically, once a month they prompt random users to participate in a survey.

Seriously?

-JJ

Speaking of the Steam surveys, they seem to only pop up when I'm using Steam in Windows for some reason. A couple of days ago, I fired up Steam in Linux, closed it, fired up Steam in Wine, and had the survey pop up.

That's kind of what I'm doing for the last couple of months. I hadn't tried anything Windows since XP. I installed Windows 7. Impressions so far:

- The desktop experience is superior to anything Linux has to offer right now IMO (and based on _my_ experience). It just makes me sad. No screen tearing (unlike in Xfce, or lately, KDE), no "Oops something went wrong!", reasonable configuration options (no huge empty grey windows like in GNOME, no ridiculous "configure in what time of the day the window's drop shadow should change it's direction like in KDE), no glitches.

- The file manager doesn't support tabs. In 2013. Really?

- Apart from some sparse cases, fonts with Slackware/Infinality look better than in Windows.

- Most of the games I've tested so far run better on Windows. I can play Half-Life 2 with all video settings at max without breaking a sweat. Though I think Linux will get there eventually. Maybe surpass Windows in the future, who knows?

- Looooots of games. I've got about 20 games in my steam's wishlist. 1 of them has a Linux port (Metro: Last Light). YMMV but I've never had the awesome experience with Wine others are describing.

- I don't like Windows. I miss my Linux, the command line, the transparency. Using VirtualBox is not the same.

Maybe when I overdoze on gaming, I'll switch back to Linux full-time. Or get a second SSD and just dual boot.

PS1. Congrats on your harware upgrade :-)
PS2. Metro 2033 is what I've been playing for the last couple of days. I like it so far. Great atmosphere.
PS3. I tried Windows 8 too. What were they smoking?

I don't have HL2 for Linux, but I do have Portal and Left 4 Dead 2, both run maxed out on my machine without problems, using the free radeon driver. In general, Valve found the Source engine (on which all these games are based) to be faster on Linux than on Windows.
Other than that, you are right regarding games, many of them run better on Windows, some don't work correctly with Wine at all. I would love to play Torchlight 2 on Linux, sadly they have only a Linux port for the first one and Wine can't handle it correctly.

I haven't tried it myself, but my impression is that the current version of Wine (1.7.6, not 1.6) does play Torchlight 2 correctly?

There are other games than DOTA2?... hmm... must research this further...

Good games or just junk? ;)

Haven't tried it for a while, but it seems that it is Platinum rated since Wine 1.7.2, so I definitely will give it a try again.

Yes, it runs Orbis OS which is Sony's modified FreeBSD 9.0.

Yep, works fine with 1.7.6., with some very minor glitches (which may be caused be the free driver), but enjoyable. Thanks for the tip.