In your opinion, what is it?

I'm going to be converting to linux as soon as I decide on a distro (deciding between Slackware & Debian) and I want to be able to play my games (like Unreal Tournament, Warcraft3, soon to be Doom3) on it so I've been looking into Windows Emulators. Wine looks good right now, especially cause I can't really find anything else that's capable of using D3D.

Also, anyone with any tips or anything about my first experience with Linux or have an opinion on my distro choices (Slackware & Debian), feel free to speak your mind. I'm all ears.

-Dion

there are no decent windows emulators. There are virtual machines such as bochs and VMware, and comatability layers like Wine, but no emulators afaik... they'd suck as that's not what an emulator is really for.

the best option is to download the CVS version of winex - wine hacked to support games better, and try that.

The games that will work with WinEx... will they work just as well as they would in the actual Windows environment or would the quality and whatnot be degraded?

Does it support most games?

Thanks a bunch,
-Dion

You need to check with the winex site about the games that are supported.How well they work depends also a lot on you graphics departement and how well this is supported by Linux.
In my experience the performance of wine and winex depends a lot on the distro that you use and it might not work well at all without a real win partition.

Well, I'm going to be dual booting with WinXP so I guess that's not much of a worry. The games that were supported didn't impress me much at all. People were bitching all over about games not working and they had polls for people to vote on what game they should work on supporting, and I was seeing old games that have been out for months that were now being voted on. WTF?

I would suggest a dual boot setup. There is really no need to set yourself up for frustration while learning a new OS.

Edit: Oh I see you are planning on that already.

Slack and Debian are very good distributions.
They are probably not in the catagory of the most newbie friendly, but they are far from impossible to learn.
You might get real lucky and everything will work just as you hope, you may be unlucky and nothing will work at all, but most likely you will be somewhere inbetween. Most things will work and you will just need to learn about some others.
Good Luck

Yep, well, I figure if I go to an easy distro, I'll just get addicted to that and won't feel like moving to a more advanced one. Anyhow, I'm not as much of a n00b as a lot of the linux newbies - just took me awhile to finally decide on moving to linux.

When I asked around based on what I already knew, I was told Debian or Slackware would be a good choice. Being the dare-devil I am, I'm taking the challenge. I have a week to learn it, cause by next Monday, I gotta go back to school and that would suck ass if I was going to school and my computer was out of commission... LOL :P

-Dion

this has been asked many times.. search the forums

The notion of an "easy" vs an "advanced" distro is not entirely correct.
80-90 percent of anything that can be done in Linux can be done on any distro. There is generally not anything to stop you making a custom Mandrake install, using blackbox, and running your PC from the command line every chance you get. Conversly, just because you have Slackware installed doesn't mean you cannot edit your config files from the KDE text editor rather than vi.
It sounds like you have a feel for what you want to do already and will do well.

This has been asked a million times! Don't feed the trolls! make them search. Actually im feeding it now...ouch.

it's not trolling, just a forgiveable level of ignorance. it never hurts to suggest that people search, but please do not insult them.

Honestly, it gets to be a pain in the ass to search when the exact question you have isn't there. There's people crying about why Wine isn't working right and whatnot and once in awhile someone will popup with a "blahblah is the best!" but they don't exactly answer my question. Sorry if it gets to be a pain.

But some distros give me more room for configuration than others, don't they? That's what I want. I just want a distro that is capable of being customized for just about anything I want it for. Webhosting, gaming, graphic editing, programming, etc, etc. And then the big plus... Free Software! (but that goes for all distros )

not really. some distributions make headway to STOP you editing things (e.g. lycoris and lindows) but unless that's the whole point of a distro it's always very very readily available in the background. even the most user friendly "normal" distro's e.g. mandrake are totally hapy with you going round the back as it were.

Sort of. Like I said, a lot of it is generally the same. And sometimes too much configuration can be a pain.
The difference is that a distribution like Mandrake will auto set up everything it can and have default settings for lots of stuff. If you want to change things, you roll up your sleves and go to it.
Debian may leave more to set up (as opposed to configure), at first.
I have heard people mention that Mandrake will overwrite some changes to config files. I am not sure how much there is to this.
I am really not trying to talk you out of your choices. Just mentioning that you will be able to make Linux what you want when you learn it well enough.