I am a recent returner to Linux, after a hiatus of many years. A long time ago, just about everything had to be installed by means of the terminal box, and everything about it was experimental. Sometimes things just worked, and at other times they didn't, and the problem-solving exercise was challenging enough, and if it was too challenging you could post a question on a forum and hope for the best. But, generally, unless you wanted to do raw computing tasks, you couldn't count on Linux for any multimedia (it wouldn't even have drivers for the audio or graphics card most of the time), and the games were pretty bad.
Now I have an Intel i5-7400. I've installed Ubuntu 18.04.1 on it. So far, so good. It's a very well-developed distro and it's moved along in leaps and bounds. It's as infantile as Windows but much better, starts up faster, is more reliable and secure, etc. Excellent. So I found Wine and installed it, in the hope of running just a couple of old Windows games. These games were:
Assassin's Creed
Assassin's Creed 2
Assassin's Creed Revelations
Microsoft Age of Empires Gold
I have the original DVDs and the licence codes/permissions for all those games.
To my surprise, there is a program here, which Ubuntu installs painlessly, called PlayonLinux. It's a sort of shell script with its own graphical interface, which has a drop-down list of games it supposedly automatically installs. I had a look at the drop-down list. It has all of the games I listed above, and more! Great! This PoL program supposedly knows the correct Wine version, and then prompts you for permission to download and install it, along with other libraries required to run the games.
I tried it out. It suggested a different Wine version for each game (I don't know anything about Wine but isn't it bizarre that an older version of Wine can run a particular game but a newer one won't?) and a set of libraries to install. I went through with it and allowed it to install what it wanted. But absolutely nothing would run. I then Googled the problem and found instructions on how others had got it working. I followed the instructions to a tee, and tried out various Wine configuration settings, and still nothing worked. I'm content to give up at this point, as I have more entertaining hobbies in my life these days than old-school Linux problem-solving.
But there is something I would like to know. I struggle to understand why Wine shouldn't do what it says it does on the tin. What is there to gain from making claims that PoL + Wine will run every program under the sun, when it demonstrably doesn't? Is it more like about having a vision for the future guiding a project (e.g. an actual Windows emulator) than about having actual functionality? How much problem-solving and research is expected from the end-user?
