I can confirm that Feral's port of XCOM is pretty spectacular on Linux. I can also confirm that Aspyr's port of Civ V on Linux is equally spectacular.

I haven't tried the Witcher 2 port, although I do own it. I'm waiting to see what happens with GOG and Linux before I spend bandwidth on it.

What in particular are you waiting for with GOG and Linux? It's smart that you are waiting, though, considering how the game performs.

I'd rather try the DRM free GOG version over the steam version, regardless of performance. I've never played #2, so I'm going to wait for GOG before I download anything.

The Witcher 2 port isn't really a port, it uses the eON wrapper to run the Windows binary. :(

I know. From what I've read performance is better on nvidia than others. I'll be running it on a pretty beefy system with an nvidia adapter. Worst case scenario, I hate the Linux version, and I download the windows version and run it wine.

I like his approach. Indeed, CD Projekt Red should take note :)

Ha! I have read a number of accounts of people with Nvidia GTX 780 GPUs who got extremely poor frames per second on the lowest settings with The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for Linux. The wrapjob is literally that bad. Search around in Linux related subreddits. You'll find some interesting stuff. Here's something to start you off with: Source.

I like supporting Linux games so when the Witcher "port" was released, and on sale on Steam for $3.99, I bought it. I've pretty much decided that I need to upgrade my system if I want to have any fun playing it. I've got an Radeon card and I can get it to work but frame rate sucks bad.

I think the big problem for Witcher is the tools used to make it, they aren't cross platform and its not easy for them to move to new tools. Some games will only see the light of day on Linux with wrappers because of this.

I would strongly advise installing the BioWare games through Wine but then playing the game itself using GemRB instead of the original engine. I'm running through BG2 now without any issues, its smooth and works perfectly.

Why do you need Wine then? I thought GemRB works natively on Linux and even FreeBSD. To get the game data you can simply unpack it without installing using innoextract. Same method as can be used for DosBox and ScummVM games from GOG.

Some of the mods in the pile GOG featured (stuff like the widescreen mod) require Win32-only patching utilities to apply.

I see. And GemRB works with the patched result?

It did for all the combinations I tested.

As far as I can tell, the end result of the patching process is just plain ordinary Infinity Engine resource files and the only reason you need the Win32-based patcher app is because distributing pre-patched files would be copyright infringement.

Im looking forward to this. I recently installed Ubuntu on my PC along with Windows XP, and since I have a 64 bit processor but Windows XP is 32-bit, I cant access all the functions, and I downloaded the 64-bit version of ubuntu and it runs quite nicely. So I've been using the amazing playonlinux scripts to install my games, and they work nicely. I've also been playing Minecraft, which runs excellently in the latest version of Ubuntu at full settings with about 130 mods installed.

Isn't the patcher for most (all?) IE mods WeiDU?
You can find Linux binaries and source code for WeiDU here: [url=http://www.weidu.org/~thebigg]http://www.weidu.org/~thebigg[/url]/