Back on Windows
Horror of horrors, I’ve wound up having to run Windows again at home and work.
For work it’s because I’m now ClearCase-boy, which means supporting developers who are running the Windows client. Plus I pretty much have to use Outlook, as the Linux speakers-to-Exchange are all less than ideal. Having two different environments with incompatible clipboards was driving me nuts.
At home it’s entirely down to World of Warcraft, or more to the point the crappy way it’s been interacting with sound on Linux. I’ve tried everything I can think of and while the stuttering can be kept to a minimum it can’t be eliminated.
As most of my work — at home and the office — is done inside web browsers and terminal sessions the underlying OS isn’t a huge deal. My partner continues to be happily running Gutsy on her desktop, and if I were also deaf I most probably would be too.
Popularity: 90% [?]
Funny, I’ve not had problems with WoW under Wine in quite some time now - the occasional fiddling with patch-downloads, but that’s about it. Following the notes from the winehq-site I even get better framerates (by ~ 30 %) than under XP.
My experience framerate-wise was that under Linux it was ~20-30% worse but not so you’d notice. The sound stuttering is the thing that finally got to me, nothing I did would fix it.
I suspect this is probably some combination of specific hardware and software revisions that can’t readily be duplicated on another non-identical machine.