Linux

[KoKuToru]

WINE is extremely unreliable when it comes to network from my experience. For example, I just set everything up on ubuntu 12.04 and I am only getting network access when starting the program via command prompt, but not if I launch the exe directly.

And in case of ffxivboot, it fails it's version check no matter how I start it. It might be because I'm launching it from an NTFS partition, idk.

Okay..

0. Get a NVIDIA graphiccard.. install the original NVIDIA driver (not the opensource one) + Install lib32 version of it ! (when you are at 64bit)
1. Ubuntu .. check your wine version. Ubuntu loves it to use years old wine-versions. Get the newest version at http://www.winehq.org/
2. dump NTFS, copy everything onto ext3/ext4 don't forget to give the executeable-flag to ffxivboot.exe !
3. If you are at 64bit.. reinit your wine -> backup your files. Remove the ".wine" folder. First time start wine with "WINEARCH=win32 winecfg"
4. Install winetricks. Use it to install "d3dx9_36 ie6 winhttp wininet xact and msfont"
5. Start ffxivboot.exe..
6. Have fun at very slow performance (GTX460 3000[win] points vs 600[wine] points [ffxiv benchmark], and thats why a OpenGL client would help..)

I use it everyday, works pretty "okay". Performance is very sh**. But good enough to "not install windows".

At wine 1.3.31 you could use "orm=backbuffer" which .. really boosted performance a lot.. well shadow only worked half with it.
Every version after it you need to use "orm=fbo" it's a lot slower but correctly rendered. If you try to use "orm=backbuffer" you will get an upside down image.

EDIT:
Here is my start script which I use:

#!/bin/bash
export WINEDEBUG=-all
export __GL_YIELD=NOTHING
export __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1

echo "start ffxivconfig"
wine ffxivconfig.exe

echo "set nvidia"
nvidia-settings -l

echo "start ffxivboot"
wine ffxivboot.exe&
FFXIV_BOOT_PID=$!
export LD_PRELOAD=

echo "wait for ffxivlogin"
until pidof "$(winepath -w ffxivlogin.exe)"; do
#wait 1 sec
sleep 1
done

echo "kill ffxivboot (because it's buggy)"
kill -9 $FFXIV_BOOT_PID
kill -9 $(pidof $(winepath -w ffxivboot.exe))

#remove the wine error box ? .. disable the error report..

[Soukyuu]

6. Have fun at very slow performance (GTX460 3000[win] points vs 600[wine] points [ffxiv benchmark], and thats why a OpenGL client would help..)

Uhm.. thank you for taking your time to write down the steps, but I'm not really serious about getting it to run, especially because of the reason I quoted above. It was just an experiment to see if it works out of the box.

I have done most of it already though, except 1. and 2. I only use linux for programming and other university stuff, so my partition is quite small. And I'm happier with win7 UI than I am with what linux can offer me so far.

Still, I'd love to see a native linux client. Would give me more reasons to dump M$ once win7 becomes obsolete (lolWin8)

[KoKuToru]

And I'm happier with win7 UI than I am with what linux can offer me so far.

Thats what you get for using Ubuntu.. lol .. Ubuntu used to be nice..

especially because of the reason I quoted above

Yeah it's too bad.. I am actually trying to find out whats up.
The biggest mistery is that a GT430 and a GTX460 have same peformance at FFXIV with wine.
I believe the render-targets eat up a lot of performance.
When you check how many times wine changes the FBO.. and it's ID's
You can see that it uses the same render-target multiply times for 1 frame.
Which I believe kills the performance, because the FBO will stall..
But probably the biggest biggest mistery is.. Wireframe or not, doesn't matter ... same performance (probably because the FBO gets reused).
Something is really wrong here.. Haven't found the cause yet (I am myself a pretty experienced porgrammer, with some little opengl/wine-hacks I could boost my performance from 8fps to 15fps [made it playable for me..])

I believe when I find the problem.. the performance of the GTX460 should speed up by at least 4 times.
Because it makes really no sense that a GT430 has same speed as GTX460 ! Something is blocking here..

[Soukyuu]

Thats what you get for using Ubuntu.. lol .. Ubuntu used to be nice..

Eh, unity isn't bad in it's 12.04 version and actually replicates win7 quite well. Now if it had more config options and didn't have those sporadic redraw issues...

Other than that I used gentoo (which was lots of fun, learned a lot about linux) and fedora (that one is kinda weird cause they're doing some things differently).

When I said I don't like linux GUI, I meant i don't like KDE (dolphin is eww), gnome3 (one app on a screen, "taskbar" always hidden) or XFCE (it feels kinda unfinished). I tried messing with e17 too, but somehow everything looks too overloaded and overly flashy.

Gnome2 was fine, but it's not supported anymore afaik and I got used to having my taksbar on the left, so that also kills LXDE and XFCE in that sense.

Yes, I am picky and windows isn't perfect either :P