If you've used Wine (in Linux, of course) to successfully play some big programs, such as modern video games, I'd like to know about it.

I tried installing and playing Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and 3 and both failed pretty badly. Heroes 2 installed, but didn't play. XCom Apocolypse won't play at all. I gave up after those.

I rarely use wine, and even more rarely for games. Wine is good for its intended purpose: to enable people to run Windows programs in other OSes, like Linux. Of course, it is not "complete", because they have no access to Windows code, and have to figure out what each function call really does, by trial and error.

To run large business-type applications under wine, you really need Crossover Office, which is produced by the same company that develops wine, itself. For games, you really need to use Cedega (http://transgaming.com) (a wine derivative). And even with that, you need to check their games database to see if/how well the game is supported. (Civ3, for instance, sees wine/Cedega as a "debugger", and complains that it can't run until you delete the debugger....)

I just use Linux-native apps for virtually everything, and don't mess with wine at all, anymore. For a very few games, I mess with wine/Cedega, but I've gone to playing Civ3 on my wife's laptop. Civ4 works under Cedega, but my hardware is too wimpy, so I won't mess with that for a while, until I upgrade my system.

(Civ3, for instance, sees wine/Cedega as a "debugger", and complains that it can't run until you delete the debugger....)

That's exactly the same problem I had when I tried to run Civ3 in qemu, which is kind of odd, because in that case it was running on an actual copy of Windows, which in turn was running in an emulator.

Which linux distro are you running? I know quite a few folks over at ubuntuforums.org have gotten different games running on Wine (including HoMM 3, iirc).

Mandriva v. 2006.

I ran Europa Universalis II with wine, off of the windows partition. No music, LAN worked but not net.