How to Play WoW 3.3.5a on CachyOS (Arch Linux) - As a Comic

[mzelyx]

Hey everyone,

I recently set up WoW 3.3.5a on CachyOS (Arch-based Linux) and documented the entire journey — including every stupid mistake I made — as a stick figure comic on Telegraph.

The full illustrated guide/story:
The Story of how Michi tried to play WoW on Linux

It covers the complete setup with Lutris + GE-Proton + DXVK on an NVIDIA GTX 1070, but fair warning — it also goes off on a tangent about CAPTCHAs and the meaning of human identity at 2am. You've been warned.

For those who just want the quick technical summary:

Working Stack:

• CachyOS (Arch-based), KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland
• Lutris + GE-Proton (Latest)
• DXVK enabled (dxvk-mingw-git from CachyOS repos)
• nvidia-580xx-dkms (required for Pascal/GTX 10xx — nvidia-open dropped Pascal support!)
• lib32-nvidia-580xx-utils (NOT lib32-nvidia-utils — will break Pascal)
• Esync + Fsync enabled

Critical Fix — the one that matters most:
If you're getting terrible FPS (40 instead of 150), check your WTF/Config.wtf:

SET gxApi "d3d9"
SET gxRefresh "75"
SET gxCursor "1"

If it says "OpenGL" instead of "d3d9", that's your problem. OpenGL bypasses DXVK entirely — your GPU renders through Wine's OpenGL instead of the Vulkan pipeline. Change it to d3d9 and enjoy your 150 FPS.

Other issues I encountered:

• KDE Plasma stealing keyboard shortcuts (Alt, Ctrl, Shift combos intercepted before WoW gets them) — fix: move KDE shortcuts to Meta key
• German keyboard dead keys blocking ^ for autorun — fix: "German (no dead keys)" layout
• Wine zombie processes after closing WoW (wineserver, winedevice won't die) — fix: kill script / fish alias

Hope this helps someone. If you're on Arch/CachyOS with an NVIDIA Pascal GPU trying to get 3.3.5a running, this should save you the 4 hours I spent figuring it out.

See you on Icecrown.

— Duree

[kormex]

Great guide!

I've found, that the easiest way was to add the game's exe to Steam as an external game. This way, I made use of Proton (set to experimental).
Runs like a charm ever since. Maybe a downside for some people though: Multi-clienting is not possible this way.

I'm using Arch btw.

[mzelyx]

Great guide!

I've found, that the easiest way was to add the game's exe to Steam as an external game. This way, I made use of Proton (set to experimental).
Runs like a charm ever since. Maybe a downside for some people though: Multi-clienting is not possible this way.

I'm using Arch btw.

Actually thats super smart! I didn't think of that before haha. Proton is running my steam games really well. But oh well - now i got it running with lutris which also works. Under the hood its the same anyways i guess (wine). For new users: Try what kormex said, either run it as external steam game so you get Proton or get Lutris if you don't have steam.