Wine Install

For most who are reading this in Windows you are only doing so because you don't want to giveup your video games just to run a better OS.
There are 2 things that will contribute to Gamers switching to Linux:

1. Game Developers widely supporting Linux
2. The success of operations like The Wine Project

unfortunately for option 1, the game developers aren't going to do this until the Gamers have switched and Gamers aren't going to switch until they can play their games. It is indeed a vicious cycle. However this is where the second point comes in. What the Wine Project does is it translates the commands that games normally send to Windows into something that Linux can understand. This method has limited success however for several reasons.
For one games run in several different ways the first method and the largest obstacle is DirectX. Which I must commend Microsoft for, it has done a marvelous job of trapping game developers in the Windows environment. This is true because of the proprietary nature of DirectX and the fact the game developers have such ready access to it.
Now Wine has trouble with DirectX because it's proprietary, which means they don't let anyone see the Source code and it was developed in house with only their platform in mind. In order for Wine to help a Windows game communicate with Linux it must understand how it is trying to communicate. Basically the Gods and Army's of Code monkeys at WineHQ have to try and reverse engineer the entire DirectX system, All versions of this system. This is comparable to an ant trying to reverse engineer a Spaceship. There are a lot of unknowns. Games designed in the method usually don't run at all if they are for newer versions of DirectX like 9.0c, and is they do they are not very enjoyable. The older DirectX games work better (Yes that means Fallout 2 Plays Flawlessly).
Another method that is used to Games is Direct 3D, this is much more friendly to Wine and generally game running in this manner can be played on Wine without massive amounts of tinkering.
finally there is the Cream of the Crop. OpenGL, I mean just look at the name it's sexy to most of us because it says open. Meaning that the source code is available, that's like handing the ants the full Blueprints, tech specs and step by step instructions. These games run almost right away.
God it's sexy!