The Story of How I Tried to Play WoW on Linux and Accidentally Questioned the Nature of Human Identity
Michi (and some Claude)
March 04, 2026 · 5 min read
This is Michi. Michi is a developer who recently migrated his entire life to CachyOS Linux. He is very confident about this decision.
Michi, moments before disaster.
Michi's plan was simple:
Install Wine. Open Lutris. Play WoW 3.3.5a. Go arena. Hit 2200 rating. Maybe sleep at some point. (By the way: Roman did a inb4 and told michi right away that it would be troubles with linux — michi ignored it — you have to learn by your own mistakes)
First, Michi needed packages: So Michi typed pacman -S and the mirror returned 404. Then the next mirror returned 404. Then the GPG keys were invalid. Then the signatures were corrupted. Michi's terminal looked like a crime scene.
please. really just install wine...
After refreshing every key on every keyserver on planet earth, the packages finally installed. Michi opened Lutris. Selected GE-Proton. Hit Play. WoW launched. Michi smiled.
Then he looked at his FPS counter.
GTX 1070. A game from 2008. 40 fps...? wtf
40 frames per second. On a GTX 1070. In a game from 2008. Michi's blood pressure rose. He investigated. Deep in the Config.wtf, hidden like a war crime, sat one line: SET gxApi "OpenGL". WoW was rendering through Wine's OpenGL instead of DXVK. The entire Vulkan pipeline — bypassed. By a config file from 2010.
Michi changed it to d3d9. FPS went to 150. Michi felt like a god for approximately four minutes.
four minutes of happiness.
Because then he pressed Alt+Q to sheathe his weapon and KDE Plasma minimized his window. He pressed Alt+Shift+1 for a keybind and KDE switched his taskbar app. He pressed Ctrl+Shift+Tab and KDE did... something. Every shortcut Michi pressed, KDE Plasma intercepted like an overprotective parent.
KDE Plasma: the final boss.
Michi tried everything. He tried Window Rules. The option didn't exist. He tried a D-Bus call to block global shortcuts. The method didn't exist. He tried Gamescope — a micro-compositor that should capture all input. It broke the resolution and halved the framerate. On NVIDIA legacy drivers, nothing is free.
In the end, Michi surrendered. He moved his taskbar shortcuts to Meta+1-6. Because WoW never uses the Windows key. Sometimes the simplest fix is the last one you try.
peace was never an option. but Meta was.
But the adventure was not over. Because when Michi closed WoW, WoW did not close. The Wine processes — wineserver, winedevice.exe, pressure-vessel, xalia, umu-run — all of them stayed alive. Lutris showed a spinner. Michi waited. And waited.
they cannot be killed. they are eternal.
Michi wrote a kill script. It didn't work from a KDE shortcut. He rewrote it with full paths. It still didn't work from a KDE shortcut. He rewrote it again. It worked — but only from the terminal. The KDE shortcut remained mysteriously deaf. Some battles, you do not win. You simply type killwow into your terminal and move on with your life.
Then Michi wanted to install Steam. Steam asked him to log in. And to prove he was human, Steam presented Michi with a puzzle where he had to drag road pieces to help a cartoon crocodile reach a waterfall.
WHY AM I BUILDING REPTILE INFRASTRUCTURE???
And this — this is where the evening took a turn...
THE TURN...
Because Michi started thinking...
Why are CAPTCHAs so absurd now? Because AI solves the old ones faster than humans. Text recognition? Solved. Traffic lights? Solved. Crosswalks? Solved. So the puzzles get weirder and weirder, while the humans solving them get more and more frustrated, and the answers they give get sold as training data to the very AI that made the old puzzles obsolete.
We are training the machines that replace us while proving we are not machines.
Michi could not stop thinking about this:
02:13 AM. Michi has not played WoW yet.
If CAPTCHAs die, what replaces them?
Hardware.
A physical key with a private key in a tamper-proof chip.
You plug it in, a cryptographic challenge-response happens, done. No password. No puzzle. No crocodile. FIDO2, WebAuthn, YubiKey — the tech exists. Your iPhone already does this. That's why Safari never shows CAPTCHAs.
But then: what if every online action requires a hardware identity?
No more anonymous accounts. No more burner emails. No more separate personas....
Every post, every message, every login — traceable to a real human. Good against bots. Catastrophic for whistleblowers. For dissidents. For anyone who needs to speak without being identified.
And what if you lose the hardware? What if you get robbed, your house burns down, you wake up on another continent with nothing? How do you prove you are you?
Social recovery.
Five people you trust each hold a cryptographic shard. Three of five confirm you are you. No single person can impersonate you, but together they can vouch for you...
(blahblabhbah)
And Michi realized: this is how identity has always worked. Before computers...
before passport..
before signatures — you were the person your community recognized as you.
Your village knew your face.
Your friends knew your voice.
Your family knew your story.
Identity was never a thing you possessed - It was a thing others granted you.
we went full circle.
It was 2:13 AM... Michi had been debugging Linux, fighting KDE, killing zombie Wine processes, building roads for crocodiles, and questioning the nature of human identity in a post-AI world. All because he wanted to play a video game from 2008 on an operating system that was not designed for video games from 2008.
But the least:
WoW was running. 150 FPS. d3d9 through DXVK. Vulkan on a GTX 1070. Windowed mode. All shortcuts working. On CachyOS Linux.
And it was beautiful.
CachyOS btw - and michi play wow on cachyos - michi happy ^^'
The end.