Did they eventually fix the game desync bug that would happen when you have a multi-core CPU?
We used to play Generals at LAN parties all the time - but once multicore CPUs hit the market, it was difficult to just get to the end of a game, because peers would desync and you'd suddenly find yourself playing singleplayer. Its clearly some race condition in the game engine which makes the game non-deterministic in a multicore situation. Does anyone know - is that still a problem?
I'm going to be nice to the net code and say that it has issues because of its age, but multicore CPUs don't cause any issues as far as I know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS0UL9QC2c4
When someone releases a game in a Windows version and a Linux version, the current Wine-based compatibility layers mean that the Windows one is more likely to run without issue than the native binary is.
I built a Linux gaming desktop 5 years ago. The only thing that regularly causes more than minor issues is that many online games use incompatible anticheat technology. I pretty much play exclusively single-player games on PC, so it hasn't been a practical issue for me.
It's pretty awesome. Some of the compatibility layers built on Wine (Valve's Proton/Codeweavers Crossover/Whisky) are almost plug and play. With Steam on Linux, a lot of games work seamlessly. I've only ran into trouble with very new games and multiplayer games with invasive anti-cheat that freaks out when they're running in an environment that doesn't look like a normal windows install
The performance hit is surprisingly low. It's not rare for the windows binary to run better on linux than the native one (when it's an option)
Just yesterday I got the Linux version of an indie game made with Unity and it doesn't even launch. Fetched the Windows build, ran "wine game.exe" and it just ran. Couple other things (C# projects iirc) also worked well
This is not a Unity game, but especially with ancient stuff like Red Alert? I would certainly try it and expect good results. Some years ago, Wine always used to give me trouble and never worked unless you used some special blend of options (like Proton and PlayOnLinux help with). Maybe those times have passed