Redline's Journal: I hate WineX

I hate WineX.
Not the actual WineX software itself, which is actually pretty nice. I have been able to place Rage of Mages (the last Windows game I bought for myself) under Linux, which makes me happy. It is the Sims and now Kohan that are pissing me off.
For my spouse's enjoyment, we have purchased The Sims (windows), House Party(windows), Hot Date (Mac, thanks Aspyr), and Vacation(back to windows). I have spent over $150US on this game. Now the spouse wants Linux on the laptop, but doesn't want to lose the Sims. Well, it would be another $70 dollars for the Linux version of the Sims. Actually, I'd have to buy Mandrake 8 to get the Sims.
This in itself is not so bad, I bought Alpha Centauri for Windows, and then bought the Planetary Pack when Loki made the port (it's that good!), so I will double-buy a game to get some penguin-love. But the Linux Sims is not a real port. It uses the infernal winelib (here on known as half-port). Some people will argue that winelib is as native Linux as SDL or OpenGl, but it isn't. SDL is a *thin* wrapper over a raw framebuffer/sound/input, and Mesa is hella-native on my rapidly-aging (but well supported in Linux) 3dfx card. WineX thunks DirectX calls to X11 and OpenGL functions. That is hardly native. I've heard that Max Payne runs half as fast under WineX as Windows. I don't know, because I won't buy that crap, but I am certain that the Loki version of SMAC runs at full speed on my ancient Pentium 166 laptop, while Windows SMAC crawls under WineX on my Athlon 700.
Now Trannie-Gaming wants to butcher Kohan and make a half-port to Linux. I guess if you have a 2.5 Ghz Pentium4 with 2Gigs of RAM and a geforce 4, you won't notice the slowdown from the DirectX emulation. It's still not good enough. People (all five of them) who bought Loki's KIS native will still be stuck without a patch to bring them back into compatibility with the Windows version. Unless they want to buy the game again, and be stuck with a slower version of the product for which they already payed good money! And it guarantees that there will never be a true native port of KIS (or the Sims). And this WineX is x86 only. What about my Powerbook running Mandrake 8.2? I have Alpha Centauri and Myth running native. Will this computer ever see the Sims? Hell-no. Thanks transgaming. By making high-end x86 Linux boxes run half-ports of windows games, you are destroying any chance of a real market emerging for linux entertainment software.
I'm not a foaming-at-the-mouth open source freak or anything, but I have a little pride. I don't want any damn Windows sloppy-seconds. I don't want a DirectX 11 game running at half-speed ("with sound coming in the next version of WineX, we promise! pay us now!"). I don't want game publishers to think they can throw us a lame-assed winex port that runs half as fast and say "See, this is good enough for those Linux folks."
I want native gaming, dammit! And if that means I am stuck wishing for native games to trickle out, then so be it. I am not paying any more money for a windows game in penguins clothing.
I hate WineX.