Hearthstone is probably the most popular digital card game. The Warcraft-themed game from Blizzard has seen quite a bit of growth over its lifetime, and it’s even a major e-sport.
Even though Hearthstone was released for a wide array of platforms, including mobile devices running Android, it has never seen official Linux support. Thankfully, Hearthstone is a lightweight game that can be run on Linux systems through Wine.
Install Wine Staging
The staging patches for Wine are necessary. Blizzard updates Hearthstone frequently, and those updates do occasionally break Wine gameplay. Having the latest patches does help.
Enable the Wine Staging PPA on Ubuntu. You’ll need the release key first, so wget that, and add it.
cd ~/Downloads wget -nc https://repos.wine-staging.com/wine/Release.key sudo apt-key add Release.key
Add the repository to Apt, update, and install Wine Staging.
sudo apt-add-repository 'https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/' sudo apt update sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-staging
Configure Wine
Now that you have the latest version of Wine Staging installed, you need to configure it a bit. Open a terminal and run winecfg.
In the window that opens, click on the “Staging” tab. Check the boxes to enable CSMT, VAAPI, and EAX.
Click back to “Libraries,” and in the search box type d3d11. Add it. Click on the entry and disable it. Repeat the process with locationapi. After that’s done, close winecfg.
Winetricks
You’re going to need the winetricks script, too, if you want the Battle.net launcher to perform properly. You can grab the latest version of the script with wget.
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks chmod +x winetricks
Run the script. If you’re not familiar, Winetricks will open a graphical application that lets you download Windows components and tools to make your Wine applications run more smoothly (or at all).
./winetricks
On the first screen “Use default Wine prefix” is selected. Leave it selected, and click the “OK” button. On the following screen select the “Install DLL” option. Find ie8 and install it.
When the install finishes, it’ll drop you back where you were. Click “Cancel” to go up one level. Select “Fonts.” Check off corefonts and install it. When that finishes, click “Cancel” until you exit Winetricks.
Install Battle.net
You’re ready to install the Battle.net client. Head over to Blizzard’s download page and get the latest version.
You can just click on the resulting .exe file to launch it with Wine. Follow the instructions as though you are doing the exact same thing on Windows. The install process is the same, and you can just click through the installer.
When it finishes, it should just launch the Battle.net client. If it doesn’t, click on the icon that it created (if it did), or find the actual path at “~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Battle.net/Battle.net Launcher.exe.”
Install and Launch Hearthstone
The hard part is out of the way. Click on the Hearthstone icon in the Battle.net app, and click the “Install” button at the bottom of the screen. Wait for the client to download and install Hearthstone. It will all happen automatically.
When the install process is finished, the “Install” button will turn into a “Play” button. Click it to launch the game.
Once the game is open, click on the gear icon in the lower-right corner. That’s the settings menu. It’s recommended that you run the game in “Windowed” mode for best performance. You can adjust the rest to set your needs.
Some of this may change as Blizzard updates the game. For the latest updates in case of breakage, check the Wine Appdb page.
Nick is a freelance tech. journalist, Linux enthusiast, and a long time PC gamer.
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