I've been playing a couple of Wine-games today and decided to switch to metacity to see what the performance difference was like. If you've never done it before, you just run metacity --replace but don't do that if you use Unity!

Anyway, surprise surprise it was like playing on a dedicated Windows gaming machine. Playing under metacity today was bliss. Much higher framerates and just a fluidity that you'd expect from a native game. I'm not sure I can go back.

Switching to metacity is no hardship but I wonder if there's anything else in the WM landscape that I should try out. I'm essentially looking for suggestions for the best way to play games. Mix up WMs, dedicated X sessions, whatever... As long as it makes Wine games run faster.

Small print

• One process per answer (eg: New X session + OpenBox)

• We should probably land on a benchmark so we can show percentage improvement over a stock Compiz desktop. I'm open to suggestions in the comments.

• If people could test it and submit their how much it improves things for them in the comments, that would give others a good idea of if it's worth the pain.