This post will be "a guidline" on how to setup things for running WoT on Linux as smooth as possible. In first part, I will describe the setup (hopefully it will be brief and clear) and in the second part I will dive into some "peculiarities" that I have encountered during setting things up.

Here is exact specs of the notebook that I use (if you have AMD graphics you will need to search for instructions how to install drivers for it yourself, as I have Nvidia graphics)

Notebook model: HP HP ZBook Firefly 14 inch G11 Mobile Workstation PC
Memory: 32GB
Processor: Intel® Core™ Ultra 5 125H × 18
Dual Graphics
  integrated GPU: Intel® Arc™ Graphics (MTL) (7-cores)
  dedicated GPU: NVIDIA RTX A500 Laptop GPU

the OS specs:

Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS on X11, Linux 6.11.0-19-generic

Setup

  1. Install nvidia drivers

    I recommend avoiding the open drivers (but I did not tested if they really perform poorly in the games)

  2. Install Vulkan

  3. Install bottles via flatpak.

  4. You also need to install flatpak nvidia drivers, otherwise bottles will not work with dedicated GPU. Bottles might install them, but double-check it.

    Important! each time you update your nvidia driver, you have to update also the flatpak driver, otherwise you will not be able to launch any game with the dedicated GPU. To update it run flatpak update

  5. Create bottle, choose Gaming preset and name it for example "WoT"

  6. Setup bottle:

    Adjust the settings for the bottle, mine are these:

    Setup Components

    I use soda runner because honestly I have the least issues with it. I tried ge-proton and I feel like fps were maybe more stable, but I could run Uplay with this runner and it took me a while to figure it out (Uplay was running but I couldn't sign in as I couldn't type the email). I hope I will save you a lot of time with this info :)

    Other that this, use the latest versions of DXVK, VKD3D, DXVK NVAPI and LatencyFlex and you should be good.

    Setup Display

    There is nothing too special, I want to use my discrete GPU so I toggle it + FidelityFX. Next you want to click on Advanced Display Settings.

    Setup Advanced Display Settings
    I toggle here Virtual Desktop because I find it convinient. But I also had some troubles with Wargaming Game Center indicator in the gnome panel, and if you use Virtual desktop you won't get it. Important here is to toggle Take Focus. Without it you will have problems if you use two monitors. When you for example click on the browser on the second monitor and then get back to the game window, your mouse will keep going to the second monitor without this toggled (I specially had this problem in AC Odyssey).
    Last thing, set Renderer to Vulkan. You do not want to use the others, I think I read somewhere that they are legacy and useful for some aplications that do not support Vulkan, but they are less performant.

    Setup Performance etc.
    I will leave this without much comments. To toggle Monitor Performance you need to install MangoHUD with flatpak. You do not need to use it, I just use it to look how much is my GPU and CPU utilized

  7. Install WoT

    Download installer from the official site, run it in bottle... I guess there is no guidance needed.

  8. Fix audio (especialy if you use EasyEffects)

    My audio runs on pipewire and I use EasyEffects as audio equalizer. I had issue with having no audio when running game on dedicated GPU. To rectify this, you have to use this command (credits):

    pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.force-rate 48000 && pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.force-quantum 240

    If you use command pw-top, you will see that the Wot expects 48000 hz and quantum 240, so we can set quantum to this number. If there are any problems with it, we can always set quantum to higher number and it should make us get rid of the problem.

  9. Fix keyboard input

    I use X11 with Slovak keyboard. With this keyboard I have issue that numeric keys are not working (apart from number 1). You know this is a problem in WoT because you cannot swap ammo etc.. Fix is to English keyboard. I use "English (UK)" because it has swapped Y-Z the way I like it (i.e. Y is next to the X).

    Select English keyboard

I think that is it. When I will have time, I will try to use my guide myself on clean Ubuntu OS installation (or maybe Pop OS). I did not provided links to some things like how to install nvidia drivers via flatpak etc. but I think you will be able to google those. I will try to add links to those if find the time for tryout of this guide.

"Peculiarities"

Custom kernel

I have tried xanmod kernel, but it could not use the dedicated GPU. I feel like there wasn't missing headers as I reinstalled the GPU drivers when I had xanmod already installed, but I might be wrong. I also tried liquorix and the performance was horrible. I tried it on both Wayland and Xorg and on both the fps were lower than on default kernel (6.11.x). Additionaly on Wayland I had problems with rotating in the garage, and these were also present on the default kernel. I thing toggling on Gamescope should resolve this problem (but I did not tested it properly).

I mainly tried alternative kernels because of the audio problem I mention earlier as I thought the problem was with the kernel. I even thought problem was with the pipewire and it would be fixed in the latest pipewire. But you have to install latest version from source and in this process I broke my system. So I reverted to pipewire version from apt and started to search if this isn't a problem somewhere else. And indeed it was (probably).

Final words

I know this site is called "Dev" and this whole article might be a little bit off-topic (but I found some other offtopic articles too, also related to wine). So I hope I won't insult anyone with posting this article on this platform. Other platforms for posting that came to my mind are more for asking questions or for discussions. Only other platform that was for me viable option was Medium but I wanted to use Mardown and Medium does not support it out-of-the-box.

This is a guide for me (when I will reinstall my system or get new hardware) and for anyone who is looking for such guide. I was in need for such a guide and found some guides for running WoT on wine or lutris, but those were mostly outdated. And additionally, this guide is focused on bottles because I found it easiest to configure 😄