Yay, It works!

I'm writing this from my MacBook running Mint off a USB disk, and I can't believe it :-D. Besides I got my installation in my desktop with The Witcher 2 in it, and all thanks to your giveaway and the forum help.

In the process I've learned a lot. Too many years programming and taking the path of least resistance (ie Windows and OSX as of late) when it came to systems and OS stuff have left me a bit outdated. Now leaving the comfort zone and actually getting things to work feels very good :)

AMD's proprietary drivers were what I meant too, but it's always better to be more specific. :-)

Open source drivers are fine for 2D applications, but they have never been the recommended approach for 3D games.

I wonder what AMD is expecting.
Instead of fixing their drivers they drop support for *NIX systems. Since they won't support newer versions of the X server the problem will expand to other systems for sure, like BSD and Illumos based distributions.
I don't see the reason why anyone, with interest on *NIX systems would buy an AMD GPU. Even if 3D games are not a field of interest, would anyone like unsupported hardware?

AMD aren't dropping support though (well, aside from pre-GCN GPUs), they're replacing the Catalyst drivers with the new AMDGPU (open source) and AMDGPU-PRO (hybrid open source/proprietary) drivers, both of which are showing a lot of promise (and are quite good already from what I've been reading so far, although still behind Nvidia's proprietary drivers... but then even their Catalyst drivers were FAR behind Nvidia in performance; the new drivers are much better).

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amdgpu-rx480-linux&num=1

That is true, but they did drop support for some cards that are barely 2 - 3 years old, limiting people to the open-source driver or to an older distro that still supports the craptacular Catalyst driver.

The open-source driver actually isn't bad, it's been better than the Catalyst driver in most areas for a long time now. Overall gaming performance is awful with either driver though.

Even with their new driver finally showing promise I was just too annoyed to stick with them for another upgrade.

Running in software rendering mode

Cinnamon is currently running without video hardware acceleration and, as a result, you may observe much higher than normal CPU usage.

When I installed Mint 18 on Virtualbox, I saw that error message when Mint started. I had "Enable 3D Acceleration" ticked in the Display settings so that wasnt the problem. After trying million things, I came across an article saying that the problem was the Virtualbox version itself. I had Virtualbox 5.0.2 and there was a fix in the 5.0.16 Guest addition. Updating the Virtualbox to newest version and running the Guest addition iso solved all the problems for me.

So to sum up, the solution for me was..

1. Upgrade Virtualbox to newest version. (5.1.2)
2. While Guest VM is off, Go to settings--> Display --> Enable 3D Acceleration.
3. Turn on guest linux mint.
4. On the above menues, click Devices --> Insert Guest Addition CD Image. This will mount an iso with the same version of your Virtualbox version. (for me 5.1.2).
5. It will autorun and ask you for password. Enter it and it will do everything itself.
6. Restart Guest linux.

That fixed the problem for me. I hope it helps someone else in the future.

The PlayOnLinux guide has now been updated & moved into its own separate guide. See the first post for the download link.

The PlayOnLinux guide has now been updated & moved into its own separate guide. See the first post for the download link.

The PlayOnLinux guide has now been updated & moved into its own separate guide. See the first post for the download link.

The PlayOnLinux guide has now been updated & moved into its own separate guide. See the first post for the download link.

Reserved

Excellent tutorial @adamhm and exactly what I needed. I think many will agree on that too. Playonlinux is the first thing i install now whenever i install linux. I have some questions but i will try to figure them out myself (learn more that way) but will knock this topic if i cant find a solution.

+1 for all of them.

ps. This could be an other topic of its own. I cant think of a gamer who uses linux can do without wine and playonlinux is the best way to use it in my humble opinion.

I did consider posting it as a separate thread, but thought that keeping it in one place would be more convenient. I could always split it off into a separate thread later if that would work better for people though.

Thanks a lot for this. You got me to install (and reinstall many times :D) Linux again after many years, then play a native Linux game (The Witcher 2, thanks again :)), and now I'll have to try POL and it looks like my current Windows licenses might be the last ones I ever purchase... :)

By the way, I reinstalled my Windows 7 in "UEFI mode" so that I could install Mint 18 without bootloader, and then add the kernel to my UEFI boot menu. It works great and I'm not using GRUB at all. I found it an unnecessary component and a pain to configure.