Yes, in its early days it did use to be quite flakey and only simple Windoze applications would work. But it has come a long way in the past 5 years such that now even Internet Explorer works reliably with Wine.Sput wrote: I last tried it about 5 years ago and it was a touch on the poor side.
Have a look at the reliability list at
<http://appdb.winehq.ORG/>
and many people are also having great success at getting numerous Windoze games to work with WINE.
Of course there are now lots of native versions of games available for GNU/Linux as well.
<http://www.linuxgames.COM/>