I’ve looked around a little, and found some mentions of using Lutris, or running it through Steam (tbh I don’t know how that would work), but I’m not really able to find any guide that explains the process well enough. I’m so used to the game being handled by Blizzard’s Battle.net launcher, so I can’t really wrap my head around how that would work.
This might not help you understand more, but in case it is helpful:
I ran Season of Discovery through Lutris. If I recall correctly, it was easy enough to install Battle.net via an install script there.
I’ve been playing around with my own private server these days. For this I run the client directly in Bottles, which is a Wine prefix manager.
I didn’t consider that you can run your own private server. Is it just a normal world with you being the only player there, or are there custom rules?
It’s your choice, and you can also allow other people to connect to it. The standard settings gives an experience that is close to the real game (as of WotLK), but you can tweak these settings to level faster or whatever you want. Depending on the implementation you go with, there are different ways to add new content - one of them (Azerothcore) is for instance very addon based and you can add bots or difficulty scaling to make things soloable for instance.