I just need a spare weekend or two to make the swap now and throw wine on it for the games I play that refuse to run on Linux.
if your primary storefront is via steam, you likely won’t even need to manage wine, steam will do that for you as part of the install process. You can use something like protonup or something to get GE editions of proton but, honestly it mostly works right off the gate.
Just be aware that proton can have conflicts if you try to use it on NTFS drives, you’ll need to manually specify UID and GID for the drive (via fstab or however you manage mounting drives) or you’ll get permission errors that won’t actually say what they are unless you ran steam via the terminal.
Try Lutris or Heroic Launcher as those two wrap around Wine (and everything else needed to run Windows games in Linux, such as DXVK) and manage the whole process for you, with only a few games which might need tweaking the config to run (and the fraction of games like that is no worse there than it is in Steam).
I use both Steam and Lutris and in my experience Steam is not at all a good launcher for anything other than games from the Steam store, mainly because it is less configurable and because it doesn’t directly expose the tools you need to use to fix those few games that won’t just run and limits the launch options you can tweak, whilst Lutris follows the Unofficial Open Source Credo of pretty much making it possible to configure everything (though Lutris specifically defaults to the best configuration for each game, but it definitelly gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself with)
Steam is very popular because of the Steam Store market dominance so tons of people swear by it (never having used anything else), but it’s not actually the greatest option for anything but steam games and even for those, sometimes it’s worse that getting the same game from GoG and using Lutris or Heroic, mainly because the DRM in the non-GoG version of some games interferes with running them in Linux.
I want to add onto this that if you’re choosing between Lutris and Heroic, you should probably go heroic. I personally use Lutris myself, Mostly because I prefer the UI design of it. However, heroic does have a faster update cycle, while having built in support of Amazon gaming, epic games(including experimental cloud support) and gog, and doesn’t have the bugs that Lutris has. Especially when it comes to trying to run GE layers through it.
Trying to get those first party storefronts to work on Lutris is, for lack of better words, a pain in the ass. I’m only still using it out of pure stubbornness because, like I said, I much prefer the overall layout.
There’s a high probability that it will work if you simply run the launcher through steam. Honestly it’s impressive what you can throw at it and it just works ™.
Only thing to look out for is the installation path when you run installers that way, with all the virtual filesystems and stuff. Haven’t encountered a single game that didn’t run since the switch, be it pirated, gog or steam
if your primary storefront is via steam, you likely won’t even need to manage wine, steam will do that for you as part of the install process. You can use something like protonup or something to get GE editions of proton but, honestly it mostly works right off the gate.
Just be aware that proton can have conflicts if you try to use it on NTFS drives, you’ll need to manually specify UID and GID for the drive (via fstab or however you manage mounting drives) or you’ll get permission errors that won’t actually say what they are unless you ran steam via the terminal.
Unfortunately the games I’d need wine for don’t run through steam and have their own launchers ☹️
But good to know for my steam library at least.
Try Lutris or Heroic Launcher as those two wrap around Wine (and everything else needed to run Windows games in Linux, such as DXVK) and manage the whole process for you, with only a few games which might need tweaking the config to run (and the fraction of games like that is no worse there than it is in Steam).
I use both Steam and Lutris and in my experience Steam is not at all a good launcher for anything other than games from the Steam store, mainly because it is less configurable and because it doesn’t directly expose the tools you need to use to fix those few games that won’t just run and limits the launch options you can tweak, whilst Lutris follows the Unofficial Open Source Credo of pretty much making it possible to configure everything (though Lutris specifically defaults to the best configuration for each game, but it definitelly gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself with)
Steam is very popular because of the Steam Store market dominance so tons of people swear by it (never having used anything else), but it’s not actually the greatest option for anything but steam games and even for those, sometimes it’s worse that getting the same game from GoG and using Lutris or Heroic, mainly because the DRM in the non-GoG version of some games interferes with running them in Linux.
I want to add onto this that if you’re choosing between Lutris and Heroic, you should probably go heroic. I personally use Lutris myself, Mostly because I prefer the UI design of it. However, heroic does have a faster update cycle, while having built in support of Amazon gaming, epic games(including experimental cloud support) and gog, and doesn’t have the bugs that Lutris has. Especially when it comes to trying to run GE layers through it.
Trying to get those first party storefronts to work on Lutris is, for lack of better words, a pain in the ass. I’m only still using it out of pure stubbornness because, like I said, I much prefer the overall layout.
There’s a high probability that it will work if you simply run the launcher through steam. Honestly it’s impressive what you can throw at it and it just works ™.
Only thing to look out for is the installation path when you run installers that way, with all the virtual filesystems and stuff. Haven’t encountered a single game that didn’t run since the switch, be it pirated, gog or steam
Good to know, thanks. I’ll give it a try as soon as I have some downtime 🙂