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Just curious: what's the point in running Steam in Wine nowadays? It seems that every Windows game in Steam that I've tried recently (Helldivers 2, Hades 2, Ho
by porphyra 2y ago
Just curious: what's the point in running Steam in Wine nowadays?
It seems that every Windows game in Steam that I've tried recently (Helldivers 2, Hades 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Talos Principle 2, etc) have been flawless in Steam for Linux since Steam will run them with Proton.
Even non-steam games such as Starcraft II work well by adding battle.net setup.exe to Steam as a "Non-Steam game", and selecting Proton as the compatibility layer.
- ProfMeowsworth 2y agoFor Linux maybe, but for Mac the situation is different. If there’s no Mac version, it won’t run.
- porphyra 2y agoHmm but Wine doesn't work on recent versions of macOS or Apple Silicon anyway, right? But hopefully the Apple Game Porting Toolkit makes it easier for Mac users to play games...
- cyberpunk 2y agoI think that’s not right — there’s even a commercial product (code weavers crossover) which is exactly this — wine for Apple silicon which can run amd64 windows games on apple silicon).
- porphyra 2y agoCrossover uses Rosetta in order to run on Apple Silicon afaik.
- kcb 2y agoIt does work.
- bhaney 2y agoI very regularly use wine on the latest version of macOS on Apple Silicon.
- ComputerGuru 2y agoProton is built on Wine.
- porphyra 2y agoYes, I am aware of this fact. That doesn't answer the question of why anyone would run the Windows version of Steam on Wine, rather than running the Linux version of Steam, which would use Proton (which is built on Wine) automatically and painlessly.
- tanduv 2y agoPlenty of older games only seem to work with certain versions of Proton/Wine, DXVK etc. There are projects like Bottles which let you manage multiple Proton distributions https://usebottles.com/ https://usebottles.com/
- porphyra 2y agoThat's true but in Steam on Linux there's a dropdown menu in the settings that lets you choose the Proton Version. And tools like protontricks can add additional wine/wine-staging/proton versions that would show up in Steam.
- ComputerGuru 2y agoI don’t know, I don’t game under Linux. But from my own wine experience, maybe to play some games that were ported to Linux and available first-party but have some form of crippled experience or bugs and playing the native Windows port is the way around it. (Eg Netflix plays on Firefox/Chrome under Linux, but if you run Chrome under Wine on Linux instead, you get 1080p video instead of crippled 720p crap.)
- jamesgeck0 2y agoNot much, but I assume we’re seeing Steam-related fixes from Proton flowing upstream anyway.
- yellowapple 2y agoKeeping all of Steam in a single wineprefix (instead of the usual approach of each game being in its own wineprefix) can make things quite a bit easier when dealing with programs/games that interact with each others' files. Three general categories of examples: - Mod managers, trainers, and other external programs that should probably run in the same prefix as the game; yes, it's possible to manually run them in specific wineprefixen with specific Proton versions, or to use tools like SteamTinkerLaunch to pop up a menu first, but these are quite a bit clunkier than just running everything in the same prefix. Vortex and Mod Organizer 2 especially come to mind as being designed to handle multiple games within the same installation; the Proton-centric approach instead encourages having separate Vortex/MO2 installations per game, with all the shenanigans around browser URL associations and such that produces. - Steam-managed editing/authoring tools for Steam games (e.g. the Creation Kits for various Bethesda RPGs). The Proton-centric approach results in these tools being in their own wineprefixen separate from the games themselves - and while that ain't impossible to live with, it's a lot less convenient than everything sharing a prefix. - Newer installments in a game series importing save data from older installments (e.g. Mass Effect prior to Legendary Edition being a thing, or the Saint's Row games). Much easier to handle when everything's in one wineprefix; much more difficult when each game is in its own wineprefix (especially if these games don't offer an easy way to manually browse for the data to import). It's theoretically possible to achieve some of this with Linux Steam + Proton by pre-creating shared wineprefixen and symlinking each game's own wineprefix to a shared one. This also defeats a lot of the point of using Proton in Steam - whereas it's easy enough to just... run Windows Steam in Wine directly (possibly even using Lutris or Bottles or what have you to create separate Windows Steam instances for separate sets of games).
- porphyra 2y agoDanke schön this is a great answer that I was looking for.