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> Just use Whisky You know, every 6 months or so I get a sudden hankering to play Portal or something and start down this rabbit hole. Based on your prompt, I

by sho 2y ago

> Just use Whisky You know, every 6 months or so I get a sudden hankering to play Portal or something and start down this rabbit hole. Based on your prompt, I had another look today. So I went and downloaded this "whisky" thing. From their website: "Experience the latest titles effortlessly with Whisky!". OK. Installed. I open it and I see a window with "bottle configuration" (wtf is a bottle?), an "open c: drive" button (???), "SteamCMD" whatever that is, "winetricks" (??) and a "run.." button which opens a file from finder (??). I have absolutely no idea what any of this is or how to proceed. Confronted with this and the prospect of hours of research and messing around I decide I don't need to play anything all that much really. UPDATE - ok, I decided to actually try and get it working and it's not that bad. Follow this video, basically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xowJ3b-pt-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xowJ3b-pt-U And protip, set your system audio to 44.1khz. Cool. Portal. I maintain the user onboarding could be MUCH more friendly.

dagmx 2y ago
Yeah whisky definitely exposes more of the wine underpinnings. Crossover is more user friendly but isn’t free. Crossover are the primary developers behind WINE and transitively, Proton. Steam just handles all the configuration elements of proton for the user but essentially it’s doing the same stuff under the hood.
npteljes 2y ago
This is one of the things that Valve does very well. I even end up installing Steam on PCs that I run non-steam software on, because Proton is just that easy. I add the shortcut to Steam, choose my proton runtime (if that), click play, and the client does the rest. WHY ON EARTH is it more complicated with other launchers? No idea, and I bet that they have exactly 0 UX people among their midst. And even the programmer excuse doesn't work, that programmers are bad at this sort of thing (think "programmer art"); because programming also adopted convention over configuration in the early 2000s, 20 years ago now. Sorry for the rant, I also hate bad UX. It makes me feel stupid for no good reason.

by sho 2y ago

dagmx 2y ago

Yeah whisky definitely exposes more of the wine underpinnings. Crossover is more user friendly but isn’t free. Crossover are the primary developers behind WINE and transitively, Proton. Steam just handles all the configuration elements of proton for the user but essentially it’s doing the same stuff under the hood.

npteljes 2y ago

This is one of the things that Valve does very well. I even end up installing Steam on PCs that I run non-steam software on, because Proton is just that easy. I add the shortcut to Steam, choose my proton runtime (if that), click play, and the client does the rest. WHY ON EARTH is it more complicated with other launchers? No idea, and I bet that they have exactly 0 UX people among their midst. And even the programmer excuse doesn't work, that programmers are bad at this sort of thing (think "programmer art"); because programming also adopted convention over configuration in the early 2000s, 20 years ago now. Sorry for the rant, I also hate bad UX. It makes me feel stupid for no good reason.