Using Steam as a WINE launcher

[spacebanana]

For when I run games outside Steam, my primary reasons not to run them directly with my system Wine installations are:

• easier 32bit setup
• fshack for fullscreen resolutions with different aspect ratio
• DXVK
• Fsync

Normally, you would use Lutris or Bottles to fulfill these requirements, but lately I have fully ditched them (for many reasons) and instead I use Steam launcher's "non-steam games" functionality, combined with Proton or even Proton-GE and it's really good. There is only a bug where if you change the executable path or working directory path after creating the non-steam game instance, Steam's own parser messes up the path and you have to fix it (missing quotation mark if i remember well). You can also integrate the steam overlay into the game though I don't care about that as much.

 

[CaffeineAddict]

Normally, you would use Lutris or Bottles to fulfill these requirements, but lately I have fully ditched them (for many reasons) and instead I use Steam launcher's "non-steam games" functionality, combined with Proton or even Proton-GE and it's really good.

Why some complex procedure when Lutris since recently comes with proton by default?
With introduction of proton in Lutris the list of games you can't play is really low.

 

[spacebanana]

Why some complex procedure when Lutris since recently comes with proton by default?
With introduction of proton in Lutris the list of games you can't play is really low.

Vanilla wine itself has decent game support too
Proton is dependant on the Steam runtime and so it's much harder to set it up outside Steam compared to wine

 

[CaffeineAddict]

Vanilla wine itself has decent game support too

Yes it does but depends on wine version, I've encountered several games so far which work with proton but not in plain wine, and my tested sample is small, out of 100 games 4-5 didn't work.
staging version will also support more games than stable wine however my last use case resulted in staging version not running at all due to some error.

Proton is dependant on the Steam runtime and so it's much harder to set it up outside Steam compared to wine

IDK for standalone setup but it's not hard at all if used in Lutris since all runtime is included and already set up.

 

[theLegionWithin]

that's neat, I didnt know about that functionality in steam.... not that I have any non-steam games lol. still, neat!

 

[spacebanana]

IDK for standalone setup but it's not hard at all if used in Lutris since all runtime is included and already set up.

Yes
I ditched Lutris and Bottles so I could centralize things on Steam and for other practical, technical and ideological reasons

I don't like how Lutris and Bottles are buggy on their official flatpak implementations (I have to rely on flatpak because I'm on Alpine and many devs decide to simply distribute binaries that are dynamically-linked to glibc or don't even distribute any binaries), Lutris removing functionality, Bottles being slow to navigate, etc.

As for the ideological reasons, I simply don't like how Bottles's developers are so extremist in treating and claiming flatpak as superior to all other native packaging systems, it doesn't look good to me and I can only wonder when they will ditch x11 support too with that arrogant attitude they tend to have (especially since they like to use the latest GTK versions).

 

[spacebanana]

that's neat, I didnt know about that functionality in steam.... not that I have any non-steam games lol. still, neat!

It's great. Normally people don't need it because either all of their games are on Steam or they are Windows users and so the usecase for launching a game on Steam rather than directly running it isn't big, since it would just be bloat for them. But for us Linux users we need wine or proton for windows games, and so this feature is significantly more useful to us

 

[CaffeineAddict]

I don't like how Lutris and Bottles are buggy on their official flatpak implementations (I have to rely on flatpak because I'm on Alpine and many devs decide to simply distribute binaries that are dynamically-linked to glibc or don't even distribute any binaries), Lutris removing functionality, Bottles being slow to navigate, etc.

Oh well that explains things, thanks for sharing.

 

[spacebanana]

Oh well that explains things, thanks for sharing.

Yeah despite everything, I end up putting ideology over practice sometimes, so I understand why people don't mind about certain software but I end up not using it sometimes even out of spite

 

[KGIII]

That was a feature I noticed on Steam when I first installed it. I've yet to dig deeply into it but now I will know that I might want to - even if it's just to see if the process is more streamlined.

So far, and this isn't a long time, I've been happy with Bottles. The list of games I've installed with Bottles totals 2. Both of them run great. Wait, it's 3. I installed a standalone .exe save game editor for Fallout 2. Also, nothing I've installed with Bottles is all that taxing. They're old games.