Disclaimer
Demand for this guide was over the roof lately (both publicly and through PM, some of you even offered help - which i appreciate a lot!), so i have to release it earlier than planned.
This guide should be suitable for anyone from complete newcomer to advanced user (latter will just read TL;DR of given sections for current Best practices and Resources).
Also, this guide is useful for any distribution, not only EndeavourOS or Arch - so you can share it for anyone who use Linux!
It is far from finished, but should be a very good start for PC gamers
Things to come
• I know that set of simple scripts in Wine section is very far from ideal workflow, to be user-friendly for wide range of people, but still it’s much easier, than what you’ll find after reading Wine wiki for 12 months.
Meanwhile i hope that those who don’t know Wine up close in personal will find great help in understanding it’s operation from guide and those scripts.
Don’t use this scripts, if you have PlayOnLinux installed and used - as i use it’s folder-structure to get auto-hooked by Lutris!
You can use many available tools like: pywinery, PlayOnLinux or Lutris itself to manage, but i won’t recommend it.
Personally i respect them for good ideas, but find them very bloated, unnecessary huge, full of dependencies, not-vanilla ways of dealing Wine sometimes, and not-functional for some advanced stuff…
I have already created a great script in bash capable of much more than just ease for gaming, but can’t release it right now until i’ll be 100% sure it’s perfect, after that i’ll release it FOSS on GitHub and AUR:
FEATURES
- Pure bash
- Very user-friendly
- Interface GUI / CLI / mixed
- Don’t auto-mess mime-types and .desktop files of original system (like Wine and Winetricks do), create PREFIX portable by default
- No dependencies except winetricks and optional Zenity for GUI
- Advanced management of ENGINE and PREFIXES, mass actions for:
- Update selected PREFIXES for specific ENGINE version
- Remove selected ENGINES (will warn if they’re in use by some PREFIXES)
- Download and auto-install ENGINES:
- For now only PlayOnLinux (wine / wine-staging)
- Looking forward for adding Proton, Tk-Glitch, GloriousEggroll
- Will try to add custom sources in config, for pre-built Engines
- Very easy to create prefix
- Execute .msi or .exe Windows files from file-manager’s double-click - it will ask on which of available PREFIXES you want to run it!
- Optional config for places where you store your prefixes, you can have multiple places which will be symlinked (for example Games on separate drive)!
- Easy scripting from:
- Bash
- Probably will parse Lutris scripts for the future too
- Config for chosen prefix:
- Change Engine
- All the usual options like winecfg, regedit, reboot etc
- Kill all processes
- Make prefix portable
- Kill all processes for all PREFIXES
- Make all PREFIXES portable
• Bridging old games (DirectX 1-8, Glide, DirectDraw) to work with Wine / Proton and DXVK
• Advises on Game configs and Mods
• Emulators
What i’ll need help with
Contrary to popular beliefs - i’m not terminator or even Wine-guru
Please alert me on:
• Typos, errors, dead links
• Best practices updates
What i very much need help with:
• Downsampling (i need universal ways of achieving something like Nvidia DSR for any game, regardless of drivers etc) - this is super-important for me personally and games quality!
• nvapi - if someone will come up with ways to hook this latest PhysX development or help Wine and DXVK - please do!
• AMD / Intel / Hybrid / Optimus graphics gaming. Anything on best practices for as i don’t have experience on Linux and hardware for it.
Now ENJOY!
And please excuse me, as i was and still am super-busy on a work, but will be here and will try to help however i can, but for now i need some rest