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Just use Lutris. It can fetch various flavours of wine and manage your bottles.

https://lutris.net/



On one hand, this is also what I use, and it kind of works.

On the other hand... Wine and NVidia seem to not like each other... at all. Every game will require tinkering with Wine and a bunch of things that are supposed to wortk with various NVidia drivers and video adapters. And there's non-zero chance that it simply won't work. Or won't work with your display manager / desktop manager / monitor connection etc.

For instance, I play GuildWars 2, and after a long struggle to find a Wine version that would work with it, I still cannot get 3rd-party extensions to work (eg. arcdps)... and I abandoned all hope of figuring out why: way too many randomly but similarly named libraries with obscure purpose.


My laptop is all AMD (AMD Ryzen 6800HS) and I think people have rose-colored glasses of the AMD situation. I certainly prefer it for many reasons: it's driver stack is open source, it has full DRI2 support, it works with Wayland, etc. That being said, it has plenty of it's own problems and I've run into many of them with Proton/Wine. I would dare say, more than my Nvidia laptop did (though, this was before Steam Deck launched; so I'm certain of it having improved).

Ironically, Intel's embedded GPUs have the least issues overall; but are the least capable pieces of hardware.


It's not just on Linux though. My wife and I had literally identical setups with the one difference being the video card. I had an AMD card, she a NVidia. And the compatibility issues are real. For a specific example, Nvidia cards and Grim Dawn just don't (or didn't at least) get along, even on Windows - with about a zillion threads of such in the Steam forums for it, indicating it wasn't just e.g. a hardware failure type issue. And that wasn't the only game issues cropped up in. That's when we decided to replace her card with an AMD one, and we've had zero issues since.

Another fun thing (again, on Windows at least) is NVidia's drivers forcibly installing telemetry, even when disabled in the install settings. NVidia was king of cards for quite a number of years, but they're really not the company they once were anymore.


Are AMD cards any use for compute tasks such as machine learning though? I would like to build a gaming PC that I can use for stuff like that as well and I feel like there is no real alternative to CUDA at the moment


In theory, sort of, depending on the card and workload. In practice, much more of a headache since (if nothing else) the user base is much smaller.

That's coming from someone who just ordered a 7900xtx anyway.


Yeah, I think this is how I feel after using AMD GPUs to try to game on Wine for the past year after a few years of trying nvidia. I definitely prefer AMD, but there are _always_ weird things to try to work around on Wine; for more actively updated games (like MMOs), sometimes things will suddenly stop working even if they were running smoothly for a while. I think things are on average better now than there were a few years ago, and I hope they continue getting better, but right now I'm not sure there's any option for gaming with Wine/proton that doesn't require a lot of tweaking for performance at the moment.


I used to have that problem, then just switched to AMD video cards, and it magically went away. It just works. Whatever graphics penalty I pay is unnoticeable in comparison to the time lost troubleshooting and tweaking Nvidia for Wine.


I am running GW2 through Steam Proton on Fedora with a custom install location so I don't have to look through the absolutely obscure (heh, forth expansion pun!) directory structure steam hides its games in. Especially non-native ones. Even arcdps works w/o issues.

In wine for arcdps to work, a dll-override is needed somewhere in the wine settings in some really weird place.


I don’t know if I’m an outlier as an NVidia guy, but my frank experience is that Lutris is a janky PoS on any distro I’ve ever tried it on (Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, NixOS)

Everything I haven’t gotten to work in Lutris has worked in Steam Proton by importing it as a non-Steam game. With far less hassle.

Since Lutris predates Steam Proton and thus likely suffers as a result, I think it’s no longer necessary if you are a Steam user.


In addition to Windows software, it also works with web applications, DOS, retro computers and consoles as well.

For wine, it has installation scripts that automatically implement the necessary workarounds for specific software. Such as picking a wine version, setting overrides, installing libraries, etc. It also creates a wineprefix for you with a recommended Windows version for that software.

For example, you can get The Sims 1 complete collection from Internet Archive (abandonware at this point), and then add that game to your collection. That will download and run the installation script for it, saving you most of the manual steps involved in installing that game.


That looks awesome! Is there anything like that for Mac?



Thanks!


There's a front-end for the new Game Porting Toolkit at least.

https://github.com/IsaacMarovitz/Whisky


CrossOver


+1 I use CrossOver, I bought the lifetime license to support them since they also upstream crazy stuff like running 32bit Windows EXE in MacOS etc.


Thanks…I’ll have to try it!


Sometimes Lutris doesn't work, so I use Bottles.


https://lutris.net/games/install/3596/view downloads and runs an MSI from a http server despite the file being provided also over https


Just tried wine for the first time yesterday to use a AFR meter. Did not work at all. Wine did not support the USB connection.


Wine is meant for programs, not device drivers.




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