Help running cracked (or not) windows games on linux

Context:

I'm currently running Debian 12.7 on VirtualBox, trying out linux before I become experienced enough to fully switch my drive to linux. I have an i5 cpu and an amd radeon gpu on my laptop. I run kde-plasma with wayland.

I have sorted out some basic stuff, but my current problem is how to play the few games I have on linux ("Counter-strike 1.6", "Hades I", "MGR: Revengeance", "Minecraft" (t-launcher) and "Outer-Wilds"). I want ro move their game data too, but I think that's a simple copy paste on the appropriate paths. I also want to run a few other programs, possibly Notepad++ and mp3tag, but I think I can figure those if I fugre the games.

I know about the existance of Wine, Winetricks (though not very good at using it), Proton, Lutris, Bottles and Heroic (and PlayOnLinux which I haven't installed).

I have installed Lutris (flatpak), Bottles (flatpak) and Heroic (Appimage).

I have successfully manually installed Notepad++ in Bottles using soda-9.0.1 and semi-successfully manually installed Counter-strike 1.6 on Lutris using wine-ge-8-26-x86_64. The issues with that (among others?) is that I cant look around with the mouse and there is no audio. Apparently some dependencies are missing.

So, this comes to my question:

How do I figure what dependencies to use on my wineprefixes?

Lutris, bottles and heroic theoritically allow you to edit the dependencies, in case something goes wrong. Lutris also is supposed to have some installation scripts on their database.

Is there any way I can find any configuration in text form? How can I then use this text to pick the dependencies myself?

I'm thinking of a list with the recommended changes:

Counter-strike 1.6 installation script:

Install Windows fonts

Install cmd

Install vcrun2013

Do X changes on registry

etc.

Is there such a thing? Is there any other way to figure this out (other than painfully and randomly trying setup combinations)?

You're viewing a single thread.

25 comments

Have been almost a year since I switched to Linux completely. I'm using CachyOS (an Arch derivative), so, you may have to adjust some things for your distro.
First of all, your driver setup varies heavily on what hardware you have, obviously. All AMD (both CPU and GPU) being the easiest for setup and laptops with Intel CPU + iGPU and Nvidia dGPU being notoriously hard to manage (it's also my case, which sucks). Look up what you need for your specific hardware.
Next comes your display server and audio server. The bleeding edge here being Wayland + Pipewire.
Wayland can be a bit removed on Nvidia GPUs, but it got a lot better over the last years. To use Wayland your desktop environment has to support it. Check with your specific DE. I'm using KDE Plasma, been quite happy since the switch.
Pipewire is pretty easy to setup, just uninstall your old audio server, replace it with Pipewire and an adapter package for what you had (like pipewire-pulse for PulseAudio) and you are good to go. It's very cool with tools like qpwgraph for audio management, easily the most mind-blowing thing I installed. Your friend came over and you want to send game audio both to your and their headphones? Easy. Been selling parts of my soul to get these sorts of setups on Windows for a long time.
Next, use native software where you can. You can replace Notepad++ with VSCodium or Helix (the learning curve for modal editors is steep, but it's very worth it).
For Minecraft, TLauncher is... controversial to say the least, even for usage on Windows. Try PrismLauncher. Works great, allows to download modpacks from popular distributors and is pretty easy to trick into playing in offline mode without a Microsoft account, just look it up.
Next, the translation layer. I'm using Proton-GE for everything via Lutris. While, as per GE, it is not a supported use-case, it's what I've got the best experience with so far.
As for dependecies, there is a good guide from GE for that.
Hopefully it helps in one way or the other. You can also experiment with distibution of your choice. There are some gaming-focused ones that come with driver installation tools to make it easier for you, don't hesitate to dump everything and start from scratch with a fresh install while you are not that commited to one specific distro.
- Oh, I forgot to mention, I have intel cpu and amd gpu, I will edit it above.
  I am using plasma kde with wayland. I will check pipewire later too probably.
  Thank you for the text editor suggestions :) I have found geany as an alternative, but it has some limitations (multi-window support isnt very good), but notepad++ on bottles opens slowly, so I want to avoid it too. (I also thought about emacs and nvim, but they are kinda scary and probably not for me.)
  As I said in another comment, I will probably try once more to convert to prism.
  Hmm, about proton-ge on lutris, for me lutris only shows wine-ge-proton and lutris versions of wine. Should I install it manually or something?
  Lastly, thanks for the guide! I hadnt found that one.
  
  I'm not exactly sure how it works with flatpak versions, but for native Steam+Lutris, you install it with this and Lutris picks it up automatically, as far as I remember. Probably need to allow the flatpack to see the installation directory or put it in Lutris runners altogether instead of Steam directory.
  Helix is very similar to Emacs and vim/nvim, but a lot easier to set up. Tried all of them but with Helix it just clicked for me.
  
  Hmm, I havent installed steam, maybe I should

25 comments