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)?

  • Björn TantauEnglish
    9•3 months ago

    Debian is not great for gaming. At least not if you have somewhat current hardware. Other distributions have much more up to date drivers and software.

    And in my experience getting a game to run in a virtual machine is much harder than on bare metal.

    That said, to answer your questions, you can find Lutris’ install scripts on lutris.net. ie https://lutris.net/games/outer-wilds/. You can select to view the scripts. For dependencies you’re looking for the task with the name winetricks.

    - task:
    app: arial vcrun2019 d3dcompiler_43 d3dcompiler_47 d3dx9 win7
    arch: win64
    description: Installing dependencies
    name: winetricks
    prefix: $GAMEDIR

    There after app you find all the dependencies it installs.

    You can also search for the games on https://protondb.com it will show you reports by users on how a game runs and what configuration changes they had to make to get a game running. It’s Steam-centric so you will only get games that are on Steam and on Steam most stuff is automated so you won’t always see the dependencies needed as Steam has already installed them. https://www.protondb.com/app/753640?device=any

    • Blastboom StriceOPEnglish
      4•3 months ago

      You’re right about debian, but I’m barely playing games and as you can see my games are kinda old anyways, so I might stay on debian.

      Thank you for actually explaining the scripts section :))

      I just download all the stuff on the app section and do any other changes other tasks require (like registry edits), right?

      • Björn TantauEnglish
        3•3 months ago

        Correct. But I find that often these scripts are over engineered and opinionated. So I’d start with just the dependencies and go from there.