Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
There’s oculus software for my vr but don’t know what I’m going to do with that
Small update: probably going to do Linux mint as that appears to be the most beginner friendly
Update two: that’s a lot of comments, and Thanks for all the info
Proton vs wine what’s the difference?
From what i understand (probably wrong), Valve forked WINE and did their own development on it.
.Work with non steam games? Also yay valve
Yep! In steam, Add Game > Add Non-Steam Game > Select the Game. Then in the game’s properties, go to the compatibility section and choose “Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool”, which will then run the game under Proton.
That said, I actually run a number of games under Wine. The Heroic Launcher covers GOG, Epic, and Prime games, and will install them with Wine enabled for them by default.
Awesome. (don’t use any of the other game platforms) but that’s good to know
It’s worth buying games on GOG instead of Steam where possible. Games on GOG are DRM-free, so you can download the installer and keep a backup of it, and it’ll work indefinitely.
Some games on Steam are DRM-free, but Steam doesn’t provide a way to download a standalone installer like GOG does.
It does. The simplest way to use Proton with other games is to add each as a non-Steam game to… Steam. But there are also CLIs for it.
Will be using that then
It’s worth looking into Lutris for non-Steam games as well. Comes preinstalled with Bazzite (heavily gaming-optimized Linux distro), though I don’t have any non-Steam games to try it on since Steam works fine for all the games I play.
Only have two nonsteam games I play (Minecraft has a Linux version already) and Star citizen
Also want to add that you can add a non-steam .exe and install some windows applications too, not just games. After installing you just remove the installer from steam and point Steam towards the installed applications .exe
Just make sure to tell Steam to use proton to run it. By default, it does not turn that on.
Yes, you can either add external games inside steam and set their compatibility options to use some version of proton or use proton through lutris or manually.
Proton is Wine but tweaked for the sole purpose of running games, so it packs a bunch of extra stuff needed to make games run well together.
Usually there’s also a long list of per-game tweaks and changes to make sure it runs, it’s all preconfigured so you press play in your launcher and it works. Not need to change settings whenever you want to play a game.
You can still use regular Wine but you’ll have to set up a bunch of stuff yourself, and eventually you run into a game that needs a different version of something that breaks another game, you get into prefix management and it’s a mess. Or oh this game runs better when we pretend to be Windows 7 but this one works best with Windows 10. Proton just does it all for you, every game gets its own space with all the correct settings from the get go, and you just launch into the game and play.
Proton is let Valve make an optimized Wine setup for you through Steam