Wine PBA looks like a promising set of patches to improve Wine performance

I hope it will get properly upstreamed once it's in good shape.

Just yesterday we played Aliens vs Predator (from 2010) again... which works really really great in wine (platinum reating). As a big fan of the Alien universe, I don't want to miss this game and wine comes to my rescue here ;)

For those curious about my issues with Lutris:

- GOG Galaxy installs using only one of the three install options they have on their site, the others complain about no 64bit Wine. Weird, since one of them works. Once installed, it repeatedly crashes while downloading games making it a little useless (but that specifically is likely a Wine issue, not Lutris).

- They seem to have no clear way to install Steam plainly with Wine. A search for Steam doesn't show it. I tried installing a game that uses Steam, to get Lutris to install Steam and that works to a point, but the Lutris installer never closes and closing it manually seems to wipe whatever it's already done.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 2 Mar 2018 at 3:01 pm UTC

For those curious about my issues with Lutris:

- GOG Galaxy installs using only one of the three install options they have on their site, the others complain about no 64bit Wine. Weird, since one of them works. Once installed, it repeatedly crashes while downloading games making it a little useless (but that specifically is likely a Wine issue, not Lutris).

You'll have better experience with classic GOG installers. Don't use Galaxy.

Or simply use lgogdownloader. It only uses classic installers.



Last edited by Shmerl on 2 Mar 2018 at 3:13 pm UTC

I'm really impressed with this guy and with wine development! I started to use wine gaming nine (with gallium nine), the performance is nice and smooth. I will start to buy more dx9 games to play, but I think they need to do a gallium-nine-winehq to ensure some control on tittles we must avoid!

Chivalry Medieval Warfare performs better on WG9 then on the native version, with my RX480!

I'm really impressed with this guy and with wine development! I started to use wine gaming nine (with gallium nine), the performance is nice and smooth. I will start to buy more dx9 games to play, but I think they need to do a gallium-nine-winehq to ensure some control on tittles we must avoid!

Gallium Nine is a pretty much dead end idea for Wine, becasue developers don't want to support hardware specific paths. Using ARB_buffer_storage for performance is a way better approach, which hopefully can get upstreamed.


Last edited by Shmerl on 2 Mar 2018 at 3:13 pm UTC

I've been using Lutris practically since I first moved over to Linux about a year ago, great to know this PBA build is available on Lutris, might have to try it myself.

Liam, how are you trying to add Steam games to Lutris? When you go to "Add Game" you'll have "Wine (Runs Windows Games) and below that you should have "Wine Steam (Runs Steam for Windows Games)

You want to pick the latter, if you haven't been doing so already, and put the appid in "Game Options"

Edit: Screenshots to show you what I am on about

https://i.imgur.com/reqYPbv.png

https://i.imgur.com/rLVXnfk.png

It sounds like you're trying to install Steam games through the standard Wine installer for Lutris, you need to use the one specifically for Steam games.

Well, I guess that's something then. They really need to clean up the user experience, unless I knew what I was looking for exactly I wouldn't have known to do that.

I was just trying to install Steam in Lutris, then run some games to test.

Edit: Even doing it this way, Steam just seems to exit by itself after a minute or two. I don't think I will be getting any testing done...trying a different Wine version to see if it helps, Wine 3.2 from Lutris just doesn't seem to like Steam.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 2 Mar 2018 at 3:26 pm UTC

Personally if you have issues with Lutris I have found Matthew aka Stryder to be more than happy to help with fixes providing you give him the error reports and use the submit bug reports. Like he always said if it doesnt get reported he doesnt know its a bug.

There is no real need to install standalone Steam in Lutris, as it's considered a "runner". Lutris will actually install Steam only once (the first time you install the runner) and then every other game using Steam will get installed into it, so all your games are in the same context.

I recently installed Lurtis to replace PoL which has been unmaintained for a while and is borderline unusable now (it habitually fails to properly install Winetricks components) and I can't say that I am unhappy with it. I got some games to run with Lutris I struggled with getting installed before.

On topic:

That's awesome news! I hope the patches make it into WINE proper soon!

@Liam: I had some problems with Lutris as well. They all seem to be gone since I found "Disable Lutris runtime" in the preferences. Have you tried that?

I was just trying to install Steam in Lutris, then run some games to test.

Edit: Even doing it this way, Steam just seems to exit by itself after a minute or two. I don't think I will be getting any testing done...trying a different Wine version to see if it helps, Wine 3.2 from Lutris just doesn't seem to like Steam.

Ah yes, I've had that issue too where it just quits, I think that can be solved by going into "Game Options" on the configuration and untick "Stop Steam after game exits"

Lutris certainly has its kinks, even after I've installed a game and re ticked "Stop Steam after game exits" I find sometimes it still doesn't exit upon exiting a game, and just other little kinks like not being able to use my mouse scroll in the configuration options, otherwise it starts changing settings about, so I have to use the arrow buttons to scroll up and down on config options

Yes, that might be what's happening here.

I guess the way I've been thinking about Lutris is partly to blame, I've been thinking of it as a launcher for anything, not just a manager to run specific games. I was expecting it to be more like install Steam in Lutris > then do stuff, but it seems it's not.

There is no real need to install standalone Steam in Lutris, as it's considered a "runner". Lutris will actually install Steam only once (the first time you install the runner) and then every other game using Steam will get installed into it, so all your games are in the same context.

Yeah, see above :)

There is no real need to install standalone Steam in Lutris, as it's considered a "runner". Lutris will actually install Steam only once (the first time you install the runner) and then every other game using Steam will get installed into it, so all your games are in the same context.

The problem with doing that, is that many games require different tweaks to Wine prefix, and it can get seriously messy at some point, that the only option is to blow away the whole prefix. If you install everything in the single prefix, it's quite disruptive.

That's why it's way more flexible to install each game in its own Wine prefix. You can easily remove the whole prefix and reinstall one game from scratch without affecting anything else. It works perfectly for DRM-free GOG games, but for Steam users it's a bloat problem, since they would need to duplicate Steam client in each.


Last edited by Shmerl on 2 Mar 2018 at 3:50 pm UTC

Said something similar before, but isn't the concept of WINE 'bottles',Lutris scripts, GOG community scripts etc.. kind of old news now Appimage, Flatpack/Snaps are out ?

https://appimage.github.io/

There are a growing number of apps here for appimage for instance. It is crowd sourced. Why not games ?

Surely having a site where the image contains all the relevant MS files, specific libraries, controller tunings within an image where clicking runs the steam, GOG, website url etc.. downloader for your account and builds the game files into the image as a one time executable should work better ? You pretty much forever have a working instance of the game on your machine no matter if you return to it 5 years later.

If it was possible that would be a real draw for noobies coming from Windows and also mean less or no endless WINE tweaking. The central store for the app image can auto update the scrips if needed.

Apologises if im missing something here But it 'seems' an image based system would be like a self contained single click .exe for Linux which worked everytime.

Said something similar before, but isn't the concept of WINE 'bottles',Lutris scripts, GOG community scripts etc.. kind of old news now Appimage, Flatpack/Snaps are out ?

https://appimage.github.io/

There are a growing number of apps here for appimage for instance. It is crowd sourced. Why not games ?

Surely having a site where the image contains all the relevant MS files, specific libraries, controller tunings within an image where clicking runs the steam, GOG, website url etc.. downloader for your account and builds the game files into the image as a one time executable should work better ? You pretty much forever have a working instance of the game on your machine no matter if you return to it 5 years later.

If it was possible that would be a real draw for noobies coming from Windows and also mean less or no endless WINE tweaking. The central store for the app image can auto update the scrips if needed.

Apologises if im missing something here But it 'seems' an image based system would be like a self contained single click .exe for Linux which worked everytime.

I think in most countries it probably isnt legal to distribute repackaged commercial content.

Im sure there probably are a few countries where its not a huge deal though.

I think in most countries it probably isnt legal to distribute repackaged commercial content.
Im sure there probably are a few countries where its not a huge deal though.

So do all the usual 're-distributable' files for WINE come directly from MS ? If so what happens if MS stop hosting them. Sorry if these are noob questions just never really thought about that, obviously there are licencing agreements i see for MS software you agree to when you install a WINE game.. do you have to agree to these each time a game is installed in Lutris using the same re-distributables or is once enough. Does the Lutris application agree for you ?

But i do see what your saying.


Just to clarify im not talking about the actual game content.Piracy is bad M.kay.

I think in most countries it probably isnt legal to distribute repackaged commercial content.
Im sure there probably are a few countries where its not a huge deal though.

So do all the usual 're-distributable' files for WINE come directly from MS ? If so what happens if MS stop hosting them. Sorry if these are noob questions just never really thought about that, obviously there are licencing agreements i see for MS software you agree to when you install a WINE game.. do you have to agree to these each time a game is installed in Lutris using the same re-distributables or is once enough. Does the Lutris application agree for you ?

But i do see what your saying.


Just to clarify im not talking about the actual game content.Piracy is bad M.kay.

Redistributables do come from Microsoft, but plenty of these are also packaged with the game installers. WINE also uses Mono and Gecko to get around needing them, to an extent.

Redistributables do come from Microsoft, but plenty of these are also packaged with the game installers. WINE also uses Mono and Gecko to get around needing them, to an extent.

Thx. So what kind of thing is @Electricprism referring too ? As i said, not the actual game files but re-distributables and Linux libs that may be required if any.

Redistributables do come from Microsoft, but plenty of these are also packaged with the game installers. WINE also uses Mono and Gecko to get around needing them, to an extent.

Thx. So what kind of thing is @Electricprism referring too ? As i said, not the actual game files but re-distributables and Linux libs that may be required if any.

I'm not 100% sure on what Appimage development entails, but the ones I used were self-contained apps. @Electricprism probably thinks, as do I, that to distribute games as Appimages you would need to include the whole game, including copyrighted content.

It would be better to use Flatpak, since you could just distribute a preconfigured WINE prefix with only the redistributable that are licensed properly, and have the user provide the game files.