winepak, a project to get Windows games packaged with Wine & Flatpak for an easy Linux installation

I think I could find a flatpack of wine version 1.6 extremely useful, as about 6 of my old games (especially the early Command and Conquer series) need that version to play for more than 10 mins without crashing. However, I also need a newer version of wine for running Windows Steam and Steam based Windows games. Currently, I end up with the old wine 1.6 version as my default and use a new wine-staging version for Steam (as a staging version can co-exist with other versions of wine). I know I can use PlayOnLinux to install multiple versions of wine, but that needs virtual drives setting up. A flatpack of wine version 1.6 sounds much easier, but would it work as I expect?

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A flatpack of wine version 1.6 sounds much easier, but would it work as I expect?

Probably. I'm assuming a known to work wine version gets bundled with each game in the winepaks


Last edited by Liothe on 13 June 2018 at 9:30 pm UTC

I don't mind tinkering with Wine. One problem with "just works" approach that was also used for example in PlayOnLinux installation scripts for games, is that it grew huge and no one was maintaining those scripts. So they quickly became obsolete. It's safer just to install something yourself using newest submissions in Wine AppDB.

Pretty much my feelings when it comes to WINE wrappers as well; I would much rather just do the heavy lifting myself and get things working just the way I want them than rely on third party packages and scripts. Of course given that I am an Arch Linux user that idea kind of comes with the territory anyway.

Not everyone is going to be both as patient and anal as I am.

I don't mind tinkering with Wine. One problem with "just works" approach that was also used for example in PlayOnLinux installation scripts for games, is that it grew huge and no one was maintaining those scripts. So they quickly became obsolete. It's safer just to install something yourself using newest submissions in Wine AppDB.

But "just works" is a necessity if Linux is to attract more gamers.
The vast majority don't have the skillset or patience like you or me (or many others here) to fiddle around with anything. Hell, for some, having to install Wine to install their game is already too much.
Of course, that says more about the quality of the people than that of the OS, but it is what it is.

"just works" is the most important bit for the spread of any OS and its software.
PlayOnLinux could have worked if it had maintained its maintainers (pun? intended).
Lutris seems to gain more traction, and is definitely more promising than PoL ever was. However, only time will tell if that leads anywhere.
Nothing of this will amount to much, IMO, if it doesn't become officially endorsed. As in, every Ubuntu comes with the most recent Lutris right away, no questions asked.

PS: Here we see the fragmentation problem, again. Now we have PoL (which is minimally maintained, still), Lutris and this winepak (and possibly others, too). All kinda similar in their purpose. It would be better for everyone if they all worked together.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 14 June 2018 at 6:59 am UTC

Wine Is No Excuse not to port your games/applications to Linux properly.

Wine Is No Excuse not to port your games/applications to Linux properly.

We're going in circles with this one. As already expressed by others most of the current Windows users will never switch to Linux if they have to lose access to their Windows only catalog of games and if they must spend 3 hours on Linux support websites to figure out how to install any of their game.

Once we get maximum playability for Windows games with an install process that is a simple double click away then we should have a lot more users. Then when the Linux playerbase starts to really represent a good fraction of all gamers, developers will have to start thinking about what they're doing.

I've been trying to make my brother in law switch for over 2 years without success, but now that he sees me starting to easily play games that he likes with Lutris (like SupCom Forged Alliance or Bad Company 2) he's beginning to seriously consider making at least a dual boot to try. If it's simple enough, the low barrier to learn how to use a new OS should outweight Windows 10 pissing him off.


Last edited by Pompesdesky on 14 June 2018 at 9:16 am UTC

I'm currently a windows user and app developer and I hate windows so much that I'm re-coding all the tools I have created to support Linux in order to switch.

I was searching for something just like this app so I can also have League of Legends or Starcraft in case I wanted to play, so for me this is great news :D

And for the

Wine Is No Excuse not to port your games/applications to Linux properly.

I think if enough games are supported or Linux via wine, Linux will become a viable platform for gaming, and then ports will surely follow. For now it's a must to get Linux to became a good enough solution.

lotsa stuff

What is the political angle? Just bad security for people or? I am interested. Who is behind flatpak and snap, and what are the differences etc?

We're going in circles with this one. As already expressed by others most of the current Windows users will never switch to Linux if they have to lose access to their Windows only catalog of games and if they must spend 3 hours on Linux support websites to figure out how to install any of their game.

Once we get maximum playability for Windows games with an install process that is a simple double click away then we should have a lot more users. Then when the Linux playerbase starts to really represent a good fraction of all gamers, developers will have to start thinking about what they're doing.

I've been trying to make my brother in law switch for over 2 years without success, but now that he sees me starting to easily play games that he likes with Lutris (like SupCom Forged Alliance or Bad Company 2) he's beginning to seriously consider making at least a dual boot to try. If it's simple enough, the low barrier to learn how to use a new OS should outweight Windows 10 pissing him off.

PlayOnLinux & Lutris are a step in the right direction but technical support for Wine when things go badly tits-up is practically non-existent. Search for any given bug & you'll find 30+ pages filled with people asking for advice on the bug & getting nowhere fast, you might get lucky every now & then & find the answer but you're far more likely to be as stuck as I was last year when Wine died & I couldn't even uninstall it to get rid of it.

The nice thing about PlayOnLinux is that Wine doesn't need to be installed system-wide to use it. PlayOnLinux will display an error message about missing Wine but you can just dismiss it.

You can just and only use the different Wine versions you can download directly via the PlayOnLinux client itself which get only "installed" (= copied) in prefixes in your /home not system-wide. You have to start Windows programs after that via the PlayOnLinux client of course but with the advantage that if you close PlayOnLinux all Windows programs are closed too and no other Windows programs can be running while PlayOnLinux is closed. This mitigates some problems with a system-wide installed Wine like security problems or installed Windows programs interfering with your Linux programs.


Last edited by Micromegas on 14 June 2018 at 10:53 am UTC

I don't see the real difference to using lutris or playonlinux.

In the end, you need to winepak it anyway, as you need to install it with lutris with different settings in a different wine prefix, because the installers will need to download the installers somehow, because you can't redistribute the games anyway.

I don't really see the benefit over using different prefixes with installer-scripts (except that installer scripts in lutris seem somehow a unmaintained mess).

The only thing could be that the game developers actually pick that up for re-distribution for their games on linux with tweaked wine versions, on the other hand - they could theoretically do that right now too.


Last edited by STiAT on 14 June 2018 at 12:25 pm UTC

This is cool and all, but I do recommend people exercise caution with certain developers and publishers.

I remember reading several years ago that Blizzard actively perma-banned people from Battle.net if they are "caught" using Wine and Linux. Could someone confirm if their hostility and paranoia is still this bad today?

I played Starcraft 2 and Hearthstone quite a while (several years) via Wine on Linux - obviously without getting banned.

I remember those rumors but I think bans were either errors by Blizzard or had other (valid or invalid) reasons.

I don't really see the benefit over using different prefixes with installer-scripts (except that installer scripts in lutris seem somehow a unmaintained mess).

The only differentiating factor in Flatpak is sandboxing. Other than that, sure you can do the same thing with prefix management and custom Wine bundles.

And yes, installer scripts tend to become an unmaintained mess, because of the sheer volume of games that are out there. That's why I simply stopped using them in the past and prefer to install things in Wine myself.


Last edited by Shmerl on 14 June 2018 at 3:18 pm UTC

But "just works" is a necessity if Linux is to attract more gamers. The vast majority don't have the skillset or patience like you or me (or many others here) to fiddle around with anything. Hell, for some, having to install Wine to install their game is already too much.

In my case a great deal of the games I play through WINE no longer "just work" on modern Windows anymore. There is a real opportunity for WINE to corner the retro PC gaming market as for many older Windows games it is now easier to mess around with WINE than to try and get them running on Windows 10. It is for this reason that I have really started to warm up to WINE over the past few years.

That's a good idea, but my hope is that such functionality should be made official and implemented within Wine itself.
After all, Wine's biggest problem is that is simply doesn't "just work". There's always some fiddling around required.

Not quite... all software from this page Just Works (tm):
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&sTitle=Browse+Applications&iappVersion-ratingOp0=5&sappVersion-ratingData0=Platinum&sOrderBy=appName&bAscending=true

Well, no. My understanding is, Platinum means it works perfectly if you set the fiddly stuff correctly, not that you can ignore the fiddly stuff. In this discussion at least, I think people are using Just Works to mean you just click something and it installs properly and happens, rather than having to figure out how to configure it first.
There is probably some Platinum stuff that Just Works in that second sense as well, but plenty that doesn't. So things like this, and PlayonLinux and so on, have always been welcome initiatives and I really hope at some point one becomes really solid--achieves critical mass so most stuff is there, and is easily maintainable so it doesn't rot.

Definition of the Wine Platinum ranking: "Applications which install and run flawlessly on an out-of-the-box Wine installation"
Gold is the one you described: "Applications that work flawlessly with some special configuration"

I stand corrected . . . partially. Presumably this means you don't need to download anything, but there's a lot of potential not-so-"special" configuration in an "out-of-the-box Wine installation". There's all these settings on tabs--which Windows version, which this, which that, and I tend to have no clue which of them matter for any given application.

But "just works" is a necessity if Linux is to attract more gamers. The vast majority don't have the skillset or patience like you or me (or many others here) to fiddle around with anything. Hell, for some, having to install Wine to install their game is already too much.

In my case a great deal of the games I play through WINE no longer "just work" on modern Windows anymore. There is a real opportunity for WINE to corner the retro PC gaming market as for many older Windows games it is now easier to mess around with WINE than to try and get them running on Windows 10. It is for this reason that I have really started to warm up to WINE over the past few years.

Absolutely! Wine has great potential.
It would just need someone in the role of a producer and/or manager - and not only developers.
However, people truly managing open source projects are even harder to come by than coders.

As long as you can install and use it, you don't really need anyone to manage it. The main resource here is bug fixing and features development in Wine itself, which so far Wine developers are addressing well.

Both the Overwatch and WoW flatpaks error out in the Blizzard launcher for me. The Blizz launcher gives the error, "Failed to create a graphics context".

Linux Mint 18.3 w/ NVIDIA proprietary driver.

I get the same type of errors for other games in that repo, using Kubuntu 18.04 with NVIDIA proprietary driver, no Lutris installed. Really puts a bad taste in the mouth when the promise is a non-fiddly install. Whatever it is that's prohibiting it from working right, I hope it gets ironed out.

"Not everyone is going to be both as patient and anal as I am. "
not everyone has time.