Note: This is written from the perspective of a KDE Plasma user using Lutris. I have no idea how this affects GNOME, Xfce, Sway, LXQt or other setups. From what I can gather, you can set DLL overrides in Bottles as well, just poke around for a similar option there if you use that.

One of my big pet peeves when it comes to Wine is how installing Windows software will also create application launcher entries.

If you set this environment variable, Wine will disable the "menu builder" that does this.

WINEDLLOVERRIDES=winemenubuilder.exe=d



You can set this in your environment variables, such as /home/user/.config/environment.d/envvars.conf, and also in Lutris. I set them in both just to be sure.

To set this in Lutris: Open Lutris, click on the "hamburger" menu in the top right then "Preferences". Click "Runners" and scroll down to Wine. Click the config icon to the left of the cardboard box icon, then scroll down to "DLL overrides". In "key", add an entry for "winemenubuilder.exe", in the box to the right enter "d". Remember to click "Save".
Here's a screenshot showing how it should look:



Setting that variable here will set it as default for every Wine game you add and install in Lutris.

Why?
If you're like me, you prefer to make entries for Windows software yourself, or not at all. It should also prevent Wine from creating entries for its implementation of notepad.exe and other apps, which has the added benefit of it not hijacking filetype associations.

I install all my Windows games in separate Wine prefixes, and I keep entries for all of them in Lutris. So I don't want them showing up in my application launcher, I launch Lutris, the game, and that will be that.

Was a nice little surprise to discover this could be disabled, so hopefully this helps someone else as well :)

Last edited by ridge on 18 March 2023 at 7:40 pm UTC