Why it's a good thing to get familiar with Wine

Hey everyone, Klebs here and today, I will explain why I started learning to use Wine even though we already tools such as Lutris, GameHub and PlayOnLinux.

The tools aren’t always reliable

I normally use Linux versions of Steam and itch to manage my game collections but it’s trickier with GOG and Humble Bundle that don’t have their own native Linux apps. In GOG’s case, it’s not such a big deal thanks to tools like Minigalaxy to install and run Linux native games while GameHub can do the same thing for games bought on Humble Bundle. For Windows games purchased on GOG, Humble Bundle and itch, I use Lutris and it does the job quite well thanks to custom installation scripts courtesy of the Lutris community.

Why then isn’t it foolproof? From what I can gather on forum discussions, it seems that most Lutris scripts would download installation files straight from the GOG servers after the user authentication but that GOG would sometimes change the way the files would be downloaded. That explains how I managed to install a few GOG games from Lutris using scripts that require local installation files instead.

Why Wine?

For Linux native games, it doesn’t matter if installation scripts were outdated since I can always install them myself. It’s more complicated when it comes to Windows games, though. This means diving into command lines and figure out tools like Winetricks, Winecfg and Wine Bottle that I hear so often from people well-versed in Wine usage.

For the time being, I tried installing Dreamfall: The Longest Journey manually by referring on the installation script in Lutris for custom configuration. Luckily, for this game, I simply had to enable Windowed mode with the 1024x768 resolution for the first run. Once successfully launched, I can then set it back to fullscreen at the 1920x1080 resolution.

Wanting to share my findings, I decided to install the rest of my Windows games using that same approach. For now, my method is experimental but once I’m more comfortable with Wine, I’ll write tutorials about them.

Conclusion

It’s been now almost two years that I’ve fully switched to Linux and whenever I feel I’m getting the hang of some basic concepts and am ready for more advanced topics, something new grabs my attention and I’m back at learning new stuff. This results in my reading material backlog growing exponentially and as an eternal knowledge seeker, I can’t ask for more. Thus begins my new adventure with Wine.

Don’t hesitate to send me your questions and comments on Mastodon.

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Thanks for reading and I’ll talk to you soon. Laters.