In my post about the wonders of DXVK, mn- wrote that configuring WINE has been a bit too complicated for mainstream use. That’s very true, but Lutris is making it a great deal easier!
In that other post, I highlighted how Lutris makes it easy to use DXVK with WINE to give near Windows frame rates in GPU-accelerated Windows applications (games, primarily, but there’s no reason it would only work in games).
In addition to that, and to keeping all of your games in one easily-managed central hub, it also makes configuring WINE really simple.
I’m not much of a gamer, really. I enjoy them from time to time, but I’m far from the person who waits with anticipation for the latest AAA title to be released. I haven’t played or seen the vast majority of AAA titles… if I happen to discover one and become interested, I’ll give it a try, but if that doesn’t happen, I am usually happy to play what I have or do something other than play games with my free time.
As such, I miss the hoopla over nearly all of the new AAA titles. I’m the same way with movies– I will happily wait for them to come out on Netflix (I don’t have an account, but I am a guest on someone else’s) or on basic cable on TV.
One such game I missed when it was new is The Witcher 3. As I’ve gathered, it has quite a following, with some reviewers saying it is the best RPG ever for PC. It’s begun to irritate me how people use “PC” to mean “Windows.” PC is hardware, Windows is software. My PCs don’t change to some other kind of computer when I put Linux on them!
Aaaanyway, now that Witcher 3 is a few years old, I’ve decided to try it. It doesn’t hurt that this AAA game with more than $80 million budget was available a week or two ago (along with both expansion packs) for $15 from GoG! (Maybe it still is; I haven’t checked).
I actually decided to try it when I saw a splash screen for Witcher 3 on the Lutris web site, lutris.net. The link took me to the Lutris game database, and there I could see the link that said it was available on GoG.com. I could get it from Steam or elsewhere and run it with Lutris, but by using GoG, I could have Lutris handle the setup for me. Other games have Lutris install scripts that work with Steam or with the actual DVD-ROMs if you have them.
I followed the link and created a GoG account. I bought the game, and then went back to the Lutris entry for Witcher 3 and hit the Install button. It popped up a browser link to download the file and open it in Lutris, which I did. It asked me to log in with my new login credentials for GoG, and after I entered that, it downloaded the game, which took a really long time on my 40 Mbit/s internet connection (the fastest available in my area). Once it downloaded, the installation commenced automatically, and I started the game with Lutris.
It started and ran without a hiccup. I started the game and went through the tutorial, and it worked perfectly except for one annoyance: the mouse look function had a point where it would stop, roughly at my 6 o’clock position to start. I’m not a keyboard steerer; in games that permit it, like WoW and RIFT, I use the press both mouse buttons thing for “go” and I steer with the mouse. That didn’t work so well with that stop point– as I turned, the stop point would not reset to be at my six anymore, but would remain in place.
I began to look for mods to take out that “feature,” thinking it was somehow intentional, but I saw no reference to it at all. That made me wonder… it’s very annoying, yet no one ever mentioned it. Could it be that it’s not actually there for most people?
I tried installing the game in Windows 8.1 on my desktop PC to test. I copied the game directory from my WINE prefix over to the Windows NTFS volume, and then I installed the Windows GoG client and tried the game. It did not run, so I used the GoG client to repair the installation. After another lengthy download (which should not have been necessary, since the game was right there), it finished, and the game ran fine. And you know what? The mouse look had no stop point. All of the same settings were already in place, as I had copied the config folder in the process.
Then it dawned on me. What if the KDE compositor was causing issues in Linux? The game was in borderless window mode (full screen windowed) on both Windows and Linux by default, so I rebooted to Linux and tried it in true fullscreen.
It worked perfectly, no stopping on mouse look!
I then turned off the KDE compositor and put the game back in windowed fullscreen mode. It worked as in Windows once again, no stopping.
Actually, it was better than in Windows. Windows stuttered and juddered as I looked around with the mouse. In Linux, it’s far smoother! I did not have any frame rate meters up in either OS, but they both felt the same in frame rate. The look and feel was identical other than the judder in Windows (which I probably could tune out if I was interested, I am thinking).
I’ve got a bunch of hours in the game now and it has never glitched, crashed, or locked up, and I didn’t have to even touch the WINE settings. It is using WINE, but Lutris handled all of that for me.
The Lutris web site has over 7500 games listed as available for Linux. That includes Windows games in WINE, native Linux games, native Linux Steam games, Steam/Proton games (Proton is the WINE fork that is developed and distributed by Steam as part of their Linux client if the user wants it), and Windows Steam games under WINE instead of proton. It’s a promising collection, and WINE just keeps getting better too.
Unfortunately, the multiplayer games that use certain anti-cheat programs won’t work in Proton/WINE, and the WINE devs say they cannot be made to work. The anticheats detect the simulated Windows environment as suspicious and won’t let the thing run, apparently. I know that World of Warcraft is supposed to have its own anticheat built in, and it works in WINE just fine, so maybe there’s some hope that the devs of the anticheat programs will work on making them WINE compatible if the Linux platform continues to advance as a bona fide gaming platform.
Software devs may not see the value in releasing Linux versions of their products, but maybe they can be convinced to make them work with WINE. Given that WINE is meant to simulate Windows as closely as possible, it should be far easier to make a Windows game WINE-compatible than to port the whole thing. If it works well on Linux, I’m happy; I don’t care how it works on Linux, only that it does.
Remember to try turning off the compositor if you run into problems in any Linux setup under WINE or Proton. Linux Mint Cinnamon has a checkbox to disable the compositor in fullscreen… I wish KDE did, but the devs refuse to implement it despite it being a common feature request. It’s not that hard to set up a KDE window rule to turn the compositor off when it detects a WINE window, or to turn it off manually (alt-shift-F12, if I recall), but simply turning it off on any fullscreen detection would be even easier.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
