Well just look at the youtube sub on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1792um0/let_that_sink_in_before_you_defend_a_billion/
99% of comments are youtube apologists
Hopefully most of those are bot comments & the mods are probably youtube employees
Why a game (unmodded) doesn’t work will usually be pretty obvious just from the errors you get
I might’ve just been lucky, but so far the only time I had to look up a fix was for battle.net launcher, which ever since a while back has to be done after every update.
The problem is in a hidden flag that’s set on the qwindows.dll file in lastest B.net version which makes it hidden from the app.
The fix is relatively easy, simply run this inside the Program Files (x86)/Battle.net/Battle.net.13801/platforms directory:
setfattr -x user.DOSATTRIB qwindows.dllAfter this Battle.net will work again.
But when it comes to mods it can be a lot trickier, and I don’t really have a general purpose solution. Hopefully the game is popular enough that someone else has a guide on what to do.
I’ve never played subnautica so I don’t know, but if the mods have their own modified DLLs then you’re probably supposed to use DLLOVERRIDES, so maybe WINEDLLOVERRIDES="ribbon=n,b" since it’s called ribbon.dll
Some other issues I’ve had with modding is that the mod might expect the game to be in a certain directory or for directories to have certain names or there might be some problem because Windows isn’t case sensitive while Linux is.
Honestly the mods are generally not causing issues from my experience, it’s the mod loaders and what not.
Years ago, Winetricks would write a new verb definition for every new DXVK release. Presumably when it was much less stable. You can see remnants of that with the 100+ verbs for installing particular DXVK versions. Now it just takes the latest stable release. Yay for the maintainers, because that’s a lot less work. As a side effect, Winetricks doesn’t have a way of updating it normally.
Oh does it not add new entries for every new DXVK release anymore? In that case I guess my DXVK version is probably a year old by now even though it says DXVK (Latest) and that it’s from year 2023: https://i.imgur.com/lNaqTPG.png
There is an easy way of updating DXVK anyway. Just run Winetricks with --force:
WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/whatever winetricks --force dxvk
Now, admittedly, I misspoke about Winetricks “not supporting updating DXVK”. I learned this option exists just now. So you can force-update it with --force, which bypasses winetricks_is_installed and installs the latest version of DXVK. Guide has been updated accordingly; thank you for making me look into this again!
Oh I had no idea about this, and I normally just use winetrick’s GUI while using it so I would’ve had to look up how to update dxvk if not for you explaining it.
Although as a side note I’ve got the winetricks-git AUR package, not winetricks so maybe there’s some fix for it somewhere already, I’ll have to look into it. So far I haven’t had an issue with DXVK being too old, but I mostly play older games
When I was writing the Visual Novels on GNU/Linux guide, I did a lot of experimentation with Winetricks.
Unrelated but I’ll check that guide out, I’ve had trouble playing VNs that are in Japanese, as without LANG="ja_JP.UTF-8" wine /path/to/game.exe they won’t even run but even with it the fonts don’t work and are shown as empty boxes.
From my understanding, at least one other necessary component is dxvk, and that wine is not enough.
dxvk is not necessary but it massively improves game performance on a lot of games, also keep in mind some games will actually not run if you use dxvk, so you sometimes (very rarely) have to use OpenGL instead and the only way I really found to do that was to have a wine prefix without dxvk. (I might’ve just been stupid though)
for the record only games that I had to use open GL for so far was Starcraft 2’s Galaxy Editor (although the actual game itself runs fine with dxvk) and I had some problems with alt tabbing in really old versions of Warcraft 3 (1.27 and older)
Anyway, for a time I used Lutris a bit but now I always run wine through terminal because Lutris was great when it worked but there were seemingly no solutions for when it didn’t (while running wine directly has never given me a problem).
And what’s great with running wine directly through the terminal is that either it will run and you’re good or you’ll get some error messages saying that some .dll or whatever is missing (usually .net, visual studio, msvcr100+.dll, mscvcp100+.dll, ms*.dll, etc.) and you just use winetricks and go through the list until you find what you need.
One more thing that took a while for me to learn was that some games (if you’re using mods) will need to be run along with WINEDLLOVERRIDES environment variable https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_User’s_Guide#WINEDLLOVERRIDES.3DDLL_Overrides
for example when I play Need For Speed Most Wanted 2005 I start it with this command: WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n,b" wine speed.exe
another thing is sometimes you want to run games with some arguments, for instance before I got XCOM 2 on Steam and used AML I used to run it with this: wine XCom2.exe -noRedScreens -review
Now here’s a pretty big caveat, which is that I use FISH instead of Bash which adds some big QoL improvements (in this case it’s mainly about tab completion).
If I actually had to manually type in the commands or spend minutes going through history file every time I would never do it.
Although I suppose you could make an alias for each game.
Oh yeah and always run the games from the same directory as their .exe file is located in, more often than not it won’t work if you just do wine /path/to/directory/game.exe instead of cd /path/to/directory && wine game.exe
Edit: some typos, and I just want to note that the && aren’t supposed to include the amp; parts
afaik you need dxvk in the actual wine prefix, just having it on your system doesn’t do anything.
I had installed dxvk from AUR and didn’t get why it wasn’t doing anything, turns out the point of having dxvk on your system is for symlinking it into your wine prefixes so you don’t have to get a dxvk installation for each prefix individually.
when I found that out I just removed dxvk package and got installed dxvk directly to the my prefix with winetricks, because I only use two wine prefixes anyway (one for vulkan and another for games that have to use opengl)
Since you mention Baldur’s Gate 3 you could try Divinity Original Sin and DOS2, DOS has 2 player coop by default and with mods you can play 4 player, DOS2 has 4 player coop out of the box.
Although depending on how old your kids are it might be difficult to play.
Someone else already mentioned the lego games and I can’t 100% recommend those as well. Lego Star Wars complete saga, lego star wars clone wars, lego indiana jones are the ones I’ve played and can recommend all of them.
Although there’s only 2 player coop.
Can you turn off privacy features?
I still want most things for convenience, but the one thing I want to get rid of is telemetry and somehow I just can’t seem to completely get rid of it with firefox (I’ve tried both nightly and default firefox)
So a browser that gets rid of all the telemetry and then allows me to enable other things that I want would be fine by me.