Even though I've used Linux mint for a year or two on my laptop I'm now considering switching completely on my main rigg, or at least dual boot with Windows. However, I wonder how I can get my games not supporting Linux actually work? Can I download non linux games from Steam and run them in Wine somehow? How easy is it? Does all games work?
Ok there are many things to consider, first not all windows games will work with WINE, over time the library becomes greater and more games work, You need to check WineHQ and search for your game you want to run, If it is a platinum rated it should run out of the box, gold should run out of box, but may need tweaking, silver almost always needs tweaking, and personally everything bronze and below is just not worth it.
Some games like EVE online that has a silver or gold rating requires tweaking at first, but ultimately runs better in WINE on Linux than it did on Windows. The one feature (captains quarters) on EVE does not work, not that I ever used it anyway.
Then there is your GPU. WINE in my experience was ok with my Radeon card, but WINE was and is mostly developed with NVIDIA cards, if using WINE NVIDIA just works, while AMD... you would be lucky if it works 1/2 the time.
If you run into troubles problems are you probably; if your running a 64bit OS, you installed the 64bit WINE! I know normally that makes sense but for some reason WINE 32 even if on 64bit run games better.
You may be in for a far bit of work just to get your games running, but it can be and is worth it in my opinion.
When you first install wine on 64 bit system assuming you did it through terminal:
sudo apt-get install wineyou want to get WINE32 entering these 3 lines in the terminal will set your WINE to run 32bit.
export WINEPREFIX=prefix32
export WINEARCH=win32
winecfgCongrats you got WINE32 and first problem is solved!!
now onto more things!
Take EVE online for exmample, it needs some librarys not installed by default in WINE. in terminal you need install them
winetricks allfonts tahoma directx9 vcrun2005spl vcrun2010this will install the necessary packages for EVE
alternatively you can search for winetricks in your system or just use winetricks by itself in the terminal to run GUI of the program
Some other things worth noting is in the winecfg GUI you will want to set certain games to run in a certain version of windows, select the game.exe have it show up in the GUI set it to run windows 7/8/xp depending on what version of windows it was released in.
Some games even further will need you to set certain library's under the "Libraries" tab and set some games libraries to native/buitin or buitin/native or builtin or native or disabled if WINEHQ says that. Steam for example in WINE has this problem displaying text, to fix this you would go into the libraries tab, use the drop-down menu find 'dwrite.dll' and add that. then edit it to disabled.
This is my first tutorial on anything really so please give feedback on it. Written language is not my strong suite.
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Okay, I see. Well I love tweaking, that is part of the fun. :) And even though I don't play games as much as I have before, I still want the possibility to do it whenever I want. But I wonder how it works with steam for example? I got almost all my games there, will I be able to download non Linux supported game and still run them in WIne?
My experience with using steam and WINE as been a bit finicky, to say the least. after steam has properly installed you can download and install every game you got no problem; there was an iteration of WINE where this did not work so well but from what I know it is now fixed.
Normally when you install a game from steam it runs a first time setup usually installing directx9 or vcrunXXXX, or etc steam wants to do this but does not work this way, you need to install those dependent libraries using winetricks. One problem I have not been able to fix is that on the rare occasion the game does not recognize I already have these libraries installed. WINEhq's app database has all the info on how to install and run games, including steam versions.
Most of the time the Steam version runs best anyway so I see no problems.
Its also worth noting some games rarely but some have dedicated modders working on making an unofficial Linux port, I know Morrowind for example has a user-made OpenGL version of the game engine, this still requires to own Morrowind and have all the .esp, .esm files to run.
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Okay, that seems reasonable.Well I will start with dual booting and se how much hassle it is first, but now I know a little bit of how it works. Thanks for the help!
Nevermind