I just decided a few hours ago to give linux another shot as my daily driver, too. New SSD on the way. Hope we see some good tips in here, and I'll be sure to post anything relevant I encounter myself.
Off topic, but I'm curious, OP. Do you have your very own nemesis around here or something? I've never seen a comment or post from you that doesn't have at least one consistent downvote.
He makes a lot of fairly good contributions, but much of what he writes is also needlessly verbose and overly self-congratulatory and self-referential. Pay attention to how often he brings out stuff like “like I say,” “as I’ve been talking about,” “like I predicted,” as well as talking about his “autism” (in the context where you’re supposed to infer he means “intelligence”). Or how often his train of thought jumps through a semi-related anecdote about a great thing he did elsewhere.
I’m not one of his downvote followers, but it does get on my nerves. I imagine it gets on some other people’s as well.
The biggest mistake though really I make is trying to even debate the reddit style spergs who write big fuck off walls of text and try to psycho-analyse you.
Honestly, it was rather gay of me. But I think letting him run his little "woe is my superior intellect to be forced to interact with others" narrative is also pretty gay too.
I only assumed it because I saw the exact same sentence here that he was saying to me at the exact same time in that thread. Which makes the deceit of it standout.
https://lutris.net/games You can search for install instructions for basically any game on here. I never played Fallout 4 but it's a Steam game so if you had to manually add files to a mod folder you would just follow the exact same instructions you'd use for Windows except the path would be different (in Steam's case you can find any game's local folder with right click - Manage - Browse local files, for non-Steam games it's wherever you install it).
Many times this is from needing one or two 'flags' or launch arguments. This can help you get around things like 'opening logos don't load' or telling the game 'use this specific library'.
I'll look on ProtonDB for what others are using for a specific game if I have trouble. Example for fallout 4: https://www.protondb.com/app/377160 where it looks like there might be some customization needed to get around not launching.
The other thing you can try sometimes is just swapping the proton version for a specific game in steam, right click it in your library and go to properties -> compatability and the only option is to force a specific version, and you can try swapping around. I've had games only work on proton experimental, or proton 7, etc. if it works it works.
Apologies for the mini wall of text, but I hope it helps.
Not basic stuff at all. You're asking good questions off the beaten path.
While not a virtual machine, I can see how Wine has that feel. Especially if you've used Unity mode in VMWare Workstation, or something similar, where there's an option to have guest applications "appear" to run outside their little window.
Getting a Windows game into Lutris can happen two ways. Easiest is installing via Lutris installer, if your game is not too obscure. For obvious reasons, the installer will only have hooks for official retail setup files, so under a black flag, things get trickier. Even then, still check out the Lutris installer to easily see if there are recommended patches and fixes.
If you just have a setup.exe, there's a "install a windows game from executable" that works mostly like the Lutris installer except you will have to give it a name and which version of Windows Wine will try to work like. Like the Lutris installer, this will also give you a path to where all the stuff is installed.
You might also have just a bunch of files, no installer or setup.exe. This is a bit harder still but not too awful. Unzip it someplace, use the "add a locally installed game" option, and select Wine as your runner. The defaults are usually pretty sensible, but I certainly haven't tried every game ever made.
Rest of the setup: Working directory is implied to be where the main executable is, so don't mess with it. Don't set up arguments unless you know you need them: these go to the GAME not the runner. Wine prefix sets up a Wine sandbox of sorts, what you observe feels like a VM. You could just one use, but MB are cheap these days, I just use a separate prefix for each game, and I just use the directory where the game is installed. If it doesn't work right away, scan down the list of runner options and see what might be sensible.
"Where do I drop files?"
Once you've got the game installed, and perhaps run it to check, check the Wine prefix directory. It'll look something like this: https://files.catbox.moe/sfug25.png (pardon the censoring, but you understand). From there you have a directory that is your "fake" C: drive. If you keep a separate prefix for every game, you also don't need to be particularly hygenic here. Installing to the "fake C: root" is just fine, there's no real advantage to using Program Files.
Using a mod manager? Copy that in to your wine prefix. (Not strictly required, but I'd recommend it). Then hit the second collapsible menu on the Lutris UI, corresponding to Wine options, and "Run EXE inside Wine prefix". It will automatically open a file picker, to the directory where your prefix is, and it will run it in that sandboxed environment.
If you are using your mod manager a lot, you have a few quality of life things you can do. If the manager launches the game, just go into the game's configuration in Lutris and set the mod manager exe as the executable instead of the game proper. If not, you might want to consider Duplicating the game and changing the executable of one of the copies to the mod manager. Using Duplicate will have both the "games" (really, one game and a supplement) pointing to the same prefix so they're in the same sandbox.
"How do you organize your files / multiple hard disks / conventions"
That's a very personal question for sure: I have a system that works for me and make no warranties that it will work for anyone else. It also has limitations, for sure, but I see it as those four junk drawers in my house full of random shit but I know exactly which one I need to get into when I need to find a 20 year old ticket stub. I have a central NAS where I save most of my files, so each computer has a "local stuff" and a "network stuff" folder. On my final Windows 7 machine, it's a permanent network mount at a letter, and a directory link to that network mount. On my Linux machines I fstab entries, which was a pain in the ass to get working right and would definitely piss you off. Still, stick with it and it's one of those things that stays solved once you solve it, and you'll never have to look at it again.
In both cases, I have a pretty loose divide between stuff I made, stuff I converted, and stuff I downloaded. From there it's really anything goes. I bought Old School Essentials a while ago, and I had all the pdfs on a local computer's "Downloads/Reading/Games/RPG/". Then I have a script to move stuff from local machines onto the NAS. Sometimes automatic, sometimes manual, depending on how often I'm accessing it. Sometimes I'll manually copy things over if it's slow over the network to work with.
Multiple hard disks? I don't do that anymore, so this is coming from blind memory. Modern linux will automatically mount internal disks "somewhere" and make an icon available but the file browser will tell you where if you need a path by right clicking and picking properties. You can have more control by using fstab but, again, a pain in the butt because if you don't pay attention you can break shit.
.
With enough experience and time, you'll come up with the ways you're comfortable doing things which will be different from above. But hopefully this is enough to get started.
I don't have an answer for Windows -> Linux, precisely. I've never tried moving a game in progress from one to the other. Files? Central NAS means I never had to go from desktop to desktop. Running TrueNAS [Core] on that machine, so that's a third operating system that is more server focused and, frankly, I don't do anything there that isn't out of the box functionality.
If someone put a gun to my head, I'd probably set up a Windows share, then use the Linux file manager (gnome, is what I use, in case it comes up) to mount that share and copy. I'm sure the other way works as well, I'm just personally more familiar with setting up Windows shares because it's easy to just give the Everybody role access to everything and it works without any fuss over my local network, whereas for Linux you can't really get away without needing some kind of credentialed user for network file sharing.
This isn't really in my wheelhouse, but would running Linux as your main OS and using a Windows VM to game solve your problem? That's one solution I'm looking into. I'm also looking into SteamOS, but I don't know if it would be any good for the machine learning stuff I do.
It's rather hard to do that without 2 GPUs, gpu partitioning just isn't a thing on Linux yet and virtual GPUs I have mostly found with virtual box with mixed success. You CAN have a full GPU passthrough but that's basically dual booting with extra steps, not really worth it for gaming(where it will complain with the anti cheat shit games).
Very, very minor games I have made work in a VM but we're talking so old you can just run them on Linux through wine.
VMs/emulators are a huge hit to performance, even a really good PC will struggle with a lot of current gen games if you have to nerf it with a VM.
Idk why emulators aren't written as live OSs rather than VMs, a lot of live OSs are really simple and performance would be so much better if you didn't force your PC to run a Russian nesting doll of OSs.
Edit: I could be mistaken but afaik emulators are a type of VM, hence why I'm lumping them together, and WINE is an emulator, so I'm not seeing the distinction.
Hey there, you're on a roll! Blender, and now this. We definitely oughtta be making or own games, or at least our own mods. Source and IdTech 4 are still very good vehicles for creativity.
The biggest obstacle for me with Linux is actually the audio issues. For some reason it doesn't always pick up input from my mics, and I could never figure out why.
What's your process for keeping track of multiple hard disks and naming conventions etc.?
You may use your distro's GUI file manager. It probably has all the same stuff as Windows explorer. Then you have "Documents" and stuff, to organize yourself.
The paths you need to follow are found, I imagine, the same way as on Windows, by using a search engine. Maybe Linux complicates that, but I dont' think so as far as once you're inside the Steam game folder.
I searched "steam linux fallout 4 mod folder" and came up with stuff.
Oh that's cuz it's using Wine. Wine makes things look like Windows to the app. The game will want to install to a C: or D: or whatever, so wine needs to emulate that.
I have all my games in a dedicated games drive I mount in my home. Seems to be the most sane thing to do so I don't have to juggle with general download folder etc for space.
I have backups also, used to be timeshift but that one was just way too time consuming (ironic with the name). Now I just run a borg script that take a backup every day and keeps 1 per month, week and last couple days.
I know, it's an unsatisfying answer. But there's no technical reason why you couldn't. I think the default is ~/games/whatevername and you're free to install games to any mounted file system.
Personally, for my entertainment, I like being able to just back up my home directory and not think too much about or keep track of other places my stuff can be. Is this efficient? Probably not, but sometimes a decrease in cognitive load for years to come is worth the 1 or 2% reduction in gaming performance from sharing drive bandwidth with your OS today.
I don't think it really matters any more whether you use a physical HD or a partition on the drive. Except inasmuch as you might want to physically separate your stuff. so just depends on how your workflow is. i don't often install extra hds any more; just use bigger ones.
Honest to God do not underestimate just running a game through steam as a non steam game. I got a lot of stuff working like that i.e. voices of the void(did not want to run in normal wine for me). Just add the exe as a non steam game and it should work, have checked it with a couple others successfully. Bonus points if you rename it correctly and use something like steamgriddb to also have a thumbnail and banner.
I just decided a few hours ago to give linux another shot as my daily driver, too. New SSD on the way. Hope we see some good tips in here, and I'll be sure to post anything relevant I encounter myself.
Off topic, but I'm curious, OP. Do you have your very own nemesis around here or something? I've never seen a comment or post from you that doesn't have at least one consistent downvote.
He makes a lot of fairly good contributions, but much of what he writes is also needlessly verbose and overly self-congratulatory and self-referential. Pay attention to how often he brings out stuff like “like I say,” “as I’ve been talking about,” “like I predicted,” as well as talking about his “autism” (in the context where you’re supposed to infer he means “intelligence”). Or how often his train of thought jumps through a semi-related anecdote about a great thing he did elsewhere.
I’m not one of his downvote followers, but it does get on my nerves. I imagine it gets on some other people’s as well.
Like Imp, he earns those downvotes. And like Imp and Abelist, he spergs out too.
Look in the mirror once in a while.
He's referring to me, folks. You can see the context here, which isn't much like he is trying to sell it.
He might be talking about me as well, which would be funny since I upvoted this submission.
I also never really downvote him, or most people. Its a pretty gay thing to do or care about.
I mean I don't know who Lethn was referring to specifically, but honestly this reply seems kind of like it confirms what he said.
Honestly, it was rather gay of me. But I think letting him run his little "woe is my superior intellect to be forced to interact with others" narrative is also pretty gay too.
I only assumed it because I saw the exact same sentence here that he was saying to me at the exact same time in that thread. Which makes the deceit of it standout.
https://lutris.net/games You can search for install instructions for basically any game on here. I never played Fallout 4 but it's a Steam game so if you had to manually add files to a mod folder you would just follow the exact same instructions you'd use for Windows except the path would be different (in Steam's case you can find any game's local folder with right click - Manage - Browse local files, for non-Steam games it's wherever you install it).
Just gonna leave this bad boys here:
https://www.gloriouseggroll.tv/how-to-get-out-of-wine-dependency-hell/
There's also www.protondb.com for Steam games specifically, I've never had a problem with a Steam game that I couldn't find a solution for on there.
Many times this is from needing one or two 'flags' or launch arguments. This can help you get around things like 'opening logos don't load' or telling the game 'use this specific library'.
I'll look on ProtonDB for what others are using for a specific game if I have trouble. Example for fallout 4: https://www.protondb.com/app/377160 where it looks like there might be some customization needed to get around not launching.
The other thing you can try sometimes is just swapping the proton version for a specific game in steam, right click it in your library and go to
properties->compatabilityand the only option is to force a specific version, and you can try swapping around. I've had games only work on proton experimental, or proton 7, etc. if it works it works.Apologies for the mini wall of text, but I hope it helps.
Not basic stuff at all. You're asking good questions off the beaten path.
While not a virtual machine, I can see how Wine has that feel. Especially if you've used Unity mode in VMWare Workstation, or something similar, where there's an option to have guest applications "appear" to run outside their little window.
Getting a Windows game into Lutris can happen two ways. Easiest is installing via Lutris installer, if your game is not too obscure. For obvious reasons, the installer will only have hooks for official retail setup files, so under a black flag, things get trickier. Even then, still check out the Lutris installer to easily see if there are recommended patches and fixes.
If you just have a setup.exe, there's a "install a windows game from executable" that works mostly like the Lutris installer except you will have to give it a name and which version of Windows Wine will try to work like. Like the Lutris installer, this will also give you a path to where all the stuff is installed.
You might also have just a bunch of files, no installer or setup.exe. This is a bit harder still but not too awful. Unzip it someplace, use the "add a locally installed game" option, and select Wine as your runner. The defaults are usually pretty sensible, but I certainly haven't tried every game ever made.
Rest of the setup: Working directory is implied to be where the main executable is, so don't mess with it. Don't set up arguments unless you know you need them: these go to the GAME not the runner. Wine prefix sets up a Wine sandbox of sorts, what you observe feels like a VM. You could just one use, but MB are cheap these days, I just use a separate prefix for each game, and I just use the directory where the game is installed. If it doesn't work right away, scan down the list of runner options and see what might be sensible.
"Where do I drop files?"
Once you've got the game installed, and perhaps run it to check, check the Wine prefix directory. It'll look something like this: https://files.catbox.moe/sfug25.png (pardon the censoring, but you understand). From there you have a directory that is your "fake" C: drive. If you keep a separate prefix for every game, you also don't need to be particularly hygenic here. Installing to the "fake C: root" is just fine, there's no real advantage to using Program Files.
Using a mod manager? Copy that in to your wine prefix. (Not strictly required, but I'd recommend it). Then hit the second collapsible menu on the Lutris UI, corresponding to Wine options, and "Run EXE inside Wine prefix". It will automatically open a file picker, to the directory where your prefix is, and it will run it in that sandboxed environment.
If you are using your mod manager a lot, you have a few quality of life things you can do. If the manager launches the game, just go into the game's configuration in Lutris and set the mod manager exe as the executable instead of the game proper. If not, you might want to consider Duplicating the game and changing the executable of one of the copies to the mod manager. Using Duplicate will have both the "games" (really, one game and a supplement) pointing to the same prefix so they're in the same sandbox.
"How do you organize your files / multiple hard disks / conventions"
That's a very personal question for sure: I have a system that works for me and make no warranties that it will work for anyone else. It also has limitations, for sure, but I see it as those four junk drawers in my house full of random shit but I know exactly which one I need to get into when I need to find a 20 year old ticket stub. I have a central NAS where I save most of my files, so each computer has a "local stuff" and a "network stuff" folder. On my final Windows 7 machine, it's a permanent network mount at a letter, and a directory link to that network mount. On my Linux machines I fstab entries, which was a pain in the ass to get working right and would definitely piss you off. Still, stick with it and it's one of those things that stays solved once you solve it, and you'll never have to look at it again.
In both cases, I have a pretty loose divide between stuff I made, stuff I converted, and stuff I downloaded. From there it's really anything goes. I bought Old School Essentials a while ago, and I had all the pdfs on a local computer's "Downloads/Reading/Games/RPG/". Then I have a script to move stuff from local machines onto the NAS. Sometimes automatic, sometimes manual, depending on how often I'm accessing it. Sometimes I'll manually copy things over if it's slow over the network to work with.
Multiple hard disks? I don't do that anymore, so this is coming from blind memory. Modern linux will automatically mount internal disks "somewhere" and make an icon available but the file browser will tell you where if you need a path by right clicking and picking properties. You can have more control by using fstab but, again, a pain in the butt because if you don't pay attention you can break shit.
.
With enough experience and time, you'll come up with the ways you're comfortable doing things which will be different from above. But hopefully this is enough to get started.
I don't have an answer for Windows -> Linux, precisely. I've never tried moving a game in progress from one to the other. Files? Central NAS means I never had to go from desktop to desktop. Running TrueNAS [Core] on that machine, so that's a third operating system that is more server focused and, frankly, I don't do anything there that isn't out of the box functionality.
If someone put a gun to my head, I'd probably set up a Windows share, then use the Linux file manager (gnome, is what I use, in case it comes up) to mount that share and copy. I'm sure the other way works as well, I'm just personally more familiar with setting up Windows shares because it's easy to just give the Everybody role access to everything and it works without any fuss over my local network, whereas for Linux you can't really get away without needing some kind of credentialed user for network file sharing.
This isn't really in my wheelhouse, but would running Linux as your main OS and using a Windows VM to game solve your problem? That's one solution I'm looking into. I'm also looking into SteamOS, but I don't know if it would be any good for the machine learning stuff I do.
It's rather hard to do that without 2 GPUs, gpu partitioning just isn't a thing on Linux yet and virtual GPUs I have mostly found with virtual box with mixed success. You CAN have a full GPU passthrough but that's basically dual booting with extra steps, not really worth it for gaming(where it will complain with the anti cheat shit games).
Very, very minor games I have made work in a VM but we're talking so old you can just run them on Linux through wine.
VMs/emulators are a huge hit to performance, even a really good PC will struggle with a lot of current gen games if you have to nerf it with a VM.
Idk why emulators aren't written as live OSs rather than VMs, a lot of live OSs are really simple and performance would be so much better if you didn't force your PC to run a Russian nesting doll of OSs.
Edit: I could be mistaken but afaik emulators are a type of VM, hence why I'm lumping them together, and WINE is an emulator, so I'm not seeing the distinction.
Should we tell him guys? :)
Pretty sure it stands for Is Not an Emulator. It's a translation layer, not emulation.
I confess to being a tech retard.
No I just thought it was funny because it's in the name.
It's not necessary to run a VM for Windows games when Proton exists and works perfectly with 99% of all Windows games.
Hey there, you're on a roll! Blender, and now this. We definitely oughtta be making or own games, or at least our own mods. Source and IdTech 4 are still very good vehicles for creativity.
The biggest obstacle for me with Linux is actually the audio issues. For some reason it doesn't always pick up input from my mics, and I could never figure out why.
True, I may just have to try out some more headsets, or other distros. I hope it's not my soundcard, because I can't swap that out as easily.
Consider trying out Bottles as well.
You create a bottle (standalone environment) and install your games there.
They have the most common runtimes, dlls, etc. for easy download.
More general than just gaming than Lutris, but still good enough for gaming.
https://usebottles.com/
You may use your distro's GUI file manager. It probably has all the same stuff as Windows explorer. Then you have "Documents" and stuff, to organize yourself.
The paths you need to follow are found, I imagine, the same way as on Windows, by using a search engine. Maybe Linux complicates that, but I dont' think so as far as once you're inside the Steam game folder.
I searched "steam linux fallout 4 mod folder" and came up with stuff.
Replace "C:" with "whatever folder is under Configure - Game options - Wine prefix/drive_c" and everything else works the same as it did on Windows.
Oh that's cuz it's using Wine. Wine makes things look like Windows to the app. The game will want to install to a C: or D: or whatever, so wine needs to emulate that.
I have all my games in a dedicated games drive I mount in my home. Seems to be the most sane thing to do so I don't have to juggle with general download folder etc for space.
I have backups also, used to be timeshift but that one was just way too time consuming (ironic with the name). Now I just run a borg script that take a backup every day and keeps 1 per month, week and last couple days.
It's up to you.
I know, it's an unsatisfying answer. But there's no technical reason why you couldn't. I think the default is ~/games/whatevername and you're free to install games to any mounted file system.
Personally, for my entertainment, I like being able to just back up my home directory and not think too much about or keep track of other places my stuff can be. Is this efficient? Probably not, but sometimes a decrease in cognitive load for years to come is worth the 1 or 2% reduction in gaming performance from sharing drive bandwidth with your OS today.
I don't think it really matters any more whether you use a physical HD or a partition on the drive. Except inasmuch as you might want to physically separate your stuff. so just depends on how your workflow is. i don't often install extra hds any more; just use bigger ones.
Honest to God do not underestimate just running a game through steam as a non steam game. I got a lot of stuff working like that i.e. voices of the void(did not want to run in normal wine for me). Just add the exe as a non steam game and it should work, have checked it with a couple others successfully. Bonus points if you rename it correctly and use something like steamgriddb to also have a thumbnail and banner.