Autism time.
So the biggest obstacle for me when I tried out Linux was installing stuff manually outside of steam and often steam itself wouldn't work which was probably a result of me not understanding how to setup dependencies etc. Maybe it's just because I've got more time to look through all of this but I think they might have changed a bit how Lutris works as well to be a bit more user friendly since I last checked. From my perspective I'd look at the damn interface and it felt like I was dealing with a virtual machine.
If I were sailing the high seas for example, how would I set everything up?
Yes, for the record I know it's not actually a virtual machine before the Linux autists rip me a new one but that's just my windows experience talking. I found it very confusing because I didn't know what files were where, if I wanted to for example put mods into Fallout 4 I wouldn't know where I could do it. How do you guys organise your files? What's your process for keeping track of multiple hard disks and naming conventions etc.?
Yes this is all really basic stuff by Linux user standards, but as a potential end user looking to give it a shot I thought it would be helpful having an up to date thread on this for people to spam information on because as it turns out there's a lot of out of date topics and videos I'm seeing floating around about this.
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).
That's the thing, maybe it's the distros' I pick and I'll have much better luck with purpose built Nobara and it will simply run out the box. However when I tried it for myself and did a standard steam install with proton it wouldn't even launch which was depressing.
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.