Hello Linux Gaming friends :)
I’ve been tinkering on and off with my wife’s laptop (Mint 22) to get a few of her games working on Linux, namely House Flipper 2. It experiences frequent OS crashes, despite everything saying that this game should work on Linux (hell, it’s even Steam Deck verified).
I’m not necessarily asking how to make this particular game run, but in my tinkering with different Proton versions I find myself asking: what is the difference between these versions of Proton? Why do some work better than others? How does one version work, say Hotfix or Experimental, but not a numbered release?
Just trying to learn to add some knowledge to my toolbelt, or whatever 😅. Thanks!
Not all too knowledgeable about Wine myself, but I’d imagine that like Windows, Wine must have its elements so tied together that updating something could potentially break something else. So on a hypothetical example, if you update how Wine interprets Vulkan API calls, you could end up breaking how it interpret Direct3D calls, as, to my knowledge, both do more or less the same thing, except Direct3D is much older.
Also, if you’d be interested and/or you have games outside of Steam, Heroic Launcher has a compatibility layer manager that lets you install and swap around different versions (and forks) of Wine. Only installs to Heroic though, not system-wide or directly to Steam (though you can add external games to Heroic).