• Druid@lemmy.zip
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    4 hours ago

    If someone, totally not me, were in possession of exe-files of games outside a platform like Steam, Epic or whatever, would it be possible to run them on a Linux distribution? Say something like a Steam rip or a GOG rip. Said someone has tried researching but didn’t find any conclusive answers

    • phar@lemmy.ml
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      3 hours ago

      Yes. It’s very easy. There’s really two ways to do it. You can actually open Steam and add non-steam games to steam if you want it all in the same place. Otherwise you can use something like Lutris, which is what I do. That gives you a nice place for everything also and you can even load your Steam games on. But yes you can absolutely use GOG stuff and exe files.

      • Druid@lemmy.zip
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        3 hours ago

        What would adding the games to Steam accomplish? I assume I can’t just log on to my account and have the required files to download and install the games since they’re not originally from Steam. Or is it just a matter of being able to launch them once they’re added to the client? Or a convenience thing?

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      3 hours ago

      So, I don’t know off the top of my head, but I need to figure it out as well because I have plenty of game installers that I’ll want to use eventually. Lots in my GOG account, others from 20 years ago with sources lost to time, lol.

      I would expect that Steam could be used as a launcher, but I know there is also an app called Lutris for managing games and compatibility layers and such.

      I’m thinking about it, and yeah I may have not yet installed a windows version of a game outside of Steam at all. Honestly I have most often installed Linux native versions via steam.

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        3 hours ago

        Lutris and one other program is used for that, I seem to remember. I’ll probably have to do some research. What’s the current go-to distro for gaming?

        • Zink@programming.dev
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          2 hours ago

          I’m not sure there is a go-to, which is good. There are some gaming-focused ones to be sure, but i’m using Mint which is super mainstream focused and user friendly (and based on ubuntu and debian) and I’ve had a great experience.