Tulon

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I've created a yet another Wine prefix manager in c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
[–] Tulon@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

Good question. So far I haven't put any effort to make sure it picks a discrete graphics card over an integrated one. That's because my daily driver machine only has an integrated graphics card and I am mostly interested in retro gaming. In future, I plan to take a look into this.

Wine Bar does support Proton, and should it use hardware acceleration by default, it may be all you need. Give it a try and tell me how it went!

I've created a yet another Wine prefix manager in c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
[–] Tulon@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

In my mind, learning a programming language is better done by doing something from scratch with it. Trying to understand someone else's code while learning the language it's written in is way harder!

I've created a yet another Wine prefix manager in c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
[–] Tulon@piefed.social 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I tried Bottles a long time ago, on a regular x86_64 distro. I remember it suffered from the same problem I described above: it either works out of the box or not at all, and you can't do anything about it.

On my Macbook Air I couldn't try Bottles at all, as the version from the repo doesn't install (complains about x86-32 dependencies not being available) and the project doesn't provide an AppImage that I could extract and try running under muvm, as I did with Heroic.

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I've created a yet another Wine prefix manager (github.com)
 

The project is called Wine Bar. There is a demo video on the Github project page.

Why a yet another Wine prefix manager? My primary goal was to make it possible to run Windows apps on my Macbook Air M2 running Fedora Asahi Remix, which is my daily driver. Before anyone asks, the project supports regular x86_64 distros as well. I could run Stream on this rather exotic setup, though I would rather run something opensource.

I did manage to get an old version of Heroic Games Launcher running under muvm, though the process wasn't straightforward. I definitely wanted a more user-friendly solution. Besides, I find most existing opensource Wine prefix managers to be lacking in one aspect that's important to me: they tend to either work out of the box for a given piece of software or not at all. For instance, if you have to install a package using Winetricks for the installer to be able to run, you are out of luck with Heroic (at least on that older version that can run under muvm).

I did find one project that was pretty close to what I wanted. That project is called simply Wine Prefix Manager. I had difficulties running it under muvm though. I contemplated about contributing to that project instead of creating my own, but the project in question is written in Dart / Flutter, which I didn't know. Myself, I am a C++ guy. However, I thought that perhaps learning Dart / Flutter would be a worthwhile investment of my time.

Long story short, I've created my own Wine prefix manager from a ground up, also in Dart / Flutter. It took me 5 months. It's functional and I'd like to invite people to give it a try and give me feedback. Thanks in advance!