Choosing the Right Wine Option

[asma84]

In Gentoo, there are three Wine options:

1. wine-vanilla
2. wine-staging
3. wine-proton

What are the differences between them? Is wine-proton the same as vanilla Proton, or is it patched? Can I play non-Steam games, like those from GOG, with it?

What is the best option for playing games without Steam, Lutris, or other launchers? Which one would be better for installing wine-ge or proton-ge? I don't know much about Wine; I just want to play games without Steam, Lutris, or Heroic Launcher and configure everything myself.

[Ionen]

wine-proton is the modified wine fork used by steam's Proton, but it's intended to be used on its own without steam/proton (and yes, you can play gog games with it). Proton-ge is proton itself and is intended to be used with steam.

wine-proton has a lot of (difficult to upstream) hacks to have better compatibility with games and so you'll generally have better luck getting games to run with it (esp. the more recent ones), but using it on its own without Steam/Proton is technically unsupported upstream, so when something doesn't work you'll have no real support. It also have a few quirks, e.g. you'll have C:\users\steamuser rather than your own $USER (gentoo does not bother trying to "undo" steam-specific things and provides it mostly as-is).

wine-staging is wine-vanilla with some experimental "staging" patches on top, it's kind of testing area and it may help with compatibility for "some" games all while being more "normal" without steam-specific changes like steamuser (wine-proton also has most patches from there).

wine-vanilla tend to break things less often and has stable branches that are still receiving moderate support in case of regressions, so if you want something to keep working it can be a better bet.

All these can be installed at same time and switched around when trying to get something to work if need be. Albeit you may want to keep wine prefixes crated by wine-proton separate given they're more quirky w/ settings.

Personally almost only use wine-proton but well.

[asma84]

Do I have to install Wine-GE or Proton-GE if I install Wine-Proton? I want to install proton-ge because I want to play Batman Arkham Asylum, and everyone says GE has fixed the problems with Arkham Asylum

https://i.postimg.cc/ZntsPzzL/123.jpg

https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom?tab=readme-ov-file#Tested-Games

[Ionen]

No, wine-proton is its own thing, and does not use nor need nor use these.

fwiw looking at protodb there is reports mentioning that proton experimental works for Arkham Asylum. The "wine" used by experimental proton is available through wine-proton-9999 (not to say if it'll be enough to get it to work, may need to use winetricks to install e.g. d3dcompiler_43 among other things, may not necessarily be obvious and I can't walk you through this without having the game myself)

[asma84]

I used wine-staging and its working without any problem

[Ralphred]

The only suggestion I'd offer is to keep "old" staging versions around until you have tested the newly installed ones.
For some games I used to have wine version specific prefixes for them because they "broke" on such a regular basis - steam does this for you nowadays. I have some wrapper code floating around somewhere that automates this if you find something that would benefit from it.