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Comment by russnes | Hacker News Reader

I've found that running non steam apps on steam with the proton experimental compatibility usually just works, it has become my go to solution

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Might work even better with CodeWeavers' CrossOver: https://www.codeweavers.com/

It costs a little bit of money, but it comes with support and directly finds the WINE project (CodeWeavers is a major contributor.)

Never had much luck with crossover in the end it's easier to hack your own winerunner for apps that don't work with standard wine.

Might want to send them some help directly if you're able then: https://www.winehq.org/donate

Do you use an application launcher / configuration manager like Lutris to do this? Or do you mean directly through steam? There's a steam game that I play often that tends to work the most frequently with proton hotfix for reasons unknown to me.

No just directly in Steam. You can just add a non steam game to your library and select the .exe file you want, and steam will create a c drive environment for each non steam game you add.

In some cases you might have to change which exe file it runs, if you initially run a setup.exe which creates the real exe file you'd want to launch inside the c drive environment folder

So you could run battle.net inside Steam? That would be fun, I've had issues with battle.net on wine / lutris

Yes, Battle.net runs flawlessly in Steam, have zero issues playing D2R and D4 this way. In fact D4 ran flawlessly on Linux on Day 1, which came as a bit of a surprise to me.

The only thing I still can't run is League of Legends. I hope someone can figure that out somehow

Lutris doesn't have to mean Wine. It can launch apps via Proton too (and so can Heroic). I think it uses https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/umu-launcher behind the scenes, not sure, but so far I haven't run into any issues with this approach.

I played WoW for several years this way without much issue. The only tweaking I ended up doing manually was to try to figure it out how to get the game to let me enable ray tracing, which I did get working but ended to being too much of a performance hit for my to leave on most of the time anyhow.

This is exactly what I do, works great. I may have had to try one or two different recent versions of Proton via the drop-down, but it's way less hassle than when I used Lutris.

This is what I do, it feels weird, but works perfectly and is the least effort solution

Wait, can I run non-games like that, too? Launch all kinds of windowed GUI programms from Steam?

Yeah, why not? Steam has non games on it by default - mostly art programs and utilities for whatever reason. When you're adding a non steam game to be run through steam it's just a wrapper and shortcut to it.

Very handy on the steam deck for some programs

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