Anything to make gaming easier, especially non-Steam. I’ll list what I know of so far:

Bottles.

Faugus Launcher. UMU-Launcher GUI, which is kinda like Bottles but for proton specifically instead of WINE. It’s early dev and lacks functional GameScope for now, but Bottles I noticed really doesn’t like me using proton so this was an alternative I found.

This is a unified launcher for Windows games on Linux. It is essentially a copy of the Steam Runtime Tools and Steam Linux Runtime that Valve uses for Proton, with some modifications made so that it can be used outside of Steam.

MangoHUD of course.

Heroic Games Launcher.

Lutris.

I have Itch.io’s launcher too.

ProtonUp Qt - grab various versions of WINE or proton for all these applications.

Winboat - Trying some experimental fuckery to use Vortex but I’ve not got that far yet, just got Winboat itself set up so far. edit: It worked surprisingly, modded Skyrim Special Edition, see my other comments here.

  • Chaser@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    5 days ago

    +1 for Lutris! It’s not only good for games, but also for regular Windows software like FL Studio. Another “tool” I use a lot is ssh. I use Gamescope on my PC with Steam Big Picture mode. Gamescope gains a few more fps, than a regular de. Also HDR works just fine with it. See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope However. Sometimes I need an desktop environment. So I created a Home Assistant automation, that allows me to switch to desktop. Now I have 2 buttons on my smartwatch. One to boot the PC and turn on the tv, avr, etc. The other for the desktop mode. I also have some nfc cards for my favorite games. Same thing here: When scanned they trigger a ha automation, which starts the games over ssh 😎

    • BurgerBaron@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      The ssh wizardry is impressive lol, I’m still learning the basics for now but I’ll keep this in mind.

      Do you know of any tricks / command line entries for stubborn games that won’t use HDR correctly like Lego Star Wars - The Skywalker Saga? Gets wrong colors with HDR toggled on in Heroic and in-game. I’m stumped as to why.

      • Chaser@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        4 days ago

        Oh, one more thing regarding the ssh wizardry (lol!): It’s not that complicated. You can pass your command as last parameter. For example if you want to launch Dorfromantik (which you should btw), you could do it like this:

        ssh me@mymachine "steam steam://rungameid/1455840"

        That’s the whole magic. Like this it won’t start an interactive shell, but run the command and closes the connection once the command finishes.

      • Chaser@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        4 days ago

        If I remember correctly I had to give gamescope a flag to enable hdr at all. However there was an env too, to tell the windows games through proton, that the machine supports hdr. I’ll check my scripts later for you

        • BurgerBaron@piefed.socialOPEnglish
          0·
          4 days ago

          Thanks for the follow-ups, very useful. The only feature of my displays I’ve not looked into yet is getting VRR working now.

          Edit: I wishlist Dorfromantik too :p

        • Chaser@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          4 days ago

          A man, a word. This is my gamescope-session.sh

          #!/bin/sh

export DXVK_HDR=1
/usr/bin/gamescope --hdr-enabled -e -- /usr/bin/steam-native -tenfoot

          I’ve created a /usr/share/wayland-sessions/gamescope-session.desktop for it, so I can launch it from login screen (or auto start it in my case)

          [Desktop Entry]
Name=Steam Big Picture Mode
Comment=Start Steam in Big Picture Mode
Exec=/home/chaser/bin/gamescope-session.sh
Type=Application

          In theory this should run all games, that support hdr in hdr. At least Cyberpunk does.