Linux Mint, Proton, Steam

[pancakewizard]

I've been banging my head against a brick wall here, trying to find a more convenient solution to getting XWAU working on a Linux MInt system with proton via Steam. A repackaged installer for Linux users would be ideal of course but I appreciate that's probably not on the cards. I just want to avoid Wine or Lutris, as I wouldn't be using these for anything else and proton should mean these steps are unnecessary in 2023.

What's frustrating is that I can actually open the .exe file in Linux like a zip folder, and I can see the script and files it copies, making me think there must be a much simpler way to do this than the suggested method here viewtopic.php?t=12132 (which didn't seem to work no matter how much I tried and I just ended up installing a bunch of useless stuff on my system I wouldn't have used for anything else).

I found this post: https://steamcommunity.com/app/361670/ ... 830762775/ which seemed quite promising, suggesting that literally anyone could share a pre-installed version on google drive or whatever for Linux users to just download and copy/paste over their steam folder. I don't have access to a Windows system I can do this on, myself but again this suggests there is a much more straightforward way to get this going.

Any help/suggests are appreciated, as I'm sure I'm not the only Linux user that's got used to the more Windows-like modern conveniences in the Proton/Mint distro age and doesn't really want to be screwing around with Wine, dlls, and unexpected error messages.

[darklord]

that's got used to the more Windows-like modern conveniences in the Proton/Mint distro age and doesn't really want to be screwing around with Wine, dlls, and unexpected error messages

Unfortunately, that is the reality of the situation. As a linux user, you can't be afraid to get your hands dirty from time to time. It's the price we pay for making things work on things that they weren't meant to work on. While the default Steam version runs fine in proton with no extra work, XWAU is much more of a challenge and you are going to hit Proton/Wine errors. It is just the nature of the dll sideloading tricks they needed to do to make it all work. Truth be told, I can tell you I wasn't able to get it to work 4 years ago. It's the main reason I dual boot Windows 11 (Besides, VR is still mostly a nogo on linux). I can also tell you from experience with other games, working directly with wine is much more straightforward than working with proton under the hood (Though that is doable too). But it's not like wine takes up that much space.

[m0rgg]

I just want to avoid Wine or Lutris, as I wouldn't be using these for anything else and proton should mean these steps are unnecessary in 2023.

You need (some flavor of) Wine to run Windows games in Linux.
Proton is just a fork of Wine, tailored to run within the Steam runtime (and only within Steam). Running XWAU directly from the Steam install folder can be problematic.
So the best alternative is to use Wine-GE, another fork of Wine by GloriousEggroll that includes most of the Proton fixes, but is made to rune outside of Steam.
Personally I made it run in Lutris with the Wine-GE-8.20 runtime, DXVK 2.3.

If you want the easiest way to install it in Linux, use Lutris. I updated the installers for XWAU, both Steam and GOG versions. TFTC is currently not working, but I hope we will be able to fix it in the future.
https://lutris.net/games/star-wars-x-wing-alliance/

If you really don't want to use Lutris (I don't think it's that heavy, even if you just use it to install XWAU), you can check the Lutris installer scripts and do the steps manually, in your own Wine prefix, using winetricks and running the installers manually.
https://lutris.net/games/install/20640/view

I recommend you to connect to the TFTC Discord (https://discord.gg/x7hFHfWqM3) and join the thread about XWAU/TFTC in Linux:
https://discord.com/channels/8519185394 ... 3403828245