How many proton/wine versions/forks are necessary?

General
1

I always have proton-cachyos installed, as most of my games are played through Steam anyway, but sometimes its an GOG, Epic or even standalone title. For those cases I use wine-cachyos, but reading about it, its just proton that doesnt link to any Steam libs; running anything from Proton can be done with umu. So why not rely on proton-cachy anyway and save some space?

Also, I’m interested in knowing how many other forks people are using, I know there’s a usecase for dwproton, since it has some fixes for Gacha games.

2

i only use

  • proton-cachyos-slr (for default game)
  • proton-ge (in case not compatible with cachyos ones)
  • dw-proton (for gacha games)

that’s all

3

I’m not sure of the current situation, but it is my understanding that wine-cachyos would be better suited for running non-game programs and protons might have patches that could interfere with those non-game programs. Both proton and wine advance at such a pace though that my knowledgish could be well outdated and proton might be suitable for most use-cases already.

4

You can add non-steam games to your steam library, which then simply uses the steam proton.

5

Not everything I run is a game, though.

I’ve got a few wine prefixes (at least 3? 4?) and the default proton options from Cachy for games.

6

so do you have like, one prefix for all games?

7

problem with that is that sometimes I switch Steam accounts and also have more than 1 open at the same time

8

for me, for non steam games ? yes, because with lutris / heroic / vermouth is easy to manage and merge them into single prefix

as for steam games, i just left it be (too painful to merge them into 1 prefix)

9

Yeah. No issues. I don’t play DRM games with anticheat as a rule, I am against DRM so no problems running games.

10

I’m just an audio guy, and I don’t do any gaming, so for me I have these: (and current “yabridge”, manually installed)

  • extra/wine-mono 11.1.0-1 [installed]
    Wine’s built-in replacement for Microsoft’s .NET Framework
  • extra/wine-staging 11.10-1 [installed: 9.21-1]
    A compatibility layer for running Windows programs - Staging branch

…And then I manually installed a bunch of 32-bit dependencies for wine. Because of unresolved bugs in WINE and yabridge(?), I have “wine-staging” downgraded/held to version 9.21 as per the community de-facto standard of stability. But it works fine enough. “Yabridge” is due to get officially updated later this year, I think/hope. After that, I might switch to the current version of “wine-staging”.

My WINE folder shows up as “/home/username/.wine/”

I don’t even mess with wine tricks or anything.
If I need to rollback WINE, I rollback my entire system using my backup/restore system (“timeshift”). In fact, to get my Manjaro’s wine onto CachyOS, I just copied/overwrote the “/.wine/” folder over after installing from pacman.

But again, I don’t do any gaming, so I’m not quite the same.

11

extra/wine-mono 11.1.0-1 [installed]
Wine’s built-in replacement for Microsoft’s .NET Framework

extra/wine-staging 11.10-1 [installed: 9.21-1]
A compatibility layer for running Windows programs - Staging branch

odd that you’re running 9.21 in cachyos. I have defaults from the repo which have worked really well for yabridge: wine-cachyos (10.0.2xxx)
am I missing something?

Also, hello again :wink:

12

I think its possible to merge then if modifying the launch options with WINEPREFIX env variable dont know if that will break cloud saves or not, and idk how exactly protonfixes does its thing. I bet wine-cachyos/proton doesnt recognize games outside Steam anyway.

13

It would be odd, except that for working with CLAP, VST3, and VST2 instruments and Yabridge, version 9.21 is the most recent version that isn’t overwhelmed with GUI bugs. Even version 9.21 has issues too, but a lot of us audio people have held/paused/downgraded deliberately because the versions that came after haven’t (yet) fixed the numerous GUI issues.

Even the Yabridge site mentions holding at version 9.21 …But thankfully, that developer has a working bugfix workaround edition of Yabridge, but it’s not mainstream yet.

As soon as Yabridge is officially updated to the bugfix version, I’ll try it out on a spare partition with the up to date modern Wine-Staging and see how it goes.

TL;DR = yes, it’s normal for people working in digital audio until wine and/or yabridge devs publicly solve longstanding problems.

14

yeh, I was on 9.21 in fedora for ages and still had issues. cachy’s repo versions solved almost all of them. That’s why I found it odd you’re still on it.