- This is the Wine-GE followup to:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/changing-wine-63101415
Why the new naming scheme?
The base for WINE was changed from wine upstream to Proton experimental, and staging currently is not used in this new build. There are several reasons this was done, which are explained in detail in the post above.
I needed a way to express that the base is all Proton7 and to reset the minor versions. Additionally, from previous discussions I've had with some other devs on official proton, they requested that I modify the name so that the GE versions were easier to differentiate, which is why the GE prefix has been moved to the front of the name.
What exactly has changed?
- WINE upstream repo has been changed to Proton experimental bleeding edge.
- Wine-staging is no longer used, but we keep it within the repository in case it is discovered that patches are needed from it later on.
What has remained the same from previous Wine-GE builds?
- mfplat implementation and continued work
- gstreamer and ffmpeg implementation
- FSR patches are still applied
- HideWineExports patches from Staging are still applied
- Various game patches which are not included in either upstream wine or proton and continuation to add such patches
What's actually fixed in this release compared to the last one?
- Fixed the stupid wine-mono checksum failure issue.
- I accidentally broke mfplat in the last release, so thats fixed now.
- We have -all- of the same patches that Valve's proton does for all of their game fixes.
- Since we are now using proton's bleeding-edge experimental, we now have -all- of the controller and gamescope related patches. So if something is broken there -- it's an upstream proton bug.
How is this different from just using proton?
IMPORTANT: As I've explained many times, Proton is built using a specific runtime within a container, and without those runtime libraries, it can easily break or malfunction. There are two key differences that separate Wine-GE from proton:
(1) I have de-protonified the wine build. This means all the steam client specific patches have been removed, and the user is not forced to 'steamuser' among other things. This allows Wine-GE to retain the functionality of proton, but to be used for non-steam games.
(2) It is built using Lutris's libraries and buildbot/environment. This is much easier in terms of portability across distros.
Again, the entire reason Wine-GE was created is because I kept getting people that tried to use Proton outside of steam -- which is a NONO.
A side note: Currently the Godfall new game intro is broken again -- but it is skippable.
I tested this build with every battle.net game I had installed (pretty much all of them except hearthstone and heroes of the storm) and all of them except Warzone (expected) worked fine -- including Black Ops 4
I tested several Uplay games and all of them worked as well
I tested several Origin games and all of them also worked.