Wine and Add-Ons?

[Lah Ca]

Hi,

This may be an inappropriate question, I don't know.

I have only ever used Wine, bare-bones from the distro repositories, except with Ubuntu 18.04 for which I came here and downloaded the latest build since I had a lot of trouble with the version in the repositories.

I have never used packages like Wine Tricks, Play-On-Linux, or Lutris, etc.

From a Wine point of view are there caveats to installing and using these packages? I assume that they rely on Wine.

Thanks.

[dimesio]

I'd say the main caveat is that third party Wine wrappers are not supported here. With the exception of winetricks, you cannot get help on the forum, file bugs, or submit AppDB test reports if you have used them.

Winetricks is semi-supported, in that you can ask for help here and submit AppDB test reports if you have used it. In general you shouldn't use it when submitting bug reports, but there are exceptions, mostly in cases where winetricks is needed to get past one bug in order to get to the one being reported. You do need to be explicit about what winetricks you have used when asking for help or submitting reports, and be prepared to retest without it. Also note that winetricks is a separate project, so bugs in winetricks itself need to be reported on their bugtracker, not here.

[Lah Ca]

Thank you for the clear and concise reply.

[Bob Wya]

@Lah Ca

I'd just add some other personal observations:

• Play On Linux is still used by new Linux users - but largely just because it is packaged by Linux distributions.
  If you look at the actual project development activity - see: POM4 Contributors and POL5 Contributors.
  This project is not really sustainable. POL5 has been in development for 2-3 years and has just reached alpha status now.
  The choice to develop POL5 as a Java application seems somewhat bizarre to me.
  Perhaps 10 years ago, this decision might have made sense (before Oracle screwed up Java, when they bought out Sun Microsystems).
• Lutris is under very active development. See: Lutris Contributors.
  The installation scripts, for games, are all published online and get frequent updates. See: Lutris: Games.
  Lutris does leverage some very bleeding edge Wine patch-sets (e.g. tk-glitch) and DXVK to get very good Wine performance - especially for more modern DX11 / DX10 titles.
  Lutris can also be used with your system installed Wine / Wine Staging version(s).
  The main drawback of Lutris is that it only deals with games (Windows games, native games and emulators) - vs. PlayOnLinux, Crossover, etc. which attempt to handle all Windows applications.
  Lutris has a Gtk 3.x toolkit base (yuk!) - although there has been discussion of alternative Qt frontend.
  I personally find Lutris a bit non-intuitive and inflexible - as I'd want to use it as frontend for multiple WINEPREFIX's.

Just my $.02...

Bob

[Lah Ca]

@Lah Ca

Just my $.02...

Bob

And a very interesting $.02 it is, too.

Thanks, Bob.

[Bob Wya]

And a very interesting $.02 it is, too.

Thanks, Bob.

np