About a year ago, I had a catastrophic drive failure. I got a new drive for my system and installed Ubuntu 22.04 on it - yeah, it took me close to a week to get everything working, but looking on the bright side, it's a good excuse to upgrade, right?
Last week, I decided that I wanted to delve back into the world of Oblivion - stress at work & at home are getting to be too much and I need to escape. I read on UESP that a program called Lutris is the way to go now & that virtually all crashing is gone when running the game with it, so I installed Lutris. It installed very quickly, not requiring much of anything in the way of additional packages. It updated and installed a bunch of stuff on it's own when I first started it (without requiring root, so I presume locally) and installed WINE on it's own. Unfortunately, Lutris refused to acknowledge that WINE was installed, even though Lutris itself installed it and I could see the WINE files in ~/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/ . I hopped on the Lutris discord and they told me that the system level WINE needed to be installed through apt in order to work, regardless of the fact that another version of WINE was already installed, so I installed WINE through apt.This is where things got hairy. When installing WINE through apt, it automatically drew in vulkan drivers - I'd never heard of these before & didn't pay any attention. Unfortunately, I learned later that the GPU in my laptop is not supported by vulkan & I started getting all kinds of errors; literally half or more of the programs on my system refused to start, complaining "did not find extension DRI_Mesa version 1" when running through a terminal. The guys on the Lutris discord quit responding to me about this time.
Removing the vulkan packages was not as easy as it sounds - seems like the dependency lists for a whole slew of packages had been updated to require vulkan, even though it hasn't been required by anything in the year or so since installing Ubuntu 22.04. Finally, after much time spent forcibly removing packages, I was able to get stuff mostly working, albeit *MUCH* more slowly than before. (Libreoffice takes 2 minutes to load now when it took about 3 seconds before vulkan infested my system. Watching videos online results in about 8-10 fps.) So far, I've been unable to figure out how to fix it (remove vulkan & restore the original GPU drivers) and apt complains that I need to 'apt --fix-broken install' which would result in vulkan being installed again, even after troubleshooting with guys I know who are experts when it comes to Linux. Frankly, I have just about given up on Ubuntu's BS - this is far from the first time I've been bitten by apt-induced dependency hell, being unable to upgrade programs to fix packages because they're a year or two behind current, not being able to do what I want because the system thinks it knows better, etc. Arch has been recommended as a very good distro & I'm probably going to migrate to that.Here's the kicker - I *cannot* lose the data currently on my drive, even for just a few days, as I work remote - so I've ordered another SSD, figuring I'd be able to swap drives as needed until I get the new Arch system configured enough to do everything I need it to in order to do my job. Needless to say, this whole experience has been beyond frustrating & has only added to the stress I was hoping to escape.
My questions are simple - can I install WINE *without* vulkan being brought in? If so, how? Given my description above, does anyone see how I could repair my Ubuntu install short of a complete wipe / reinstall? (Really not relishing the idea of reinstalling / reconfiguring everything I'm going to need for home & work again...)
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Side-note: I'm really hopeful that someone here will be able to help me. Lutris left behind a 'tweaked' version of WINE in my system's trash... after forcing enough vulkan packages away with dpkg -r --force-depends such that programs would again start, I played with this. It refused to install Oblivion with an illegal instruction error, but *was* able to install Morrowind just fine. It won't *play* Morrowind, but installed it. Without vulkan packages.
(This is what gives me hope that WINE is runnable without vulkan, in addition to my running it like that before the drive crash.) Thinking it was due to the WINE being non-standard, I went to install Lutris again, figuring I'd let it install standard WINE locally, copy it out of where it put it, and then remove Lutris, only to find that system/apt WINE is now a dependency of the Lutris package, which of course wants to pull in the vulkan I'd spent so long trying to get rid of. Tried installing PlayOnLinux & it also insists on installing apt wine. Found openmw & installed it, but am almost afraid to try starting it given the abysmal graphics performance the system now has with literally everything.I appreciate any help or advice.
For the benefit of others who may be in this predicament & find this thread, after removing every package with vulkan, kisak, and mesa that I could find (along with some stuff that had the same exact funky version as the vulkan/kisak packages), I found and installed an old DEB with amd graphics drivers. ('apt list --installed | grep <string>' is your friend.) Frankly, I don't even know where I got it from - was very late when I ran across it. No idea if it was the one that was installed with the system, but my graphics are back to normal. 
