I have to say, I’m starting to see for myself the reasons why they removed Proton from the drop lists, as I become more aware of the changes to Proton. I hate a “black box” where I don’t understand WTF is going on, so I studied it a bit.
First of all, the reason I have to copy the d3d12.dll files is that they aren’t in the usual skeleton that gets copied to the wine prefix when updated. They don’t know what Valve is going to do next, so they can’t continue to support it. That was my first clue.
Secondly, Proton has changed. It now sets up containers for “Linux Runtime Soldier” and Proton uses the libraries in that environment.
I don’t think Lutris ever used the Proton wrapper, just the Wine implementation in dist. You don’t get the new runtime soldier environment and you may not get some scripted hacks.
This still works for me, probably because I have the full complement of 64 and 32 bit dependencies installed on the system, but it’s not going to work for everybody on those distros that are cutting back on multilib, or distros with older guts.
I’m not happy about the way this went down, broke all my Proton wine prefixes by changing that out from under foot (and the dxvk version string for that separate matter), but this is not an arbitrary decision to drop Proton support.
I hate to dredge up a finished discussion, but I like to keep things in context.
Be warned, if you are using Proton and have copied dlls to your lutris wine prefix, and upgrade to Lutris 0.5.8.3, it now enforces that DXVK version string in Advanced options by creating symlinks in this manner:
It will do the same thing for other proton dlls, like d3d11.dll, d3d9 and d3d10 core etc. It renamed my dlls and replaced them with symlinks, and there seems to be something enforcing it when the wine prefix is started.
So if using Proton for a game in Lutris, enable Advanced view and choose “Manual” for the DXVK version and do not select anything from the list. If you have copied dlls there, remove any corrsponding symlinks and copy them back or you will burn.
Actually since all this, the lutris- wine runners have gotten very good. Lutris 6.0 then 6.4 have been outstanding.
Except that Valve’s Proton is still better for me, for Cyberpunk2077. There are problems with screen space reflections in lutris’s vkd3d in that game, for me. However I’m just running it through Steam now, as a non-steam game from the lutris installed game directory. I’ll revisit this with every new lutris- version and DXVK/VKD3D bits. It kind of defeats the purpose of buying it on GoG… the whole point was to have a game that didn’t need an internet login but I can always launch it through Lutris if my internet is down, as the wine prefixes are separate.