Does someone have a good WINE checklist?

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My old but still still reasonably powerful laptop got cludgy recently, so I replaced the SSDs. The / drive was installed fresh, but I RSYNCed my /home back into place.

Before the operation, I actually had things working rather well, except for the hardware issues. Now I can’t seem to get WINE in LUTRIS to work reliably. I can usually get an installer to run, sometimes I can get a game to run once or twice, then not at all. I’m running the same OS I had before - the one difference being I mostly use this as a work machine, I don’t think I actually had the NVIDIA drivers working right before and they’re working right now.

When I got fed up with the WINE issues I did an apt-purge of Lutris, deleted my ~/.cache/lutris folder and my ~/.config/lutris folders outright. I followed the instructions about how to do WINE the Lutris way when I put things back, so that’s done, I have Steam on here so most of that was covered anyways.

Most of my errors are 1280 errors.

Right now Castelvania & Contra from GOG did work, but not now, that one is obviously Nvidia related so I can tackle it, but the 1280 errors are a plague and I’m not sure where to start with those. If there’s a step-by step purge this, erase these confilgs, then install this again “big fix” I can try or known things to look for, please share. I’m pretty good with troubleshooting overall, but WINE really isn’t my thing.

The big plague on my system that really doesn’t seem to matter much is:
“MESA-INTEL: warning: Haswell Vulkan support is incomplete” - but that’s just incomplete support and it never seems to have bothered anything, it just situation normal when I install things on this lappy.

BTW - My desktop is working great. Probably because I don’t have two different GPUs trying to work in harmony.

[System]
OS: KDE neon 22.04 jammy
Arch: x86_64
Kernel: 5.19.0-46-generic
Desktop: KDE
Display Server: x11

[CPU]
Vendor: GenuineIntel
Model: Intel(R) Core™ i7-4800MQ CPU @ 2.70GHz
Physical cores: 4
Logical cores: 8

[Memory]
RAM: 31.2 GB
Swap: 34.3 GB

[Graphics]
Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL Renderer: Quadro K1100M/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 470.199.02
OpenGL Core: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 470.199.02
OpenGL ES: OpenGL ES 3.2 NVIDIA 470.199.02
Vulkan: Supported

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You know guys, I have a personal curse. This happens to me repeatedly.

I can troubleshoot things for days on end, but the moment I ask for help I usually fix it myself. Turns out setting the system to “on demand” in the Nvidia control panel for GPU switching, then turning it OFF in Lutris seems to be the secret sauce that works on my system. I just got Castlvevania & Controa to launch again, the Cup Head which was definitely problematic.

I’m leaving my question up because a nuclear option - how-to about making sure everything is blown out and reinstalled clean where WINE is concerned would still be a nice thing to hear about.

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In regards to Wine, the default Wine prefix data (the one the standard system install uses) is at “~.wine” (i.e. the “.wine” folder in your Home directory) ; so if you have issues with the Wine profile itself, after backing up any necessary data, you delete that (i.e. the “.wine” folder in ones Home directory) and start fresh if you need to (or you can create separate ones that a typical program/game won’t touch through terminal etc(I talk a bit more about this below)).

if you want to create specific profiles for use with specific games, and you don’t need the latest version of Wine, I suggest using PlayOnLinux (apt install playonlinux) to create a profile (for 64bit profiles it has ‘up to’ 6.17 Wine version (although I manually added Wine v7.0.2 to it not long ago, but this is a bit more complicated so I won’t get into it for now)) for use with Lutris and then just tell Lutris to use that particular profile…

‘right click game shortcut in Lutris > Configure > Game options’ and on the ‘Wine prefix’ section you can input the location of your PlayOnLinux profile you want to use (you can create the prefix/profile in PlayOnLinux after you start it up and go to… ‘Tools > Manage wine versions > Wine versions (amd64)’). for example… “/home/user/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/PlayOnLinuxWinePrefixNameHere/” (without the ")

but as far as the general instructions for installing the newest ‘stable’ or ‘development’ etc versions of Wine as a basic system install, simply follow the instructions on the official Wine website in relation to ‘Ubuntu’, which are here… Ubuntu WineHQ Repository - WineHQ Wiki (it’s basically six total commands you enter in the terminal. but I issue one more (so a total of seven commands) that’s not listed there to give me the Wine start menu entries though, which is… apt install wine-desktop-files ) ; I generally have been using the ‘development’ version of Wine (currently v8.12 ; but this seems to be updated about once a month or so where as the major ‘stable’ versions seem to be about once a year in January with maybe a occasional small update throughout the year (like say v8.0 to 8.0.1 etc)) for most of my games as this gives you the newest Wine version for general usage.

but on one game I have (RDR2 build 1436.28) I used PlayOnLinux to create a custom profile specifically for use with it since that particular game stopped working for me from a clean Wine profile after version 8.1 (development) (so 8.2 on forward has the issue). I also continue to use Lutris v0.5.12 over the current Lutris v0.5.13 since there are show stopper regressions on at least two of the games (Mafia: Definitive Edition/Mafia III) I play where as on Lutris v0.5.12 things work well.

but my general point with the whole PlayOnLinux wine prefix creation is once you get a game working well it should stay that way since the wine prefix it uses won’t change and you can use it ONLY for a particular game ‘if’ you need it as when you run typical windows games through Lutris it will default to using the system Wine prefix which is the “.wine” in ones Home directory and won’t touch those additional ones you made with PlayOnLinux etc.

I get that it’s possible to create a separate prefix with the currently installed system Wine version if one wants a separate prefix on that (on whatever version of Wine is installed to your system), but if your game works with the slightly older versions of Wine through PlayOnLinux it’s probably a bit easier to just use that since it’s pretty much all GUI (graphical user interface) based where as creating another profile with your currently installed system Wine you have to use terminal commands. for example (this creates a typical 64-bit Wine prefix)… “WINEPREFIX=~/.test winecfg” ; this will create a wine prefix named “.test” in your Home directory and then bring up the ‘wine configuration’ window to tweak to your liking (with Windows version etc) and then once you exit you can adjust Lutris to use this if you want which will remain separate from you typical use system “.wine” profile.

p.s. in relation to that ‘official’ WineHQ ‘Ubuntu’ installation instructions I noticed in the ‘help’ section below there is a specific note in relation to ‘KDE Neon’ on Ubuntu 22.04. so you may need to pay attention to that since you are using this OS.

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I think my best path forward is a new laptop. I’ve been dragging this one through the trenches for a decade, I’m incredibly impressed with it’s ability to keep going, I can even buy something new that isn’t as powerful as this relic, but it almost seem cruel to keep pushing the thing.

Most of the issues I outlined were fixed by messing with the Intel/Nvidia tag-team.

I have nearly everything that used to work before the drive swap working again, have a couple of things not working that did (Blizzard stuff bombs out for some reason I’ll figure out soon enough).

I have found certain things do work better on older versions of WINE. I have found a couple of things that are Linux native but old that are too much of a pain to deal with and just using WINE and the Windows version is easier. This saddens me.

As for the KDE Neon thing, I’ll check it out. I tried a lot of different distros before finding Neon, but a KDE distro compiled against GTK just wasn’t really a KDE distro.

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I see. my current primary PC’s motherboard I have had for 11+ years now even though I upgraded the GPU back in 2017 etc. I don’t plan on upgrading my primary PC setup any further (so what I have now is likely what ill stick with until I decide to build another computer etc) as it works well enough for what I do.

so I figure, short of hardware failure out of no where, I would not be surprised if NVIDIA stops updating the GPU driver for my GPU (Geforce 10 series) and that makes it more likely for me to force me into upgrading (i.e. building another computer or thereabouts) before I naturally would have to as I suspect that will become a problem before my hardware becomes too slow.

but even if this is true, I suspect ill be covered for at least 4-6 years from now since at least on Linux Mint my GPU will be supported until April 2027 at the bare minimum and likely to April 2029+ since I would assume the next major version of Linux Mint, which will be released about mid-2024 (and be supported until April 2029), will still have proper NVIDIA driver support as I think NVIDIA still supports older GPU series on Linux (I want to say at least a generation or two earlier than mine off the top of my head) and those will likely be dropped first before the Geforce 10 series is. so it’s possible I could go beyond 2029. but who knows what the future holds as there could be other issues that eventually turn up that forces me to upgrade a bit sooner than I would like. but all-in-all, even being a bit conservative, I suspect ill have this computer at least another 2-4 years on the low end short of major hardware failure, but could be well beyond that.

but depending on what games you play in general… I would not be surprised if games from around 10 years ago (or even older) work better on what is older hardware now than the more recent hardware. even speaking for myself… while I might play a more recent game once in a while, the vast majority of games I play are replays of games I like from the past and in this regard my current computer works anywhere from passable to quite good.

but good luck on whatever you decide to purchase :wink:

p.s. personally I am not a fan of laptops in general as their only real advantage over a desktop is portability, so if portability is not a high priority, I would get a desktop as nearly everything else favors desktops as they have a bigger screen and are easier to work on and have better cooling etc.

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I have been in I.T. since 96. I have laptops and desktops. I tend to get leftovers but my desktop is pretty much up to date. I actually purged most of my extra “other” systems last year, my Chromebook is my only extra system now.

Right now I’m working with my laptop mostly to have a second system going. My kids like to play LAN / Internet stuff sometimes and I’m setting up Lutris so they have a way to launch NOT Steam games (for license reasons), or one Steam one other version. In all fairness my desktop works great Ryzen 7700x, GeForce 3060. My up to date system was involuntary. My mainboard died in December, then my 1080 Ti died within two weeks of of the new guts.

My laptop with the ancient everything and more than one video chip type to deal with is a royal pain.