Need clarity on 32bit stuff

Support
1

Hello there, I want to kindly ask for a guidance or link to tutorial, as I have a mixed feelings, experience and google answers.

The primary question is how to properly setup a freshly installed distro for playing 32bit games?

Especially what to do in which order, do I need instal Wine before/after, do I need to run wine prefix commands before installing Lutris, or will Lutris make 32bit setup for me right during install, etc.
So, what are the best practises, if I want to achieve a state, where I can peacefully instal&play any old game?

For context, on previous distro, I spent an evening with wine and winetricks commands, very likely doing a redundant stuff, and on next days were old games easily installed&played on Lutris. I will be trying different distros, so there must be a tried and more efficient way than what I did before.

Thank you for any tutorials/guides/links and recommendations.

2

That would depend on the distribution, how to set up multilib. Some don’t have the package repositories added by default.

Lutris will create your wine prefixes for you. Wine itself (or the wine runners you use in Lutris) is what will have the 32 bit support.

For example on *buntu distros:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
3

Thank you for reply, do I understand correctly, that all I need to do on fresh distro instal, is just to enable i386 architecture in terminal, before installing Lutris, and that is it???

4

In fact, recent Wine version and GE-Proton version support 32 bits games without need of 32 bits wineprefix and so installing 32 bits libraries is now useless.

5

FYI:
https://archlinux.org/news/transition-to-the-new-wow64-wine-and-wine-staging/

6

Does Wine’s wow64 work for all games and applications now? I tried it (not recently) and found I had 32 bit games that wouldn’t run. I still do proper wine builds (despite Arch).

To answer the question, when enabling i386 repos in *buntu, you’d want to run “apt update” to sync your package list databases. THEN, when you install packages that have 32 bit package dependencies, they will be pulled in.