Context:
I'm currently running Debian 12.7 on VirtualBox, trying out linux before I become experienced enough to fully switch my drive to linux. I have an i5 cpu and an amd radeon gpu on my laptop. I run kde-plasma with wayland.
I have sorted out some basic stuff, but my current problem is how to play the few games I have on linux ("Counter-strike 1.6", "Hades I", "MGR: Revengeance", "Minecraft" (t-launcher) and "Outer-Wilds"). I want ro move their game data too, but I think that's a simple copy paste on the appropriate paths. I also want to run a few other programs, possibly Notepad++ and mp3tag, but I think I can figure those if I fugre the games.
I know about the existance of Wine, Winetricks (though not very good at using it), Proton, Lutris, Bottles and Heroic (and PlayOnLinux which I haven't installed).
I have installed Lutris (flatpak), Bottles (flatpak) and Heroic (Appimage).
I have successfully manually installed Notepad++ in Bottles using soda-9.0.1 and semi-successfully manually installed Counter-strike 1.6 on Lutris using wine-ge-8-26-x86_64. The issues with that (among others?) is that I cant look around with the mouse and there is no audio. Apparently some dependencies are missing.
So, this comes to my question:
How do I figure what dependencies to use on my wineprefixes?
Lutris, bottles and heroic theoritically allow you to edit the dependencies, in case something goes wrong. Lutris also is supposed to have some installation scripts on their database.
Is there any way I can find any configuration in text form? How can I then use this text to pick the dependencies myself?
I'm thinking of a list with the recommended changes:
Counter-strike 1.6 installation script:
Install
Windows fonts
Install
cmd
Install
vcrun2013
Do
Xchanges on registry
etc.
Is there such a thing? Is there any other way to figure this out (other than painfully and randomly trying setup combinations)?
you're overcomplicating it. get a separate $20 SSD and install the OS to it, dicking around with wine and tools within virtualbox is a headache you don't need. set it up as desired (I recommend using flatpak versions of lutris and friends because of freshness) and then install the games one by one, followed by transferring the game data/settings/etc. you can experiment to your heart's desire because you always have the fallback solution of your original drive.
then, when you know what's what and where's what you can make the transition. good luck!
I think this is supposed to be a reply to me, so I'll respond🙃
Yep, I think you're right, I'm currently flashibg the debian installer on a usb card which I'll use to install debian on an external ssd I found. Vbox is too slow for my needs now.
Mind if I ask why you're sticking with Debian for gaming? Debian's awesome for servers because you want the stability; but for gaming, you generally want nice fresh packages, updated drivers, etc etc. I'd use Bazzite or Nobara – the former if you're comfortable with immutable/atomic paradigm, the latter if not.
Well, as I said to someone else, while indeed debian probably is a bad choice for gaming, I barely game and the windows games I have are kinda old (Hades I is probably the most recent). I just casually play cs 1.6 or Supertuxkart every now and then :)
Maybe in the future I could experiment with the other distros, thanks for the suggestions.
correct, no idea how I managed to do that.