As someone who's been gaming on Proton or Lutris + Raw Wine, I'm not sure I agree. I regularly update Proton or Wine without seeing major issues or regressions. It certainly happens sometimes, but I'm not sure it's any worse of a "version binding" problem than a lot of stuff in Linux is. Sure, sometimes you have to specifically use an older version, but getting "native" linux games to work on different GPU architectures or distros is a mess as well, and often involves pinning drivers or dependencies. I've had games not run on my Fedora laptop that run fine on my Ubuntu desktop, but for the most part, Wine or Proton installed things work the same across Linux installs, and often with better performance somehow.

I specifically mentioned the sims3. That one is constantly broken by updates.

Also age of empires2 hd, after working fine with wine/proton for a decade, doesn't work with the latest proton for me.

Sure, I'm not contesting that Wine breaks things with updates. So does a lot of stuff on Linux. The amount of times I run an apt update and some config file is now obsolete or just gone is a lot more often than I'd like.

The advantage is that the Wine Ecosystem seems to realize this more than the Linux ecosystem at large, and specifically makes it easy to pin versions and never update. If it worked, why update? Or why not roll back? I'm already used to having to do that with every other part of linux gaming including my graphics drivers...

> If it worked, why update?

For multiplayer games, which nowadays get updated every day or something, and old versions are incompatible.

I'm not asking why you'd update the game, I'm asking why you'd update Wine if your game "is constantly broken by updates".

It's one thing if the game keeps updating and then you have to hope it works on the same version of Wine or re-find which version of Wine the new version of the game works with, but presumably that's a problem that the OP isn't happening with The Sims 3.

If the game works on a specific version of Wine, why would you mess with it? Or if you are, then treat it like any major OS update and back up/be ready to roll back if it breaks something. Wine is especially good at letting you make multiple sub-environments, so it's not like your whole system has to be on the same version of Wine.

You update Wine to fix game A, and it breaks game B. Or something small is broken in a game, so you try to update to fix it.

That's not how Wine or Proton works in my experience. As OP said, Steam and Lutris both have tooling to easily set up Wine prefixes per-game, including specifying specific versions, including custom compilations like GloriousEggroll's builds. In general, you can flip between versions comfortably and easily, often without having to do anything more than changing a value in a GUI.

I could see it being an issue if you were managing your Wine prefixes by hand, but that's like deciding to install your OS dependencies without apt or dnf and then complaining that Linux has bad packages because you chose not to use a package manager.

I literally play multiple online games in Wine/Proton on a daily basis, including Path of Exile, FF14, WoW, and Payday 2. The only one I've had major issues outside of general performance with is FF14 and that's because it integrates closely with Steam and their launcher uses a super outdated version of .NET that Wine hasn't worked out how to emulate. It's been broken for years, and is a known and documented issue with Wine.

And Aoe2 HD broke with every game update in Wine. I had to keep patching in different DLLs. Gave up one day. It's worse than the original game anyway.

I used to say that Wine makes Linux tolerable, but after using it for several years I've concluded that Wine makes Windows tolerable.

Absolute opposite experience for me. The native versions of Half-Life, Cities: Skylines and a bunch of other games refuse to start up at all for me for a few years now. Meanwhile I've been on the bleeding edge of Proton and I can count the number of breakages with my sizeable collection of working Windows games within the last couple of years on one hand. It's been a fantastic experience for me with Proton.

Mind saying what the error is? Linker problem?

Not sure if I'm honest. Starting up steam through the terminal and launching the game doesn't give me anything indicating the reason in the logs, which is weird. I'm using Arch and tried both steam and steam-runtime already.

It works fine for me. If it was something with glibc it wouldn't work for me.

Half life works fine for me on latest kernel, latest glibc.

Probably you have different unrelated issues.

> Please use wine for more than a few months before commenting on how good it is.

I’ve used it for several years, and even to play Sims 2 from time to time, and while I’ve had issues the experience only gets better over time. It’s gotten to the point where I can confidently install any game on my Steam library and expect it to run. And be right most of the time.

But not sims 3

Age of empires DE will not work with proton. And it's not really a top notch graphics game.

I'm not entirely sure what the point of updating Wine is in the first place. If you have a version that works with the game you're trying to play, why not pin it? Things definitely tend to break with Wine upgrades by nature of what Wine does, that's why it's common for people to have multiple versions of Wine installed.

Y'all sure you don't have Sims 2 and Sims 3 mixed up? Sims 3 is rated Platinum on AppDB / Gold on ProtonDB (and I've ran it on Proton on multiple machines and distros without issue), whereas Sims 2 had a Garbage rating on AppDB for the longest time (apparently the Origin version is Silver now, but still).

I am most definitely talking about Sims 2. I play the Origin version through Lutris, from when they gave it away for free.

> Every new release of wine breaks it.

Is there any way to easily choose which Wine version you use for compatiblity? Multiple Wine versions without VMs etc?

Steam lets you do that, but I think it's a global setting and not per game.

Debian normally keeps 2 versions of wine in the repositories, but if none of those 2 work, you're out of luck.

> if none of those 2 work, you're out of luck

That's not true. There are multiple tools for managing multiple versions of Wine and Wine-related tools for gaming, the oldest one being PlayOnLinux. Lutris is the most widely used one, and works great in my experience.

This is wrong. Steam lets you choose a Proton (Wine) version per-game.