Please remove or tell me to delete if this isn’t allowed!
I’ve been dual booting Ubuntu and Windows for a good few years now. I keep the windows around for gaming, because, ahem, I don’t like giving EA, among others, money. I know it’s not a problem to play most of the games I’ve paid for on Linux, but does anyone have experience with playing games on Linux that you’ve, somehow, obtained for free? And keeping them updated, too?
I’m still going to dual boot because keeping my games separate from my work is a decent adhd strategy for me, so I’m open to gaming friendly OS suggestions as well!
Yes just use Lutris. Depending on the method of installation you may need to either select the + and install from an exe file or copy the files over and then tell Lutris where the game’s exe file is.
for games that fell off a truck or something, maybe look here. I’ve found almost all of those I’ve found in the mentioned way to work without issues with lutris.
as to upgrading the games, hadn’t tried that. I know there are periodic updates for popular titles (like Cyberpunk 2077) released and you can find them in the same place you found the game, but seems too much hassle.
Heroic launcher with GE proton installed runs about anything that works on Steam Linux.
Installing GOG games (without Galaxy) is about the same as what you’re describing. The easiest way is with a game manager like Lutris, because it offers patched versions of Wine (like GloriousEggroll’s builds), DXVK, vkd3d-proton, and various Windows libraries that the game or its launcher might need. Manually discovering and installing all that stuff is harder, but it can be done.
LinuxRuleZ makes repacks specifically for this. Has worked well with both Linux mint on desktop and bazzite on steam deck
You can add a non-steam game to steam and run it using proton, did it for one game that I couldn’t make work on Lutris or Heroic.
Though for some reason you have to enable the compatibility for it even if you have set it up to use Proton automatically for all games