Hello,

I’m not sure how many of you here use Linux for gaming, but there might be someone who can help me.

With my friends, we play a few games that, based on the place I’m writing in, are assumed to be pirated copies. We use something called an “Online fix” for Steam, which tricks it into thinking we’re playing a different game in order to access its API and play multiplayer together.

How do I actually do this under Linux? I use Bottles, which allows me to play Windows games. I’ve installed a Windows version of Steam through it, and it works quite poorly, but it gets the job done (or rather, it used to). Basically, I just have to start it up to be able to play. The problem arose recently when Valve released a new update that significantly changed the Steam UI.

After the update was applied, I encountered several issues:

  • When Steam starts, a strange symbol appears on the screen, which stays on top of every window or application, and it’s quite annoying.
  • Steam itself started crashing. And when that happens, the game crashes logically as well.

Before the update, I had no problems, and now I don’t know what to do. To play these particular games, I need to have Steam running. If I run the native Linux version, it works, but the game can’t detect that Steam is running since it’s not actually inside the Wine container.

EDIT: I think I found a solution for now. Adding -vgui will launch the old Steam UI.

  • @priapusEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    You can do so, but that doesn’t make it the best idea. There’s a reason the devs say not to. Steam makes it very difficult to manage prefixes, installing dependencies and running exe’s under the prefix is very awkward. There’s really no benefit over using Lutris or Bottles.

    • @Sa6o90@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      Yup, there are 2 main reasons I use Bottles.

      1. I have only 1 bottle (wine prefix) and I put all of my games there. This means, I don’t waste extra space for a separate wineprefix for every single game (I have a lot of games), and I don’t have to set up a prefix every time I install a new one. I only had to install dependencies and set environment parameters once, and then every single game just works.
      2. Bottles runs with Flatpak (sandboxed), which gives me an additional layer of security. We all know that downloading and running a pirated EXEs are not always safe.

      Everything was working so well until this recent Steam update…