Do they have to be installed in the default .wine folder and c:? I’d prefer to install big games using wine on another drive if possible as space is linited on my home drive.
Edit: Solved. All good to install anywhere, thanks!
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TLDR: use a prefix manager instead of plain Wine
You can install them anywhere, but if you’re using plain Wine, I’d suggest you instead go with something that will manage these locations for you.
Each Wine setup has what is called a “prefix”, which in the simplest sense is just a folder that is setup like a Windows C:\ drive, and includes all the shared libraries and bits needed to run the game. When a program run is launched, it is locked into this prefix, so when it goes looking for files as it would on Windows, it’s going to find a familiar folder structure, including installed dependencies like MS VC libraries and DirectX stuff.
Now…when you as a user are just using Wine directly, you’d generally be using the SAME prefix to install multiple games, which is hard to manage, and just clunky.
Prefix managers like Proton, Lutris, Bottles and even Heroic will make a new prefix for EACH program, making things like troubleshooting, switching runtimes, or invoking custom configs per program a LOT easier.
Oh, so I don’t even need to launch with Wine necessarily? Like I noticed Heroic has an install game option, so I could change the Heroic directory to, say, /mnt/drive2/Games on my other drive, and run the game .exe from the Heroic installer?
Yup. Same with any other as well. If you don’t want to use Steam, I think a lot of people find Lutris and Heroic simple.and functional for all levels of user, and they also include the ability to run Steam Runtimes and Proton versions pretty simply too.
All of these launchers run Wine under the hood, and are a good abstraction on top of that entire stack. Just makes it super simple to manage.
Great, appreciate the info
You can install them wherever you want.
Great, thanks!
No, not at all. By default Wine should offer your whole Linux drive on Z:, so you can choose whatever location you want.
Heroic puts the games in
~/Games/Heroic/gamenamebut the .wine folder in~/Games/Heroic/prefixes/gamename. Steam does something similar.You should also consider using a helper like Lutris, Heroic or Bottles. They create a separate .wine folder for every game. That way it is easier to manage multiple conflicting libraries and Wine versions. If your home is on BTRFS or other deduplicating filesystem the additional space needed for multiple .wine folders is almost zero.
If you don’t want to use a helper program you can still utilise multiple non-standard .wine locations with the
WINEPREFIXenvironment variable.Yeah I wasn’t sure if it was necessary. I use a few Windows vst apps with yabridge, but I suppose those need to get installed in specific places so the apps know where to look. Seems like for games I can just change the install directory to my other drive and run from there. Thanks for the write up, I was actually planning to launch using Heroic, just wasn’t sure if games through Wine needed the C:\ drive prefix.
Thanks for the write up, I was actually planning to launch using Heroic, just wasn’t sure if games through Wine needed the C:\ drive prefix.
It creates a virtual C:\ drive for the programs in the bottle. Externally it doesn’t matter where it is as long as your launch script/application knows where it is.
No, you can install them whetever the config is
Great, thanks!
