I really enjoy Linux but I find myself having to keep Windows partitions around for software that specifically requires Windows.

Proton makes everything easier by automatically running game files through a translation layer, and it “just works” quite well most of the time.

Also VanillaOS can apparently auto-spin a container when you try to open a .deb or AUR package (this is my rudimentary understanding).

Setting up WINE/Bottles, etc. is above my pay grade.

Is it not possible to create an OS that just does the same thing as Steam but for the entire OS?

  • DLSantini@lemmy.ml
    0·
    7 months ago

    Along with the other suggestions here, Garuda also already does this out-of-the-box.

    • Peffse@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 months ago

      I feel like there is a scary amount of copyright infringement going on to make it look THAT much like Windows 11.

      • qprimed@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        damn! that is quite the impressive windows veneer going on there. did not know about this distro (and I find the win 10/11 UI to be a whole lotta “meh”, so not personally interested), but I am sure there are others who would be. interesting link to throw, hand grenade style, into a distro flame war.

  • qpsLCV5@lemmy.ml
    0·
    7 months ago

    honestly, wine has seemed unreasonably complex to me in the past and i haven’t tried since. but Bottles offers a nice easy to use GUI, i do recommend giving it a shot. at least on arch linux it’s super easy to install via the AUR.

    the only issue is some apps need additional dependencies which can take some searching to figure out what exactly is needed. the arch wiki lists a bunch of them though, and often the error messages bottles shows will point you the right way.

    i’ve gotten almost every .exe to work with it, most immediately, some after a short bit of tinkering.

  • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
    0·
    7 months ago

    In Debian and, probably, Ubuntu you may install the wine-binfmt package to get all *.exes running with wine automatically. However I don’t recommend doing so because it is very easy to run some windows trojan with this.

  • ZeroHora@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    In my understanding you can run .exe with double click if you install wine and choose it to open any .exe as default, if you have DXVK with wine like fedora do and if the program have all the dependencies in the .wine folder things probably will work.

    It think that the magic that happens with Proton is just a hell lot of people debugging and pushing fixes to Proton/Proton-GE and so on for multiples games.

    Hijaking the post to ask another thing related to Proton, do Proton uses the binarys of the bin folder most games have? Like the multiples .NET runtimes? Or the windows still need to have it so the game can detect it as installed?

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 months ago

    Give setting it up a try, it doesnt seem hard once you do it.

    Also, linux binfmt is powerful magic. My x86-64 machine can run arm binaries like native with qemu, wine integration is also possible but in my setup i let the gui file manager launch exe files with wine.

  • Quazatron@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 months ago

    Can you run non native binaries on Linux? Sure, Linux is the Swiss army chainsaw of the OS world. There are multiple ways to achieve that.

    Is it complicated? A bit. You’re interfacing a binary created for a completely different and alien environment. You’d get the same answer if you asked “why can’t l just run Mac apps in Windows like any other .exe?”

    The best way to run .exe files is Windows. You have wonderful tools to help you run Windows apps on Linux, but the experience will probably never be as seamless as you want.

  • BreakDecks@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    Setting up WINE, in my experience, is as easy as just installing it and running EXEs and MSIs with it. I just set wine as the default handler for those file types, and things mostly just work.

    There is some tweaking that is sometimes necessary, but it’s easier to tackle that on a case-by-case basis. I hardly have to do anything for the handful of Windows-based tools I keep to work, and there’s usually someone online who has already figured out a workaround so I don’t have to.