How to install and use Protontricks

Ahmed Elsayed included in category Linux tutorials and series Proton

2021-01-04 2021-03-13 593 words 3 minutes views comments

Contents

What is protontricks

Protontricks is a simple wrapper script that allows you to easily run Winetricks commands for Steam Play / Proton games. This is often useful when a game requires closed-source runtime libraries that are not included with Proton.

Winetricks is an easy way to work around problems in Wine. It has a menu of supported games / apps for which it can do all the workarounds automatically. It also allows the installation of missing DLLs and tweaking of various Wine settings.

How to install protontricks

Arch based Linux distros

Open the terminal, then copy and paste these commands:

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sudo pacman -S python-pip python-pipx python-setuptools python-virtualenv
python3 -m pip install --user pipx
python3 -m pipx ensurepath

Close and reopen the terminal again.
Install protontricks using this command:

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pipx install protontricks

Debian and Ubuntu based Linux distros

Open the terminal, then copy and paste these commands:

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sudo apt install -y python3-pip python3-setuptools python3-venv
python3 -m pip install --user pipx
python3 -m pipx ensurepath

Close and reopen the terminal again.
Install protontricks using this command:

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pipx install protontricks

Fedora

Open the terminal, then copy and paste these commands:

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sudo dnf install -y python3-pip python3-setuptools python3-libs
python3 -m pip install --user pipx
python3 -m pipx ensurepath

Close and reopen the terminal again.
Install protontricks using this command:

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pipx install protontricks

protontricks graphical user interface

Protontricks has a graphical user interface that can easily get the App ID of your installed games, then you can use winetricks with these games.

How to use protontricks GUI

Open the terminal, and type this command:

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protontricks --gui

then choose the installed game from the list, and press OK

Select the default wineprefix and press OK

Pick Install a Windows DLL or component and press OK

Select all the components that you want to install, and press OK

How to use protontricks

I will give you an example of a game that does not run out of the box on Proton and requires additional workarounds.

The name of this game is Her Story. The game requires some multimedia codecs to run the videos.

According to protondb.com the game requires Proton 4.11, and some closed-source runtime libraries to be installed using Protontricks.

You need to change Proton version to Proton 4.11
Open the game once, and close it again.
Type this command in the terminal:

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protontricks 368370 ffdshow l3codecx winxp directshow

Info

protontricks is the application that we installed before.
ffdshow - l3codecx - directshow are the closed-source runtime libraries that need to be installed using protontricks.
winxp is used to tell protontricks to change the Windows version of Proton to winxp.
368370 is the App ID of the game

What is App ID

An Application (or App) is the main representation of a product on Steam. An App generally has its own store page, it’s own Community Hub, and is what appears in customers' libraries.

Each App is represented by a unique ID called an App ID. Generally a single product will not span multiple Applications.

How to get App ID of a game

Go to this link » https://steamdb.info/apps/
Search for the game by its name.