How to use custom wine builds

Ahmed Elsayed included in category Linux tutorials

2021-03-15 2021-07-31 833 words 4 minutes views comments

Contents

What is custom wine builds

Wine is an opensource application that anyone can build it from the source code, so you can build older version of wine, and you can build wine with additional patches that can add extra functionality or fix games that do not work on wine installed on you Linux distro. The most popular custom wine builds are wine-tkg, proton-tkg, and proton-GE which will be explained later in this tutorial.

proton-tkg, and proton-GE can be used with Steam, and outside of Steam if you want. Wine-tkg can not be used with Steam.

Why using custom wine builds

Some games need a certain version of wine to work properly.
DotNet from version 4.5 to 4.9 can only be installed only using wine 5.11 or below (currently broken).
Custom wine builds like wine-tkg add some patches for certain games that do not exist with official wine builds.
You can use Proton and Proton-GE outside of Steam to run games from other stores like: GOG and Epic Games.

How to download custom wine builds

You can download wine-tkg, and proton-tkg from this link » https://github.com/Frogging-Family/wine-tkg-git/releases

Notes

The first choice is proton-tkg which can be used the same way as proton-GE, check this tutorial to know more about proton-GE » [link]
The second choice is wine-tkg which can only be installed on Arch, and Arch based Linux distros like: Manjaro, and EndeavourOS.

Tip

If you do not use Arch, or you do not want to install wine-tkg on your system, check this repo instead » https://github.com/Kron4ek/Wine-Builds/releases

There are 6 options to choose from for each release:

wine-devel (64bit).
wine-staging (64bit).
wine-staging-tkg (64bit)
wine-staging-tkg (32bit)
wine-staging (32bit).
wine-devel build (32bit).

Notes

wine-staging = wine-devel + staging patches.
wine-staging-tkg = wine-staging + tkg patches.
64bit wine builds can run 32bit applications and 64bit applications, but 32bit wine builds can run only 32bit applications.

How to extract the compressed file

To extract the compressed file that you downloaded before, right-click on the compressed file, and choose Extract archieve here, autodetect subfolder from Extract sub menu

Info

These steps might be different based on the desktop environment you use.

How to use the extracted custom wine build

You can use to the extracted custom wine build by pointing to its location like this example:

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~/Downloads/wine-5.11-staging-amd64/bin/wine ~/Downloads/7z1900-x64.exe

That will open 7z1900-x64.exe using the custom wine build that you downloaded earlier.

Notes

Wine will use the default location of wineprefix » ~/.wine if you do not use WINEPREFIX enviornment variable which is explained in this tutorial » [link]
Custom wine builds has its own winecfg which can be used like this example:

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~/Downloads/wine-5.11-staging-amd64/bin/winecfg

Winetricks uses the default wine installed on your Linux distro, but you can force winetricks to use custom wine build instead by using WINE enviornment variable like this example:

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WINE=~/Downloads/wine-5.11-staging-amd64/bin/wine winetricks

Info

This workaround can help with installing DotNet from version 4.5 to 4.8 which is broken in wine from version 5.12

How to install DotNet on wine

Download wine version 5.11 from this link » [link]
Extract it as it was explained before » [link]
If you want to install Microsoft .Net framework version 4.5 type this code in the terminal:

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WINE=~/Downloads/wine-5.11-staging-amd64/bin/wine winetricks dotnet45 -q

Change dotnet45 with whatever version you want to install like:

dotnet452
dotnet46
dotnet461
dotnet462
dotnet471
dotnet472
dotnet48

How to use Proton GE outside of Steam

There are a few things you need to know first before we start:

wine and winetricks need to be installed on you system.
You need to install DXVK and VKD3D-Proton manually.
VKD3D is integrated in Wine, but in order to use it, you need to set dxgi to builtin using winecfg after installing DXVK.
VKD3D and VKD3D-Proton are separate projects.
You can not use Proton launch options outside of Steam, but you can use Wine environment variables instead.
You need to define a separate wineprefix.
You need to define the location of the executable of Proton / Proton-GE.
You need to set all xinput libraries to builtin using winecfg, that help using controllers outside of Steam.

(1) To install Proton-GE, check this tutorial » [link]

(2) You can install dxvk using winetricks:

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WINEPREFIX=~/proton-ge WINE=~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/Proton-6.13-GE-1/files/bin/wine winetricks dxvk191

(3) To install VKD3D-Proton, check this link » https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton#building

You can run any game using Proton-GE like this:

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WINEPREFIX=~/proton-ge ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/Proton-6.13-GE-1/files/bin/wine [location_of_the_executable_of_the_game]

Notes

WINEPREFIX is used to define a separate wineprefix for Proton-GE, otherwise it will use the default wineprefix location » ~/.wine
WINE is used to define the location of the executable of Proton.

Check these tutorials to know more about wine, winecfg, and winetricks:

If you have any questions, write it down below, or you can contact me directly by my E-mail account.

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