POL-POM-4 VS Proton-Caller

Should the website www.playonlinux.com indicate the situation more clearly too? Any clarification? What do you think of this "mess"?

I noticed the Call of Duty series on Steam, so I expect most or all of them will play perfectly fine on Linux Mint in Steam. If you want to play Windows games outside of Steam, there are apps like Lutris and PlayOnLinux that make running Windows games on Linux pretty easy. https://lutris.net/ https://www.playonlinux.com/ https://www.protondb.com/search?q=call%20of%20duty

If you will to run a game with Wine, use the release version. You can also use PlayOnLinux (I feel old mentioning this), Lutris, and Bottles (this new one I didn't tested yet).

So, I don't use WINE directly. Instead, I use PlayOnLinux, which hides most of the complexity for you. It handles all the WINE stuff on your behalf. It looks like you're using Ubuntu (please remember to include your Linux version in future!), so you can install PlayOnLinux from the standard repositories.

I believe POL is basically dead, see the repo here: https://github.com/PlayOnLinux/POL-POM-4/commits/master where there were only 10 commits over the last 2 years.

https://www.playonlinux.com/ is a good resource to get Windows Apps up and running easily and has a compatibility list of most software

There are also GUI front-ends for WINE. PlayOnLinux has been around for a long time, and Bottles has recently come on the scene. I don't know how to use WINE, but I can use it because of those two apps.

If you want to know if a game is playable or not and it doesn't have a linux version, then the best way I know of is looking it up on lutris. You can't look on protondb, because it's only for Steam games. You can also look on wine and playonlinux, but they usually aren't as exhaustive as lutris.

I find WINE quite complicated to use, so I use PlayOnLinux, which is a front-end for WINE. Unless you need expert mode, it's way easier to use PlayOnLinux than to have to fiddle with setting up an app directly with WINE.

Since I couldn't get get with Proton 8 to work with Proton-Caller, I went with this standalone script:

Yeah pretty much. Check out Proton Caller: https://github.com/caverym/proton-caller

It's funny, I spent the time to get a windows app launching in proton as I was having some issues with the Linux version that I didn't have the time/patience to diagnose and fix myself.

The launcher is called proton-call ... I changed Steam to use the version of proton to match what the app expected, and it worked pretty cleanly. All said, I do wish it were easier for a separate launcher or third party to include proton as a separate package.

https://github.com/caverym/proton-caller

This tool can be installed through package manager in any Debian and Arch based distros. Also, it can be manually built and complied from source code. (here's the github link if you want to check it now: https://github.com/caverym/Proton-Caller/)

Run it through proton-caller instead of steam itself

As someone who owns a crap ton of games, Proton-GE works for every single game that are supposed to be working on Linux for me. I use it in conjunction with proton-caller, they just work. Not sure where this things are likely to break in subtle ways comes from.

Proton is not inseparably tied to Steam; you can easily run it outside that environment, and projects like proton-caller make it dead simple.

proton-caller https://github.com/caverym/proton-caller

i use proton-caller and find it easier to manage non-steam games that way. heroic game launcher and bottles should be easier though.

Yes it is. But it's not recommended.