nixos-homepage VS lutris

If you care, there won't be any substitute for keeping track of changes to the recommended install and deciding whether you do or don't want to follow suit. Luckily, the site's source is public: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/blob/master/download.tt

Wow! I can't believe I've never noticed that. For many years, the only graphical installation disk was based on Plasma, and I think it also had that tag. NixOS only started shipping a GNOME iso for installation purposes a little over a year ago (for 20.09), and I kinda never noticed.

Looks like the main reason GNOME is recommended for installation media at the moment is that it does a better job of autodetecting HiDPI displays, and then scaling appropriately: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/pull/643

There are also some packaging issues for Qt with NixOS, because Qt plugins fundamentally rely on ‘impurity’ at runtime, and the Qt framework makes promises it doesn't keep about binary compatibility.

Here are some of the relevant issues for historical context and some of the tradeoffs Nixpkgs developers have faced when it comes to handling Qt and KDE packaging:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/86369

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/54525

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/44047

I realize that may not be a fully satisfying answer as to why the GNOME-based installation graphical ISO is recommended over the Qt one because one can imagine that the Qt packaging issue should be resolved some other way, or see the difficulty of packaging Qt plugins and applications in Nixpkgs as fundamentally a Nix defect. But I hope it makes that decision make more sense.

FWIW, afaict Plasma is the more popular of the two major DEs on NixOS, and it's what I've always used on NixOS myself, including now. It is definitely usable.

Looks like there's already a related issue: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/issues/745

You can get Lutris: It's an open source launcher that you login into with GOG account and it will download the games and wrap them with Wine, similar to Steam.

https://lutris.net/

For "normal" games you could look yourself using ProtonDB regarding every game released on Steam and AreWeAntiCheatYet for most multiplayer games. If a game isn't available on Steam you have three possibilities. First if it's available on GOG, Epic Games or Amazon Gaming, you could use the Heroic Games Launcher. Second you could try to run the launchers through Steam itself using once again Proton. Third you could try installing it with a script or tutorial in Lutris or Bottles.

Can I suggest you head over to the lutris.net site and follow the link the lutris discord - with what you are describing, it would take me 20 minutes to get the base battle.net working so you can see what is causing your issue or 3 days back and forwards here. As a hint, your wine version has known issues, and unless you manually installed the lutris 0.5.14 from the git page in Mint, or are running flatpak, you have other issues related to that

Hmmm I remember there was some confusion in Lutris around this, like https://github.com/lutris/lutris/issues/4237 , and I had to do some workaround. But I can't check what exactly right now...

As a data point, you can run a fair number of Windows games under Proton by using Lutris instead of Steam:

* https://lutris.net

* https://github.com/lutris/lutris

It's an OSS game launcher that takes the place of Steam, and you can set things up to run locally so you don't even need an account on their system (lutris.net).

Lutris

[Resources] * Ventoy (for EZ bootable USB sticks) ==> https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html * How to use Ventoy ==> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K64sT0pQc-0 * Rufus (alternative bootable USB stick creator in Windows) ==> https://rufus.ie/en/ * MD5 & SHA Checksum Utility (for validating your ISO downloads) ==> https://download.cnet.com/md5-sha-checksum-utility/3000-2092_4-10911445.html * Steam will be in the repositories (repos) and Proton is apart of Steam * www.protondb.com (lookup Steam game info... see how well it works or if it is in a FUBAR state on Linux) * WINE will be in the repos and can be acquired via WINE HQ. I recommend using the repos, but WINE HQ if you need it ( https://www.winehq.org/ ) * Lutris is a front-end to WINE which makes installing and running non-Steam games easy. It can be found in the repos ( https://lutris.net/ ) * How-To videos for setting up various distros for gaming ( https://www.youtube.com/@IntelligentGaming2020/videos ). I have no affiliation with this channel. He is a Linux user/gamer sharing info. Search his channel for your distro to find the specific how-to videos. * r/linux4noobs (a newbie focused Linux subreddit) * most if not all of the distros will have their own subreddits (ex: r/pop_OS, r/linuxmint, r/fedora, r/manjaro, r/EndeavourOS)

ProtonDB is a community list of Steam games rating their playability. Heroic launcher runs GOG and Epic games. Lutris and Bottles can be used to run everything else.