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I have heard that to run non-native Steam games on Linux you have to have a separate Steam installation running in Wine for each game, and that you can't just install Steam once in Wine and then have more than one game installed through it that runs.

Is this the case? If so, then is it the fault of Steam, WINE, or both? Is this something that the responsible party is looking into and planning to deal with, or is this something that cannot be resolved? And why is this the case?

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    "I have heard that..." where did you hear it? What if I said Shuttleworth was actually draining your accounts by fractions of $APPROPRIATE_CURRENCY every year, would you post on Ask Ubuntu about that?
    – muru
    Sep 13, 2015 at 21:09
  • @muru: Someone just mentioned it in the chat room once and I remembered it, but couldn't find it, nor anything about it so I thought I would ask...
    – user364819
    Sep 13, 2015 at 21:15
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    @muru - I think he was referring to hearing somewhere that every time a game was installed with PoL - it installed another copy of wine in a clean winedrive instead of sharing one winedrive with all the winetricks on a shared wine version in one spot.
    – RobotHumans
    Sep 13, 2015 at 21:17
  • @hbdgaf PoL does that for everything, not just Steam.
    – muru
    Sep 13, 2015 at 21:18
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    I know. I wasn't complaining about it. I was just explaining what I think he remembered, however accurate or inaccurate it was.
    – RobotHumans
    Sep 13, 2015 at 21:19

3 Answers 3

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It doesn't. It only requires a new install of steam if it's in a new winedrive like when you're using playonlinux. If you just read the PoL install script and install all the same winetricks in one winedrive - you don't need more than one winedrive or more than one install of steam.

e.g. - I have about 5 games installed in one winedrive, and then I use this to launch that steam/winedrive:

$ cat ~/bin/payday 
export WINEPREFIX=/home/schadenfreude/PlayOnLinux\'s\ virtual\ drives/Payday2
cd ~/PlayOnLinux\'s\ virtual\ drives/Payday2/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam
wine Steam.exe
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As hbdgaf says, no, it doesn't.

However:

Running games on Wine is a tricky business at best. It may well be the case that a setting/tweak for one game would cause problems for another. That's why it's just saner to run individual apps in different WINEPREFIXes. Even though you can set application-specific overrides in winecfg, IIRC that's for DLLs.

It's also easier to reproduce your settings if you want to get some particular game up and running on another system. That's why PoL uses separate prefixes - the scripts use specific versions of Wine and exactly those tweaks which are needed to the get the game running.

Thus, Steam doesn't require anything of you, but the game you're trying to run may well force you to use a separate WINEPREFIX because of a conflict with tweaks for another game you have.

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No, you can put several games on a single wine prefix. Most of your games you should be able to put in the same prefix.

However, if the games require different wine environments, you will need to put them in separate prefixes. (For instance, ones that require Microsoft .Net and ones that require 64bit installs currently cannot be placed in the same prefix.)

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