I have had numerous cases where a non-Steam game would run perfectly through Steam with Proton but the same game wouldn’t even launch through Lutris, even though I used the exact same Proton version. How are they different? Is there anything that Steam does in the background that Lutris won’t?
I’d love if anyone could shed some light on this for me.
Proton isn’t meant to be run outside of Steam at all. If you are running games in Lutris you need to use the “lutris-GE-Proton8-14” you can find in the Lutris wine version manager. There is actually a huge bold disclaimer about that on the proton-ge-custom repo I linked in my last comment.
Yeah I know, I’d just like to know how they are different. I imagine some of it has to do with controller compatibility and steam features such as overlay and achievement integration?
Proton and the Steam Runtime bundle a bunch of different libraries so they all play nice together and are consistent across everybody’s machines. There are the obvious things like DXVK and VKD3D, but the Steam Runtime includes basically all of the system files. It’s not quite the same thing but for the sake of simplicity think of it like a virtual machine. The Steam Runtime is using files from Debian. Lutris on the other hand lets you select DXVK and VKD3D versions independently of the wine version, and uses your system’s actually libraries rather than the standardized Debian ones.
That’s a really helpful explanation, thank you!