From my understanding, at least one other necessary component is dxvk, and that wine is not enough.
If I dont use lutris or some other manager, how can I game on linux? do I have to configure dxvk? do I need soemthing else too? vulkan?
Is there a guide that explains it?
My issue with lutris is that when I used it before and something didn’t work, or used to work but broke, I was completely at a loss, because I did not understand what all it is doing exactly. It just felt that what lutris is doing is a bit too obfuscated or unclear to me.
Is bottles any better on that front?
Yes. I find prefixes in bottles much easier to configure. It’s all the same stuff, but the UI is simply better IMO.
But if that’s the problem you were having, setting off to manage wine yourself will only make it worse. You would be massively increasing the amount of legwork you’d have to do, not decreasing it.
Also grab protonup while you’re at it. It can download specific proton/wine versions for you and put the files in all the right places for the extra versions to be selectable in bottles/steam.