I have a desktop and a steam deck. I would like to setup some old games I have on disc on the desktop. Then compress them and decompress on my Steam Deck without doing the full install again. I understand that with wine/proton prefixes they should be installed to a “fake c:/ windows hierarchy” can I just compress that and copy to a different Linux machine? Does it save which proton version was used? If I use something like Lutris or bottles can I import into them?
No, actually.
Your game files do not need to be inside a prefix, and I generally do not set things up that way.
Same as on windows you can have your c drive, but then install games to a different drive. You can mount any file location as an additional drive in wine. There is usually already a “z” drive mounted, which gives the prefix access to the filesystem outside the prefix.
This means there’s not actually any need to place things inside the prefix, except for save files which need to be in specific locations like appdata or documents.
So to move things over and run them, you’d just copy the game files anywhere you like. To run it, instead of a location on the c drive, you’d use the corresponding z drive path to the exe.
With bottles, this is super easy. Set up the bottle (and copy any save files into the prefix), then in a file browser go to the game .exe. Right click it, and select run with bottles. Bottles will ask which bottle to run it with, and that’s that. Alternatively, use the “Run executable” button found on the config page of the bottle. For ease of use, add the exe to the bottle as a shortcut.
No need to fiddle with putting all the game files inside the fake c drive.
Setting things up this way means you have your prefix, with save files and such, separate from the huge game install. You can easily delete game installs without touching the save-file-containing prefix, or move the game around wherever you need and still have it work as long as you always run it using that prefix/bottle.
Very informative thanks! Do you have a specific article that you’d suggest on bottles? Or does it have a decent wiki?
Not really. Just install bottles, usage is extremely self-explanatory as the UI is very good.
But if you need more details, the bottles docs are great.
Does it install winetricks and wine? Or is it up to you to install that? I believe the steam comes with it pre-installed though, so it’'s probably not necessary.
Bottles has a wine manager that allows you to install various wine versions, and switch between them. You can also use the system installed version or even more versions installed by protonup-qt.
Winetricks is included.
You have been beyond helpful. Thank you so much!