Prefixer is a modern alternative to Protontricks that's faster and simpler

Protontricks is a useful tool for Linux gaming, but it's a bit on the slow and complicated side that Prefixer aims to solve.

If you've never used Protontricks directly - it's a wrapper tool that enables you to run Winetricks commands for games running with Proton / GE-Proton. This is useful for launching external executables, adding needed runtime libraries and so on that sometimes games need to actually run properly (or for major standalone mods).

The developer of Prefixer emailed in to note:

For the past 5 months I've been working on a tool called Prefixer. It's a ground-up implementation of winetricks', built for more modern workflows with Python. To summarize the benefits, it has fuzzy matching of game names, "verbs" are defined in JSON5 files for modularity and due to directly editing registry files (no wineserver) its up to 40 times faster than legacy scripts. Main drawback is that currently it only supports system-installed Steam, but it's being worked on.

On the GitHub page these some examples of how simple it is to run various commands like:

prefixer 'cyberpunk' tweak libs.d3dx9.47 # installs d3dcompiler 47 in Cyberpunk 2077
prefixer 'fallout new' run ~/Downloads/fonv_patcher.exe # runs the patcher for Fo:NV
prefixer 'subnautica' tweak loaders.bepinex # installs BepInEx 5 for Subnautica
prefixer 'Balatro' openpfx # opens the wineprefix folder in your file manager

There's also a GIF comparison on the speed and ease of use difference between Protontricks (left) and Prefixer (right):

Seems like an interesting project.

Check it out on the GitHub page.