How Do You Install Non-Steam Windows Games With Proton?
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Altefier Aug 29, 2021
This is a very generic question but I am completely unable to find any info on this whatsoever

I know you can RUN non-Steam Windows games with Proton by simply adding the .exe as a non-Steam game and then launch it from Steam. But what if I purchased said game outside of Steam and it needs to be installed first? I've used applications to install Windows games for Wine in the past but when it comes to Proton I'm entirely stuck.
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on_en_a_gros Aug 29, 2021
You have to point to the installer first and activate the compatibility tools in the settings. Once it is installed you have to point it to the .exe files that was installed. It's explained in French in in this YouTube video, but it should be comprensive just by watching what he's doing.
Hope that it helps.
whizse Aug 29, 2021
If it's a stand alone game, not needing the actual store bits, it might be easier to simply extract the game from the installer, or run the installer with Wine and the then point Proton to the install dir.
Altefier Aug 29, 2021
It does, thank you.

I'll try shortly but I'm not sure if it will work for me because... not strictly related, but I ran into a different issue. I just switched to Manjaro, I was previously on Pop_OS where most games I installed via Proton worked fine (latest and experimental) such as Rocket League, but now those games like Rocket League refuse to run. Steam says "launching" and then terminates the process. Also, when I emable Steam Big Picture mode, it freezes the entire OS and I have to CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to save it.

I'm really confused as to what's going on. It's the latest Manjaro XFCE and since it's brand new I've done virtually no changes to it.
on_en_a_gros Aug 29, 2021
If you have non steam windows games you could try to run them through lutris with proton if steam doesn't work with steam. If neither of them work, maybe check your graphic driver and if the vulkan "depency" are installed like vulkan icd loader.
Altefier Aug 29, 2021
Yeah, I don't even know what GPU drivers I got nor how to check. I launched the Manjaro Live USB with the proprietary drivers but I have no idea if that's what it ultimately installed. Google is strangely unhelpful with this issue
scaine Aug 29, 2021
You could try installing "inxi", then run inxi -GMS which will give you a really nice, short system summary. You can paste it in here, as a code block. Should tell us everything we need to steer you in the right direction.

Here's mine.
scaine@groovy:~$ inxi -GMS
System:    Host: groovy Kernel: 5.13.12-xanmod1 x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: GNOME 3.38.4 Distro: Pop!_OS 21.04 
Machine:   Type: Desktop Mobo: ASUSTeK model: TUF GAMING X570-PLUS v: Rev X.0x serial: <superuser required> 
           UEFI: American Megatrends v: 1407 date: 04/01/2020 
Graphics:  Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Navi 10 [Radeon RX 5600 OEM/5600 XT / 5700/5700 XT] driver: amdgpu 
           v: kernel 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 driver: loaded: amdgpu,ati unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,radeon,vesa 
           resolution: 3840x2160 
           OpenGL: renderer: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (NAVI10 DRM 3.41.0 5.13.12-xanmod1 LLVM 12.0.1) 
           v: 4.6 Mesa 21.2.1 - kisak-mesa PPA


You can see my kernel (5.13.12-xanmod1), my display server (x11), and the version of the driver (Mesa 21.2.1). Since you mentioned proprietary graphics, I'm assuming you're running Nvidia, so it'll look a bit different.

Edit to add: although, if you're not sure how to run command line stuff or what driver you're on, I'm curious why you would move from Pop_OS with its custom Gnome environment, sane defaults and Pop Shop, and instead install Manjaro with XFCE. You're making a big hill for yourself in my opinion. I've been using Ubuntu derivatives since 2005 and I found Manjaro to be mostly baffling and ran into a variety of issues I just couldn't fix. Not to say don't use it - it's popular, so it must work for some folk... but it's hardly a starter distro.

Last edited by scaine on 29 August 2021 at 11:06 pm UTC
Altefier Aug 30, 2021
Inxi was pre-installed, actually

System:
  Host: Alam0-Manjaro Kernel: 5.13.12-1-MANJARO x86_64 bits: 64 
  Desktop: Xfce 4.16.0 Distro: Manjaro Linux 
Machine:
  Type: Desktop Mobo: Micro-Star model: B450 TOMAHAWK MAX (MS-7C02) v: 1.0 
  serial: <superuser required> UEFI: American Megatrends v: 3.40 
  date: 10/25/2019 
Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA TU104 [GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER] driver: nouveau v: kernel 
  Device-2: Oculus VR Rift CV1 Sensor type: USB driver: uvcvideo 
  Device-3: Oculus VR Rift CV1 Sensor type: USB driver: uvcvideo 
  Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.13 driver: loaded: modesetting resolution: 
  1: 1050x1680~60Hz 2: 1920x1080 3: 1280x1024 
  OpenGL: renderer: NV164 v: 4.3 Mesa 21.2.1 


Okay yeah, so it's using the nouveau drivers instead of the proprietary ones... in all previous distros I used this was easy to figure out but with Manjaro I wasn't able to find an application that would give me any such info, let alone allow me to install the proprietary drivers via a GUI.



QuoteEdit to add: although, if you're not sure how to run command line stuff or what driver you're on, I'm curious why you would move from Pop_OS with its custom Gnome environment, sane defaults and Pop Shop, and instead install Manjaro with XFCE. You're making a big hill for yourself in my opinion. I've been using Ubuntu derivatives since 2005 and I found Manjaro to be mostly baffling and ran into a variety of issues I just couldn't fix. Not to say don't use it - it's popular, so it must work for some folk... but it's hardly a starter distro.

I'm not new to Linux, I've technically been using it since 2013 when Valve did the Tux cosmetic promotion for installing Team Fortress 2 on Linux, and I downloaded Ubuntu like they recommended at the time. I've used various distros such as Mint, Puppy Linux, Debian and Pop!_OS since then.

I've used Linux extremely sparsely however; since I most use my computer for playing games, Windows has seemed like the best option as of yet. Although I use Linux from time to time to play old Windows games which are extremely difficult to get running on Windows 10. Oftentimes, they just ran on Wine with no tinkering required, this is what Linux excelled at for me, but I haven't engaged much with the OS apart from games. Until two years ago I was actually triple booting Windows 10, 7 and Linux depending on which game works best with what, but I came to the conclusion that this was a bit too much of a waste of disk space and got rid of 7.

The reason I switched to a new distro this time was because I wanted an OS more suitable for my preferences, including an easy way to disable the compositor to get rid of forced Vsync. Also, Pop!_OS was acting up after the big update it had, it took about five minutes to boot and I couldn't find a solution to that problem. So if I was going to have to reinstall, I figured I might as well try something new

Anyways, every distro I've used until now came with some GUI application to display system info including GPU drivers but I was unable to find something like this in Manjaro.

I know how to use command line interfaces, the problem is knowing which commands exist and what they do. This stuff is extremely difficult to figure out via Google for some reason. It's not like I haven't used the CMD or Powershell in Windows a ton, but anything you'd want to do in Windows is very easy to find via search engines as opposed to Linux, presumably because of its comparatively tiny market share.
Altefier Aug 30, 2021
Alright, I figured out how to get the proprietary drivers, and this seems to have fixed every issue. Steam doesn't crash anymore and Proton games run as expected. Thanks everyone.

EDIT: Should probably say how. There is a GUI application you can find in your start menu called "Manjaro Settings". In "Hardware Configuration", right click "video-nvidia" and select "Install". When that's done, reboot your computer and it should now be using the proprietary drivers.

So there's actually a very simple, user-friendly way, it was just hidden in a location I didn't expect nor think of. No terminal necessary :-)

Well, sort of user-friendly. I'd never have figured out what to do with an entry "video-nvidia" should I have found it on my own, it could certainly be far more descriptive than it is.

Last edited by Altefier on 30 August 2021 at 8:35 pm UTC
scaine Aug 30, 2021
Yeah, I ran into a power of problems with Manjaro, but I'm glad it's working for you. Hopefully this is a longer stint on Linux for you and maybe one day you'll make the jump full time. You never know.

Quoting: AltefierI know how to use command line interfaces, the problem is knowing which commands exist and what they do. This stuff is extremely difficult to figure out via Google for some reason. It's not like I haven't used the CMD or Powershell in Windows a ton, but anything you'd want to do in Windows is very easy to find via search engines as opposed to Linux, presumably because of its comparatively tiny market share

Quite the opposite for me, I've found. So much disinformation and so many various versions of Windows, any time I need to research something, it's just so painful. But between the Arch wiki and AskUbuntu, I've almost always found the answer, if one exists. I guess you get used to what you know though. It's been a while since I did anything truly technical on Windows - my only interface with it now is as a work machine and I don't have administrator on it, so the things that annoy, I can't do anything about anyway. I can change the default browser at least, although I have to do so after every update for some reason. Same old windows. So glad I'm outta that rat race.

Good luck with Manjaro!
Altefier Aug 31, 2021
So unfortunately, GOG Galaxy refuses to run with Proton, at least when starting it through Steam. The installation worked, but it doesn't want to launch. Or it does, but quickly terminates. I think Wine probably works fine with older games from GOG, but I'm having issues finding out if there's a way to install GOG games while keeping native launcher functionalities such as cloud saves. I tried Mini Galaxy but it doesn't look like cloud saves are working, I might be mistaken though.





Quoting: scaineQuite the opposite for me, I've found. So much disinformation and so many various versions of Windows, any time I need to research something, it's just so painful. But between the Arch wiki and AskUbuntu, I've almost always found the answer, if one exists. I guess you get used to what you know though.
No I mean really, I'm pretty sure that's not how this goes... I'm not sure if you purely mean researching advanced things, but I'm talking primarily about simple things that a casual user would want to do. Or me, since like a casual user I would start with simple things like setting up my workspace.

Just for example, I just searched "how to change monitor layout Windows 10" and literally the first search result, shown in the Google page itself, is a detailed step-by-step method with images. Like "1. Open Settings. 2. Click on System. 3. Click on Display. 4..." etc.

When I do the same search for Manjaro "how to change monitor layout manjaro" the first search results are people with random issues like "New monitor always appears to the right", "Problem with dual monitor setup layout", "News manjaro", "Install Display Managers"...
Somewhere down the line there's a link to an Arch Wiki for xrandr. You may not even realize this is relevant to you if you are not familiar with terms like "Arch" or "Xrandr", after all you're a casual user who just needs to set up their monitor layout. Then this wiki may show or explain how to do it somewhere on that page, but it's not friendly to newcomers either. Instead of step-by-step explanations they just assume you know everything else about Linux already.
Where it describes how to change the monitor layout, it just says "you can use xrandr to do so" and then plumps down the commands. New users won't know how to open terminals. People can make more sense of GUI to guide them rather than cryptic text, and if you need to use the CMD or Powershell most Windows articles have much better guides as well. Maybe someone is able to find an Xrandr GUI in their distro in the start menu after reading that but it's not in Manjaro.

And that's basically what I mean, the main reason it is so hard to find what you need for Linux is 1. The smaller userbase leading to less, and less relevant search results, and 2. how seemingly everyone and everything presupposes new users already know everything about Linux and instead of telling you step by step how to get to a terminal, what this terminal does and the exact mouse clicks for the thing you need to achieve, they just say "Do this thing with sudo".

Learning Windows was much easier because you learn by doing via repeating exact steps you can find on the internet for any common thing you may want to do, and once you know how to do these steps you can branch out and try things on your own after you slowly understand what you're doing. But Linux requires a huge time investment immediately from the get-go and dumps all things to know on you at once. Where to understand what people are even saying you have to google every single term like terminal, sudo, xrandr etc. that people just throw around without explaining them for the simplest of things, and every time you find an article or wiki page these terms are explained with even more cryptic terms that you don't understand. It's kind of a nightmare maze experience. That's just no good way for people to learn on their own. There's a reason I've dabbled with Linux as a casual user since 2013 and I'm still confused about most things that should be simple to do (although to be fair, yes, I'm only using it to play old games)



As far as advanced stuff goes, it usually didn't work in Linux for me either. Many guides for installing software you find use outdated commands which are deprecated, or it just doesn't work because you are missing dependencies which for whatever reason are not included with said software or at least checked whether they're missing; half the time I'd end up with a borked installation of something.
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