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I am using Steam on Linux and am very happy. I have purchased many Windows-Only games on Steam which play flawlessly on Linux/Steam with Steam's Wine-implementation called Proton.

Now I would like to "import" Steam-external games like Starcraft2 and run them with the help of Proton.

Can I somehow do that - or do I need to install a separate copy of Wine?

2 Answers 2

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I found an interesting reply on Proton's github. Apparently there is a way to run non-steam games with just the Steam client.

Do these steps once:

  • Go to your Steam settings, "Steam Play" on the left and Enable Steam Play. Optionally, Enable it for all titles too, so that you need fewer steps for each game you want to add (though I suggest against it, see below).
  • After Steam restarts go to the "Tools" section of your Library and install any Proton versions you are going to use. If you don't know, select the most recent one (currently Proton 4.2-2 is the latest).

For each game:

  • Go to Steam's main window, on the left-down corner click "Add a Non-Steam Game...", "Browse...", change the File type to "All Files", find your game's Windows executable and add it to your library.

  • (Optional) Right-click the new entry, go to its Properties, name it as you please in the first field and select "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool".

    • Note that if you didn't choose to Enable Steam Play for all titles in the settings, this step if REQUIRED otherwise it's going to run using your system's wine version.

    • Even if you selected that, you may want to try different versions for each game and see what works better. Remember to have the corresponding Proton version installed from Tools, otherwise, it falls back to system wine again.

  • Launch and enjoy.

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  • Thanks! Sadly Battle.net-Setup.exe does not start. Also there is no error message so I would know what went wrong. Btw, I don't have Wine installed on my OS. I only have it in Steam. First I added Battle.net-Setup.exe to my Steam library. It didn't seem necessary to install Proton via Tools...right clicking on the Battle.net-Setup.exe entry > Properties still showed the option to run it via Proton. Sadly it didn't launch. Then I installed Proton 4.2 via Tools. Still it didn't launch. On top I cannot uninstall Proton 4.2 from Tools now (the error mentions shared content) Commented Apr 4, 2019 at 10:14
  • Unfortunately my knowledge of Linux is limited and SC2 having its own launcher is a challenge. What if you install it through Wine but run the executable for SC2 through steam? Just add SC2 itself and not the b.net launcher?
    – Xander
    Commented Apr 4, 2019 at 10:26
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If you look on the wine official website, you will find that Starcraft II is supported out of the box with Wine. This means that all you have to do (in theory) is install Wine, then install StarCraft II, and it should work without any playing around with the configuration.

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  • I know. Still, I don't want to install Lutris or Wine. I have a Wine install inside Steam which is very well supported. I did hear that it is possible to bring Non-Steam Games inside Steam...so maybe there is an option to do it with SC2 and re-use Steam's Wine? Commented Apr 3, 2019 at 20:44
  • Also from my experience with Wine in 2012-2016, the Steam fork of Wine is much much better for games. Starcraft2 was just ONE example of games I want to run. There are many more. Commented Apr 3, 2019 at 20:45

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