It used to be common and useful. I did this even after Valve shipped a native Linux TF2 as at the beginning the Wine method gave better results on my hardware. But that time has long passed as Valve has integrated Wine (Proton) and in almost all cases the Linux native builds will outperform Wine (and Steam will let you use the Windows version via Proton if you want even if there is a native Linux build).
So while I suspect that there are still a few people doing this out of momentum, habit or reading old tutorials I am not aware of any good reasons to do this anymore.
Launching Steam games outside of Steam can be very difficult. Some games outright won’t allow it.
Steam provides native libraries such as the overlay, networking and matchmaking tools, achievements… You need to have Windows versions of these which wouldn’t be distributed by default in the Linux version of Steam.
In the past Steam just didn’t run under Linux, so you had no other option.
On Linux you can run native version of Steam, which then uses Wine (actually Proton, which is based on Wine) for running games.
So Steam is not wrapped within Wine, but the games are (if needed/enabled)
There is an option in settings to allow trying all games. By default it only allows it for tested and verified games. But it is a simple checkbox then you can download and run any Windows game.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone run Steam through Wine. What would be the reasons for that?
It used to be common and useful. I did this even after Valve shipped a native Linux TF2 as at the beginning the Wine method gave better results on my hardware. But that time has long passed as Valve has integrated Wine (Proton) and in almost all cases the Linux native builds will outperform Wine (and Steam will let you use the Windows version via Proton if you want even if there is a native Linux build).
So while I suspect that there are still a few people doing this out of momentum, habit or reading old tutorials I am not aware of any good reasons to do this anymore.
But why would you run steam under wine? The games themselves make sense, but steam not so much.
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There used to be a time when Steam for Linux didn’t exist.
Oh, does it allow you on Linux to download all games with the native client? On the Mac that doesn’t work, so then I run it through Wine.
On Linux you can run native version of Steam, which then uses Wine (actually Proton, which is based on Wine) for running games. So Steam is not wrapped within Wine, but the games are (if needed/enabled)
yes, and then you run them using Proton, Valve’s tool based on Wine, specially made for doing exactly that.
There is an option in settings to allow trying all games. By default it only allows it for tested and verified games. But it is a simple checkbox then you can download and run any Windows game.
Steam on Linux has it’s own version of wine(proton) built in.
So you can launch Windows games through the Linux native Steam client.
I haven’t used it in a while, but last time I tried Lutris there were many games that relied on the Steam on Wine runner.