Installing Games

[MenschMartin]

Hello,

I have been trying to install games on my Thinkpad T530 with nvidia nvs5400m and Kubuntu 22.04.

And this makes me feel a little helpless...
I have a lot of GOG games.

Very few Steam games.

In my gog library I have quite some old dosbox games, that I would expect to work.
Some had linux installers and were fine.

But I am struggling to get those others working on dosbox linux.
At least my not gog games Mechanized Assault and Exploration went over without too much problems.

Steam games worked good so far.
But gog games...

I managed to run about half of the Cossacks game with heroic game launcher.

The Mount and Blade Warband Linux from Gog did not start. Found somewhere that wayland does not let it run. xorg would. Though I have no clue what that means and why one is linux and one not.

Some game may have run, but the newer Proton Versions seam to use Vulkan which my grapics driver does not support and older proton version are not available in the heroic game launcher or better the heroic game launch tester... It all starts with Version 7...

Now I have about 20 games of 200 running. After investing a lot of time...

At least I got winauth running with some very detailed step by step guide.

The worst part of this all is, that if I look at protondb they show most games as gold, even though they do not run at all...

Now what is the recommended way to make games run on linux without making each a google marathon?

[claydoh]

Wayland may or may not be a factor. it is a different display protocol that eventually will replace xorg. Basically, you can ignore it, as it won't be relevant unless you try to log in with it instead og xorg.
The games will still run in xorg, even in wayland, anyway.

It may well take a marathon, as what games work, and how, will entirely depend on each individual game, as well as the specific setup of the external tools and libraries.
The best bet would be to replicate your dosbox, wine, and any other tools configurations and versions as you did elsewhere before.

The worst part of this all is, that if I look at protondb they show most games as gold, even though they do not run at all...

protondb is specifically for games running under steam. They have basically done that marathon for you. Plus all the tweaks and configs users have used there to improve things.