Sounds like a guide to me ☺️

The registry is one of the reasons I was thinking I would need separate prefixes that I can copy. But, I also understand that games that actually use the registry are few and far between. If I actually come across one that needs registry edits I can just pack that differently.

You have been beyond helpful. Thank you so much!

Does it install winetricks and wine? Or is it up to you to install that? I believe the steam comes with it pre-installed though, so it''s probably not necessary.

Wow. You wrote a guide on it. I'll try to find time to read it tonight! I do have a question, what if a game makes use of the windows registry? Would that change the prefix?

Very informative thanks! Do you have a specific article that you'd suggest on bottles? Or does it have a decent wiki?

I wonder if it would then be easy to backup the drm-free games to copy elsewhere..?

Thanks for your help!

Cool, thank you! A lot of games on ProtonDB list specific versions of proton that work best for different games. That's why I asked. But, I could just add a file in the root of the prefix with the version that worked (for troubleshooting purposes).

Do you have any preference for Lutris, bottles, vanilla proton?

Makes sense. I wouldn't want to have all of my games in one wine prefix. I would like to keep them separate like steam/proton does. From looking it up, it seems the issue is that there is a lot of duplicate data that would need to be deduplicated. Steam supposedly does symlinks to solve this. But, if the symlinks points to /home/user/ as the base then that would break on /home/deck.

If you have any experience with Lutris/bottles. Do they do separate wine prefixes? If so, how do they handle it?

What about graphics drivers? What if the desktop has an Nvidia GPU and the steam deck is AMD. Would that even matter?

Ah. Different builds for different versions. Makes sense

I have three questions if you have the time. Can you make it go to desktop mode by default, not big picture mode? What DE does it come with, Plasma? Does it come with Lutris or whatever? If I have an .exe installer for an old game, does it come pre-installed with tools to help create the proton wine-prefixes and everything? I imagine the last one would allow Flatpak to be used.