pwalker

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/41516848 Technically this should also work in a similar way for other games and other trackers so I guess this community fits also for this little guide.

I am fairly new to Linux gaming after I recently switched fully to Linux (Fedora 42). As you probably know, most steam games will run in Linux out of the box thanks to proton and Valve.

However in case you want to run games like MTG Arena together with a third party tracker like Untapped.gg things become a little tricky. As I only found outdated threads on reddit I thought we might as well need one here on Lemmy.

Quick summary for beginners: We want to install the Untapped companion Windows (exe file) inside the steam/proton environment that is used by Steam to simulate windows. These simulated environments are called "prefixes" and this was already used before Steam/proton by the popular windows emulator called Wine. Which is why you will sometimes read about "wine prefixes" or "proton prefixes" or tools like protontricks or winetricks that help you to configure those prefixes. Also you will read about "verbs" which are little "helper scripts" or recipes for winetricks/protontricks.

I found this neat little verb someone created for the untapped companion and it probably should work very easily in case you have the flatpak version of steam and protontrick:https://github.com/sabedevops/wine_untappedgg_companion

However I have the native Fedora 42 versions of steam and protontricks which is why also explain the manual steps here using the protontricks built in GUI. Whenever you install protontricks it should come with an GUI app in you applications folder. When opening this app it should list all installed steam apps together with their "app IDs". 

For Arena will look like this:

After selecting the Arena app you have to choose a "wineprefix", just select the "default" one, then select "Run an arbitrary executable" and select your manually downloaded Untapped.gg+Companion+Stable+Installer.exe  This will install the Untapped companion in your MTGA prefix.

Now you could always manually start the companion app within the mtga prefix via the proton-launch command and knowing the path of your steam wine prefix (which might be different depending on your distro of if you used flatpak). You can find your wine prefix folder also via opening the protontricks UI app and select "browse files" after selecting the default prefix for MTGA. protontricks-launch --appid 2141910 "/home//.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2141910/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Programs/untapped-companion/Untapped.gg Companion.exe"

What we actually want is that the companion automatically starts each time we open MTGA via Stream. As described in the github verb above, the trick is to use the Steam game launch options and use the PROTON_REMOTE_DEBUG_CMD variable which will pause the game start and open anything you pass to it before starting the game. So go into your steam library and add the following to MTGA -> properties -> General -> Launch options. Beware of the different handling of spaces in path names and use the "" after "Untapped.gg" and replace the path with the actual path to the compoanion app that you installed above via protontricks: PROTON_REMOTE_DEBUG_CMD="/home//.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2141910/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Programs/untapped-companion/Untapped.gg\ Companion.exe" %command%

Additional Information: The overlay functionality is actually pretty broken (at least in Fedora 42 using KDE Plasma+Wayland) and will cause random window glitches and not show up most of the time. However there is an option in the Untapped app that let's you open your deck window in a separate window outside of the game: Click on MTG Arena -> Deck Wndows -> enable "show player deck window".  So unfortunately no overlay possible right now but at least I can use the tracking and also see my deck statistics while in a match.

I am fairly new to Linux gaming after I recently switched fully to Linux (Fedora 42). As you probably know, most steam games will run in Linux out of the box thanks to proton and Valve.

However in case you want to run games like MTG Arena together with a third party tracker like Untapped.gg things become a little tricky. As I only found outdated threads on reddit I thought we might as well need one here on Lemmy.

Quick summary for beginners: We want to install the Untapped companion Windows (exe file) inside the steam/proton environment that is used by Steam to simulate windows. These simulated environments are called "prefixes" and this was already used before Steam/proton by the popular windows emulator called Wine. Which is why you will sometimes read about "wine prefixes" or "proton prefixes" or tools like protontricks or winetricks that help you to configure those prefixes. Also you will read about "verbs" which are little "helper scripts" or recipes for winetricks/protontricks.

I found this neat little verb someone created for the untapped companion and it probably should work very easily in case you have the flatpak version of steam and protontrick:https://github.com/sabedevops/wine_untappedgg_companion

However I have the native Fedora 42 versions of steam and protontricks which is why also explain the manual steps here using the protontricks built in GUI. Whenever you install protontricks it should come with an GUI app in you applications folder. When opening this app it should list all installed steam apps together with their "app IDs". 

For Arena will look like this:

After selecting the Arena app you have to choose a "wineprefix", just select the "default" one, then select "Run an arbitrary executable" and select your manually downloaded Untapped.gg+Companion+Stable+Installer.exe  This will install the Untapped companion in your MTGA prefix.

Now you could always manually start the companion app within the mtga prefix via the proton-launch command and knowing the path of your steam wine prefix (which might be different depending on your distro of if you used flatpak). You can find your wine prefix folder also via opening the protontricks UI app and select "browse files" after selecting the default prefix for MTGA. protontricks-launch --appid 2141910 "/home//.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2141910/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Programs/untapped-companion/Untapped.gg Companion.exe"

What we actually want is that the companion automatically starts each time we open MTGA via Stream. As described in the github verb above, the trick is to use the Steam game launch options and use the PROTON_REMOTE_DEBUG_CMD variable which will pause the game start and open anything you pass to it before starting the game. So go into your steam library and add the following to MTGA -> properties -> General -> Launch options. Beware of the different handling of spaces in path names and use the "" after "Untapped.gg" and replace the path with the actual path to the compoanion app that you installed above via protontricks: PROTON_REMOTE_DEBUG_CMD="/home//.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2141910/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Programs/untapped-companion/Untapped.gg\ Companion.exe" %command%

Additional Information: The overlay functionality is actually pretty broken (at least in Fedora 42 using KDE Plasma+Wayland) and will cause random window glitches and not show up most of the time. However there is an option in the Untapped app that let's you open your deck window in a separate window outside of the game: Click on MTG Arena -> Deck Wndows -> enable "show player deck window".  So unfortunately no overlay possible right now but at least I can use the tracking and also see my deck statistics while in a match.

I normally don't use Firefox very often but wanted to give it a try again. My usual default browser would be Vivaldi (which is unfortunately Chrome based). Anyway I usually have turned on my NordVPN system wide (Windows 10 Edu V. 22H2), which works fine on Vivaldi. I turns out it does have a weird side effect on Firefox. The DNS resolution for "google.com" just doesn't work anymore. Any http request runs into a timeout. Strangely it works on any other google domain like google.de or google.org, also I couldn't find any other domain to reproduce this behavior. Now this wouldn't be such a big deal if google's reCaptcha wouldn't also be used by a lot of webpages and the api is hosted on google.com so basically the reCaptcha box just never appears and I'm stuck on those pages.

I tested it with v. 123.0 (64-bit), in private mode, in safe mode, FF portable 115.8.0 ESR and it is all the same strange behavior.

NordVPN also does have a FireFox Extension and using this extension everything works again.

Also tested it with the FF MacOS version and NordVPN client, here it works.

I can't really explain this behavior other than some weird Firefox behavior together with NordVPN or some interaction with the Windows 10 vpn layer.

Can someone confirm this behavior on Windows? I assume other VPN providers like Mozilla VPN don't have this?

[Update]: Forgive me it was late yesterday. I still can't explain the behavior exactly but for sure the reason is the split tunneling feature of NordVPN. I had it enabled as I only wanted certain apps to go through the VPN and Firefox wasn't on that list. So actually the NordVPN client should have treated FF routed through my default system connection and FF should just not have been routed through the VPN. Now it is more likely that it is some split tunneling bug that for whatever reason the google.com requests are treated differently by NordVPN/FF and are kind of blocked on my side or wrongly routed and never reach the google server.

[Update2]: As @LucidBoi@lemmy.world noted in the comments, the problem is not only related to Firefox and therefore wrong in this community. It actually also works on other browsers as well. It seems to be a problem of the windows NordVPN client and/or Windows 10. As soon as you use the split tunneling feature and exclude a browser from it, suddenly google.com doesn't work anymore. Very strange, but that's it. Actually for Firefox you should just use the NordVPN add-on anyway as it gives you a lot of flexibility to use split tunneling per domain, which actually works also for google.com then.

I just noticed that you can't access any mod tool like the "mod queue" from this app. I guess it's a niche use case but it would be convenient if mods could use this app also.

version 1.0.88 How to reproduce:

1. Go to settings > default comment sorting option > select comment sorting preference "sort comments by top"
2. Go to your inbox and select one of your replies
3. click on "view full post"
4. full post opens but comment sorting is not by "top"
5. coment sorting still works when you access the post not from inbox

Why call it "Connect for Lemmy"? It's so inconvenient and not catchy at all. Might even be misunderstood by most search enaginges when typing in the current name of the app. Just call the app like this community "Lemmyconect"

I love the app but it seems to be very inefficient with caching of data, especially pics. I've been surfing c/pics for a few time and very quickly got the mobile data usage alarm, was almost 2Gb. It seems the app is loading all full pictures of the whole community. Not sure how other apps are doing or how it was done by reddit apps but I'd assume the only preload a lower resolution version of the thumbnails of the pics.

Also it seems lemmyconnect is not properly caching the thumbnails. So if I click on a post in the overview to seen the comment, then go back to the overview, all the pic thumbnails have to be reloaded. You can easily see this when you try surfing in low bandwidth situations.

Just woke up for my final hike

Am on a hiking trip around Salzburg right now. Greetings to my new Lemmy friends.