Google is an enormous beast. It doesn’t care about you, or me, or the good of anyone. Sometimes its goals happen to align with a common good for awhile - and so good stuff can come from that. But often their goal do not, and they cause harm while crushing any possible alternative path. And as time goes on, less and less of what google does is for the common good.

For that reason, I think it is unwise to support google. Supporting them further entrenches their power, preventing others from contributing.

The smart engineers you spoke of would still be smart engineers with or without google. Google didn’t create them. They can still contribute with or without Google. But Google did direct their efforts to suit Google’s own needs. - Sometimes that’s also good for other people, but often it is not.

When you switch Wine to a newer version, if the Wine developers have updated Mono or Gecko, Wine will show a popup asking if you want to download them. That happens when your version is outdated or missing.

Hmm. But I’m not manually installing Wine. As far as I’m aware, the only implementations of Wine I have have been installed via Bottles (and via Steam, I guess). So for me, getting a new version of Wine basically means going to the ‘runners’ tab in the Bottles preferences menu, and clicking download on a newer version of something. And that has never shown any kind of popup. It just downloads it, and then I later select that new version in a menu for to choose to use it. So I guess I don’t really know when or if mono and gecko ever get updated. If it is integrated into the runner, I suppose they are upgraded like that - but I suspect they are not, because I manually installed wine mono to resolve that first error message.

I reckon somewhere in this business is where the problem is.

I don’t know how familiar you are with Wine, but for the future remember: dxvk is not the default Wine implementation for DirectX 9–11. By default Wine uses wined3d, which is slower but often more robust. So if something doesn’t work, just try disabling dxvk.

However, in Bottles there’s currently a bug (I think) where to switch properly you first need to change the Wine version to an older one, and then back to the version you actually want to use.

I didn’t know either of those things. And that’s good info for testing purposes. Thank you again.

I believe that Heroic Launcher is good and trustworthy, but nevertheless I don’t particularly want to be giving my GOG details to a third party. And in general, I prefer things to be simple and isolated. So I don’t really want integration with different accounts anyway. I’d prefer to just say “this is the thing I want to install, and this is where I want it to be installed”.

It might be possible to use Heroic Launcher in a way that would suit me, but the one time I did try to install a game with it, it didn’t work and I wasn’t sure where it had tried to install it, or why it didn’t work… and so I basically just went back to what I was doing in the first place - which was installing games in Bottles. (And although I’ve spent ages trying to work out this particular problem, the fact is that I can still play every windows game I have with Bottles, including this new one.)

[edit] I feel like a lot of the replies past this point kind of ignore what I’ve just said. The short of it is that I’m not intending to use Heroic in the near future. I understand and appreciate that many people think its a great product. But different people have different priorities and values. I have my reasons for not using it, and the testimonials don’t really address the topic of this thread. Note: the main goal of the thread is ‘how can understand and fix this bottle problem’, rather than ‘how can I get this game working’. I can already get the game working.

I use Linux on my home computer, and Windows on my work computer (begrudgingly).

Windows 11 does not feel like an ‘upgrade’ at all. One obvious downgrade is that when I try to change the settings when printing a document, the settings window does not fit on the screen. … I don’t blame Windows for that - its a big settings Window. But the issue is that Windows doesn’t allow me resize it, or scroll down on it, or even let me drag it partially of the screen. And so the result is that it is impossible for me to click the ‘ok’ button when I’m done. The only way to save my changes is if I memorise which button is ok, then press ‘tab’ the exact right number of times to have it select the ok button while I can’t see it, and then press enter. That’s pretty crap. I didn’t have that problem on windows 10. (To be honest I don’t remember exactly what was different. Certainly the window with all the settings was the same, but I believe it had a scroll bar, maybe? In any case, I could certainly press the ok button before ‘upgrading’!)

There are so many annoying features in Windows 11 that I’ve spent ages trying to turn off. For example, I was happy with the way windows could be snapped to the top and to the sides of the screen in windows 10. In Windows 11 they’ve expanded that feature, but made it worse. The snapping brings up menus, and behaves different ways at different times. It’s fiddly and harder to predict. It tries to do more, but ends up being less useful because it is unreliable. I’ve disabled most of the differences in the settings, but not all can be disabled.

And there are heaps of weird inconsistencies in Windows 11. For example, when I rename a file in file explore; often stays in the same places even though it is no longer in the correct file order with the new name. So with alphabetically ordered files, there are often a few things that are out of order - because Windows is inconsistent. (Closing and reopening reorders them.) There are also some weird glitches. For example, I often see graphical glitches while using Excel in Windows 11 which I never saw in Windows 10. Things like rows partially overlapping other rows after scrolling, or the outline of the selected cell sometimes not being visible in parts of the document until you minimise and restore the app. It’s pretty bogus. Obviously they’ve tried to change some backend stuff and created some bugs in the process.

Anyway, the point is that it easy to see why someone would be reluctant to ‘upgrade’ to Windows 11.

I also have dual-boot with Mint, because I expected to be using Windows for gaming. It turns out I have never needed to. Every game I’ve wanted to play has worked on Linux; and so my Windows partition has just sat idle.

Thanks a lot for the reply. I’ve been going through each of your suggestions.

Firstly, I’ve tested using a few different runners, including caffe-9.7, ge-proton10-15, wine-ge-proton8-26, kron4ek-wine-10.14-amd64 and a couple of others. In every case, it fails on the original bottle but works on the new. I’ve got what I think are the latest versions of dxvk (2.7.1) and dxvk-nvapi (0.9.0); but not the latest vkd3d (there seems to be a problem with the download of this in bottles at the moment. I have 2.10.).

By default, the game uses dx12. But if I launch it with -dx11 then it uses 11 instead. So I tried disabling vkd3d and launching with that command option as you suggested; again, it fails on the original bottle but works on the new one. When using dx12, there are heaps of messages in the terminal (mostly identical, but with that failure near the end only for the broken version). Whereas with dx11 there are very few messages in the terminal. The broken version gives me 00b4:err:hid:udev_bus_init UDEV monitor creation failed. (every runner gives me 002c:err:wineboot:process_run_key Error running cmd L"C:\\windows\\system32\\winemenubuilder.exe -r" (126). - but I seem to get that all the time on every app even when it works fine. So I assume that is irrelevant.)

I’m not sure what you mean about ‘can’t download the newest Mono’; because I’m not sure when / what might be trying to download Mono. Do you mean bottles itself, or the game, or something else - I’m not really sure how this stuff works exactly. In this case, I installed mono within the bottle manually by downloading and msi and running it in the bottle. I wasn’t able to find it in the dependencies list inside Bottles, so that’s why I did it manually. But I got the link to the msi download from the bottle dependency list on github. In both of the bottles, the windows uninstaller list tells me that I have 10.1.0 of the Wine Mono runtime.

All the mono stuff looks right to me, but given that I don’t know what I’m doing, I reckon its quite likely that the root of the problem is related to that stuff. Maybe I didn’t install it correctly or something.

I tried deleting the cache, and that didn’t work. I also tried copying the cache from the working version to the broken version; that didn’t work either.

Anyone, thanks again for your thoughts and info on this. I feel like the underlying message in what your saying is that I should just accept that it works in the new one and not the old one - and take that to be the standard practice for how I should do it anyway! Which isn’t exactly what I want, but perhaps it’s the best answer I’m going to get.

I get by alright without a smart phone. Over the years I’ve seen more and more “just scan this QR code to do such-and-such”, and I ignore them. I think you’re right that it is a lot of added friction compared to using a phone. A lot of stuff is instantly at your fingertips with your phone.

But to be honest, I really truly think that a bit of friction is a good thing. Without it, we just slide helplessly into oblivion. Or, less metaphorically speaking, the friction turns an automatic decision into a deliberate one. The friction pushes people to think about their actions and choices a little bit. And that’s generally a good thing - even if its a little bit harder.

<insert "GNU + Linux" copypasta here>

I reckon there are better free ways to waste your time, and many don’t require moral corruption.

Company says that everyone should give them money and stop using competing products.

Obvious thing to say in the land of self-interest.

It’s a short hand way of communicating. Like saying that a good search engine tries to find the most relevant sites. Or a streaming algorithm tries to recommend videos that you’ll watch. It’s not that we are saying these things are conscious or whatever. We’re just describing what they do.

It’s not so much an aversion to algorithms as it is a version to corporate controlled algorithms (which are often targeting highly questionable metrics).

So what you’re saying is that if we just keep switching to different data sources, we could get above 50% in less than two months!