Context:
I'm currently running Debian 12.7 on VirtualBox, trying out linux before I become experienced enough to fully switch my drive to linux. I have an i5 cpu and an amd radeon gpu on my laptop. I run kde-plasma with wayland.
I have sorted out some basic stuff, but my current problem is how to play the few games I have on linux ("Counter-strike 1.6", "Hades I", "MGR: Revengeance", "Minecraft" (t-launcher) and "Outer-Wilds"). I want ro move their game data too, but I think that's a simple copy paste on the appropriate paths. I also want to run a few other programs, possibly Notepad++ and mp3tag, but I think I can figure those if I fugre the games.
I know about the existance of Wine, Winetricks (though not very good at using it), Proton, Lutris, Bottles and Heroic (and PlayOnLinux which I haven't installed).
I have installed Lutris (flatpak), Bottles (flatpak) and Heroic (Appimage).
I have successfully manually installed Notepad++ in Bottles using soda-9.0.1 and semi-successfully manually installed Counter-strike 1.6 on Lutris using wine-ge-8-26-x86_64. The issues with that (among others?) is that I cant look around with the mouse and there is no audio. Apparently some dependencies are missing.
So, this comes to my question:
How do I figure what dependencies to use on my wineprefixes?
Lutris, bottles and heroic theoritically allow you to edit the dependencies, in case something goes wrong. Lutris also is supposed to have some installation scripts on their database.
Is there any way I can find any configuration in text form? How can I then use this text to pick the dependencies myself?
I'm thinking of a list with the recommended changes:
Counter-strike 1.6 installation script:
Install
Windows fonts
Install
cmd
Install
vcrun2013
Do
Xchanges on registry
etc.
Is there such a thing? Is there any other way to figure this out (other than painfully and randomly trying setup combinations)?
I recommend using PollyMC, if you want to play Minecraft for free. It's based on the awesome Prism Launcher, is completely open source, and has more features than the official launcher or TLauncher.
If you want something that's basically the exact same thing as Notepad++, check out Notepad Next. If you want something similar, try Notepadqq, and if you want something better, use Kate. It's developed by the KDE Project btw, and fits in well with the rest of your Plasma desktop experience.
Why did you install Heroic as an AppImage? Just go with the Flatpak, which is more convenient, because you can easily update it from Discover.
https://flathub.org/apps/com.heroicgameslauncher.hgl
I also recommend installing ProtonUp-Qt btw, it's an easy to use graphical tool that lets you manage multiple versions of Proton. Once you have it installed, use it to download the latest version of Proton-GE-custom. It has better performance and compatibility with many games.
When actually installing Linux onto your machine, I would reconsider your choice of distribution though. Debian isn't bad, but there are better, easier, more user-friendly distros for gaming. One example of this is Bazzite. It's pretty similar to Steam OS, and you can't really break it.