Linux Support Update?

I don't use Lutris due to it's tendency to break stuff sometimes, all it's doing is managing a wine prefix. Some people like to have one single wineprefix with everything in it, I prefer one dedicated for each game. Have Ubuntu on a spare laptop, apt-get wine, wine64, winetricks. Use wintricks to create a new wine64 prefix for FFXI, the used winetricks to put the required libraries inside. Copied the FFXI installer to a temp folder under the c folder inside the prefix. Winetricks and launch explorer, double click on the install and it installs just like on windows. Same for windower, then make sure that atomos's dx9 proxy is inside the pol folder and it works cause dxvk is magical.

Lutris tries to automate all that, and it works usually, but when it breaks you need to spend awhile debugging why it broke. With FFXI not only are we installed a very old game (DX8), we are also trying to install windower on top of it with all the addons and so forth that requires.

Decided to boot up the Ubuntu 24 laptop and see how I have it setup. Inside the Wine64 prefix windower.exe starts up, updates itself, then crash's itself. Running pol.exe from the same prefix starts up FFXI which updates and runs fine. Likely there is some sort of new dependency on the windower.exe side so I'll dig around until I can find whatever MS library it's calling.

Yes, I generally don't recommend doing it manually since terminal is scary for most users. So Lutris, Steam or Heroic Game Launcher is usually my recommendation for frontend. Supposedly Bottles works too but I never got it working. Lutris script just do it for you, only time I've run into issues has been with Arch (like two months ago) since they ship a much newer version of Wine and disabled upstream Wine32.

AFIK Windower expects dotnet48 and gdiplus. For good measure I usually install corefonts and consolas separately, and dotnetdesktop8 if I know I will run other applications inside same prefix. Windower required dotnet48 some time ago so if you haven't touched that setup in a minute that's likely it.

For POL Proxy which, obviously is optional I run as a docker container https://github.com/Mandracord/polProxy

Ok just found the dependency change, I had DotNet 4.62 and had to use winetricks to install 4.8.


If someone is really gonna be doing gaming on linux, then they really should understand how wine / wine64 / winetricks works under the hood so they can more easily troubleshoot issues that arise. All those auto-installers work well on either popular games with a large user base to support, or really old games that do not change.

FFXI on Linux without Windower is really easy, it's requirements are known and have not changed in over a decade. But adding Windower support complicates the matter as not only is Windower not supported by SE, but it frequently changes. Someone on the Lutris / ProtonDB / etc.. side would have to be constantly updating and validating their installation and configuration methods. I doubt they are so it's entirely up to the FFXI community to manage that.

Prime example is that these instructions are wrong.
https://docs.windower.net/linux/

dotnet462 should be replaced with dotnet48, otherwise windower.exe throws errors on start.

Oh I agree, it just I lost count how many times people freaks out when you mention run a basic <insert your package manager> command.

I might just be biased from working with RHEL and using Linux desktops for more than a decade.

Same here, but if people are going to take the plunge, then the distro can only hold their hands so long. It would be different if the software / game was native to linux, then just let the package manager take care of it. Since we are emulating a NT operating environment, then stuffing windows games and supporting libraries into it, we need to get our hands dirty.

It's also why I usually recommend Ubuntu as the starting linux distro to people. Everything and I mean everything works on it without needing third party repositories or package managers. A single command installs wine / wine64 / winetricks, then someone can just launch winetricks to do the rest. I've gotten virtually every game I own working using this methodology. All it takes is figuring out which libraries you need to load into which games, which is usually available with a simple google search. And since it's Ubuntu, it's guaranteed that package will be available.

Ok so after some messing around, I am able to get FFXI + Windower + Reshade working on both a 32-bit and 64-bit prefix on Ubuntu. Laptop was a quad core intel cpu, 16GB of ram and a 960M with 2GB of VRAM (yes it's old). Display was 1440p, without reshade it was 40~60 FPS, reshade brought it down to 30~40 FPS with my presets. Was also able to get other unspecified third party tools working flawlessly.

Ended up using a simple startup script that an icon on mydesktop points to. Both start-ffxi.sh and start-ffxi64.sh just reference their specific prefixs and install locations.

start-ffxi64.sh

start-ffxi.sh


Winetricks made this easy by just clicking to install the requirements from the FFXI linux page, only using dotnet48. Ubuntu has wine / winetricks available so just apt get wine wine64 winetricks. Then type in winetricks and you can create a new prefix, mount folders into prefixs, and install libraries and run explorer.exe where you install FFXI / Windower exactly the same way you do on MS Windows.