I have a desktop and a steam deck. I would like to setup some old games I have on disc on the desktop. Then compress them and decompress on my Steam Deck without doing the full install again. I understand that with wine/proton prefixes they should be installed to a “fake c:/ windows hierarchy” can I just compress that and copy to a different Linux machine? Does it save which proton version was used? If I use something like Lutris or bottles can I import into them?
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?
Lutris uses separate prefixes and doesn’t do any deduplication. You will need a separate tool for that or just use a filesystem like btrfs that supports deduplication.
I’ve never used bottles, so I don’t know how it handles deduplication.