Link: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases/tag/GE-Proton11-9

Patch notes in spoiler

Added automatic HDR detection

Hell yeah.

Just reassure me that, when I get time to play wow again, it'll work on my nobara44 setup? Bonus if somehow the bnet vchat works too.

Faugus Launcher has built in one-click BNet installer support. Then you run BNet via Faugus. Voice chat is janky/outright broken last I checked, sorry.

Never tried Retail however, I play on private servers for where I also use Faugus Launcher...which is a nice GUI for UMU-Launcher which is a thing used to run non-Steam games with Proton properly, very basically. From what I hear, playing legit Retail/Forever/Classic all work fine?

Long explanation is UMU is taking advantage of Steam Runtime Tools and Steam Linux Runtime containerisation for non-Steam in the same way Steam does and also gets you access to protonfixes: a shared online database of per-game patches (DXVK options, DLL overrides, env vars, etc.) applied automatically via unified game IDs that Heroic, Lutris, and Bottles also use.

I think my hokey setup is a lutris, but honestly I'm too new at being on a Linux desktop again - having avoided it from 95-2026 - that the wine launcher 'scape is magical and mystical. So I may be on steam as an external app.

I think I need someone to hold my hand, tell me what they did to get Bnet vChat and wow on nobara, and let me paint by those numbers.

(Nobara/fedora has been a great experience compared to 1995, for sure, but my gaming time is increasingly taken up by futzing with the gaming in the hopes of playing instead of playing, and I'd love to just skip the lanpartyism of it all and get to the mindless questy brain candy part)

Blizzard's voice chat is broken under Proton/WINE, it doesn't matter what front end or method you use. It's not specific to Faugus. Be nice if Blizzard cared but they don't.

Edit: Check this out, not merged yet but fresh fixes for BNet via Bottles soon (tm). Couldn't tell you if this will be superior to Faugus method or not since I don't use Battle.net.

https://github.com/bottlesdevs/programs/pull/504

but my gaming time is increasingly taken up by futzing with the gaming in the hopes of playing instead of playing,

You can't skip the learning curve, sorry. It was hard to wrap my head around compatibility layer quirks and prefixes at first but now I'm proficient a year later using CachyOS as a daily driver and I'm even modding games again, usually via Amethyst Mod Manager and CurseForge. Once you understand Linux folder structures it gets easier.

I tried Nobara early on but the perf differences between it and most popular distros is negligible despite the hype and then a bad update bricked my install, so I don't have a positive impression of Glorious Eggroll's side project. Solo dev distro isn't viable IMO.

Some people online say adding sapi.dll to your BNet prefix via winetricks works but it's mixed results. May or may not work. Ehhh find a guide for using winetricks. It's a clunky piece of shit, not gonna lie. It's "GUI" barely masks that it's a command line utility. Like usually I need to click CANCEL on the first menu it pops up which is usually fucking useless in order for the menu I actually want to appear next, but it's unintuitive because a beginner is going to obviously think that closes Winetricks. Nope! Very dumb. It's easy to access via Faugus since it's an option in the settings menu when you right click any game you've added to it. You'll need to learn how eventually if you ever pirate stuff because dependencies like .net or visual c++ will be missing without manually installing them via winetricks. Winetricks downloads/installs that shit for you btw you don't need to hunt down the Windows executables yourself or sapi.dll in this case. Although you can run other executables under the game's prefix, again, in the same settings menu where you'll find winetricks button in Faugus.

If you're wondering wtf a prefix is, it's basically a Windows folder structure in a folder specific to that game. Your AppData/My Documents whatever. Your save files and config files go there like they would on Windows, but also dll files and other Windows specific crap. Which annoys me actually so I use the same prefix for every non-Steam game so I don't need to piss about with multiple prefixes and installing storage space wasting duplicate dependencies and fresh prefixes per game. It's pretty stupid default behaviour IMO but it probably helps devs troubleshoot compatibility layer bug reports when users don't have 40 games all using the same prefix folder idk...I just point Faugus to the same prefix folder I made every time instead of letting it make a new one per game.

Steam doesn't give you any option regarding that so it just makes a user unfriendly folder per game using the Steam ID jumble of numbers (which you can find via SteamDB, although I just sort by recently modified after installing a game if I need to snoop in there for some reason) as the folder name for game prefix folders in Steam's compatdata folder. Really pisses me off they don't just use the fucking name of the game same as it is in steamapps/common where all the games are installed by default or let me use the same prefix as an option within Steam /rant.

The actual game files aren't inside the prefix folder.

Also when you run Windows stuff via Proton/WINE and need to browse to a location outside of the prefix, your Linux home folder is labeled as Drive X. Like say I run something that patches the game executable for a mod or whatever, but my game folder isn't inside the prefix obviously so your actual Linux storage drive is given the drive letter "X" by Proton/WINE while the Windows program thinks the prefix folder is your C: drive / Local Disk. If that makes sense.

Idk hopefully that helps or I confused you more lol?

Ya this is a huge deal for a line item in a patch notes. HDR being (relatively) simple was the only thing really making me miss Windows as an Nvidia user.

Besides some compatbility misses, it's less confusing than Windows is with AutoHDR too now I think. Combined with KDE adding more HDR spec stuff in 6.8, pretty solid experience on Linux at this point. mpv HDR is working with version 0.41.

I just want Firefox HDR now.