Can't download Windows games on Steam Deck.

[NB-2022]

Hello,

The itch.io application is known to have support for downloading windows games on a Linux system (as some games don't have a Linux port). The problem is that the Steam Deck uses Proton within the Steam App, rather than a system level in install of Wine (Requiring a user to add a itch.io game as a non-steam game to play it on the Steam Deck).

It would be good if the requirement for a system-wide install could be bypassed, by either detecting that a system running Steam OS does not require this or adding an option in the settings menu.

[leafo]

It would be good if the requirement for a system-wide install could be bypassed, by either detecting that a system running Steam OS does not require this or adding an option in the settings menu.

In order the itch app to run a windows executable it has to have something it can execute the game through, eg. wine. If SteamOS is providing a different executable for proton then we can attempt to start the game through that.

[grifdail]

I think a good first step would be : allow the download of window version / build of a game from a Linux version of itch. Some sort of checkbox in the advanced settings for instance.
I didn't find how to do that. From there we could manually add the game to steam in desktop mode.

Even better would be if steam would allow either:

• other software to add themselves to the steam Library.
• Other software to launch game with proton without going through steam.

There's also the option to include another version of proton in the app itself but that may be overkill. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

[radgeRayden]

I would like for itch to have a similar option to how Heroic does it, where it allows you to set a default and per game wine executables/distributions. It also looks into common places where they would be installed, like lutris config directories, but that isn't an absolute requirement.

[UndarkAido]

Steam Rom Manager could handle adding Itch games to Steam if only we were able to download them

[mxnemu]

Here is the code that determines if windows download should be enabled.

You need to add proton or whatever the steam wine executable is called to this check.

[benklop]

There is a wine flatpak that could be used - the binary name it provides is org.winehq.Wine - specifically, if that name was searched in addition to just wine, then installing the flatpak would make it all work.

EDIT: doing this seems to allow the games to download and install, but so far i haven't gotten them to actually run using this method.