Is there a painless way to run Starcraft 2 on Linux?

Question

Now that Starcraft 2 is free to play, is there a painless way to run it in Linux?

People have been doing it with different success for years, but the hacks are spead over different resources and often are distro specific.

I have some specific limitations though.

Since I saw file names like Starcraft64 on a Windows install of Starcraft 2, I would like to run it on a clean 64bit Linux distribution without the multilib 32bit compat layer installed.

I am fine with either 64bit stable wine or the 64bit staging wine, no wrappers like PlayOnLinux or Lutris should be involved.

Is it possible to install and run Starcraft 2 this way?

So far I went to starcraft2.com website and downloaded the installer, but when I ran the file tool on it, I was told it is a 32bit Windows executable, so obviously it won't be able to run under pure 64 wine.

Answer 1

Yes there is, and I'm amazed on how easy that is. You can do all installation, download and configuration with flatpack (a similar installer like Ubuntu snaps).

This is the tutorial for Ubuntu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexlarsson/flatpak
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install --install-recommends flatpak
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists winepak https://dl.winepak.org/repo/winepak.flatpakrepo
flatpak install winepak com.blizzard.StarCraft2

You can also do the same following this guide for other distros.

Seat back relax, that's it. After it finishes:

flatpak run com.blizzard.StarCraft2

Answer 2

I was able to run the installer and load the battle.net login normally with a 64bit wine prefix, so I think it should work fine. This was done on Ubuntu 18.04, with wine-4.0-rc2. As a side note, I did have the multilib 32bit compat layers installed, but I don't know how much that affects 64bit wineprefixes.

Answer 3

This answer is outdated now. I am now playing sc with the wine version included in ubuntu for years without mayor issue. Probably Blizzard stopped upgrading sc ;-).

Short answer no. It takes several ppa/and git repos and the install seems to change from version to version of Starcraft. So it is always painful. I got the current version running and it is playable (4.10.1.75800). I use the internal intel gpu.

What did not work for me:

• wine version bundled with the distro (battle net does not even start)
• wine stable version from winehq with vulkan support and wineD3D (battle.net runs but the game crashes with a segmentation fault)

What did work for me

• Purge bundled wine

    sudo apt purge wine
  

• Install wine staging as described here from wine-hq (4.14~bionic) with this workaround here

• Install the newest winetricks from github repo

    wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
  

• Install corefonts and d9vk_master via winetricks gui or cli

• Update to the latest ppa version of the mesa vulkan driver (for intel)

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers libvulkan1
  

• Reboot

• Get the starcraft installer from here and run it via wine

• I need the nohiz flag to be set to run the game. Otherwise the game crashes after a couple of minutes

    export INTEL_DEBUG=nohiz; wine start /unix .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Battle.net/Battle.net.exe
  

• This issue is probably fixed

Answer 4

I'm too low-rep to comment, BUT I would like to add to @Erlon r. Cruz's answer that you may be required to install some other packages. To his script (prior to the last step) I had to add:

flatpak install winepak org.winepak.Platform.Extension.corefonts flatpak install winepak org.winepak.Platform.Extension.vcrun2015 flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-XXX-XX flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-XXX-XX

where XXX-XX is the version number of your linux nvidia-driver.

After this I had some minor issues, but they all got fixed in client.

Answer 5

Just to piggy back on @Erlon and @Mark: This is what I did to make it work:

flatpak --user install winepak org.winepak.Platform.Extension.corefonts

flatpak --user install winepak org.winepak.Platform.Extension.vcrun2015

flatpak --user remote-add --no-gpg-verify --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

flatpak --user remote-add --no-gpg-verify --if-not-exists winepak https://dl.winepak.org/repo/winepak.flatpakrepo

flatpak --user install winepak com.blizzard.StarCraft2

Answer 6

Yeah setup Lutris and will be way easier, first install Wine Staging then Lutris, Lutris will handle the prefix and setup for the game which will make you just click "next next finish".

Lutris.net