Like Darvond and others have mentioned a few times now, you can run Wine and your games in sandboxed mode, meaning it only has access and permissions to do whatever you allow it to do. So even if somehow the Windows program compromises your system, or does something you don't want it to do, it can only act in a very limited fashion and will only affect the wine prefix. Which only contains your game.

Take it one step further - install Lutris/Heroic as a flatpak and disallow networking. Done.

I just find it silly to install a whole OS (on the same drive no less) just to do some gaming, when your existing OS installation, Linux is perfectly capable of doing that already. Wouldn't it be a lot more convenient?

In any case, feel free to experiment with the possibilities, Linux is great in that sense.

Alright. I guess I could do that. It's just that I have no experience at all in running an application like that, so I'll have to look into it. I still want to see if I can get Windows fixed or otherwise reinstalled though, because I never wanted it to mess up in the first place, so I'd like to just undo the problem if I could.

but he does know how to fix the problem, wipe the drive and start over.

No worries, I wouldn't trust random video game forumers suggesting software either without doing some research myself.

Even worse on the Windows side with people suggesting registry edits, closed source random tools and hacks, and shell commands that they don't even know what they do.

But yeah, you literally just install Lutris from your package manager/app shop, press install, open, install a GOG game, press play. Done. Later you can learn what all the options are/do, and mess around with flatpak permissions if you go that route. It's not rocket science, everything can be googled easily.

So. 5 days and 4 pages of posts later, how's it coming along? What have you managed to do/determine? Keep us updated, we are all waiting with bated breath ;)

Lutris doesnt just work. It requires a scalpel for each game to get running. I use it. Its a mess.. Wine is for basic programs and is nice, but if it reqiures other software, it also gets messy..

Just a thought, did you change one or the others, OS time clock? Windows and linux use a different clock system, that breaks stuff in the other OS when using both on 1 machine. Seriously. Look it up.

A side note, if you have to scrub the system. Install Windows and only Windows on the system. Then physically remove the drive. Use 2 usb drives to install a full linux onto a bootable usb. 1 to host the test install and the other to be the full linux recipient. Change the clock in te linux install. Replace the windows drivw back into the machine. Then neither will misbehave. Why physically remove it at all? Because linux devs are incapable of thinking windows exists and will allow the linux install to break stuff. At least then you get both systems with no overlap.

Make linux use local time works best.:
https://www.howtogeek.com/323390/how-to-fix-windows-and-linux-showing-different-times-when-dual-booting/

If this doesnt help solve the problem, at least it will if you have to do a fresh install.

Weeelll, it's true that YMMV. But I've yet to encounter a game I couldn't get running (GOG or otherwise), and Lutris was the most friendly way to do that. Older games may require fiddling (I remember Gothic 3 and Risen 1 required some Physx package etc.) and modding Dragon Age was a bit of a pain.

For this kinda user who isn't used to Wine, Lutris or Heroic is the best recommendation still. Bottles might be too tricky at this stage.

Lutris will also download the offline installers if you don't want to use lgogdownloader or gogrepoc. Also, it has the benefit of community tweaks and fixes for the installation scripts to get games running. Heroic does not. But these days with custom Wine versions targeted at gaming, you don't really care, everything just seems to work :)

That's insane. How does that even happen?

Extreme is in the eye of the beholder. Knowledge is power, and with that comes great responsibility. XD

What I meant was that Richard Stallman, aka the father of free software (Linus would probably be the mother?) has a reputation for having zero-tolerance over binary/propriety software, which most Linux distributions have.

Certain vendors would like to keep certain secrets as they won't document a feature f.ex., and thus these drivers/firmwares (sometimes called binary blobs or non-free drivers) are made available for conveniences sake even thought there are a few open source drivers that does almost the same thing but with worse performance. NVIDIA (and many others) is particular infamous for not providing open source drivers (at least, until 2022, we'll see), which is why AMD is often preferred on Linux.

When you install a Linux distribution you're often asked if you want to install non-free drivers, and then there's the telemetry we have/had in Ubuntu (which Mint is based off of). So yes... you can't get 100% free today when it comes to conveniences we're used to because that would almost be like using a stone-age equivalent computer.

Free Software Foundation have few recommendations but none of them are gaming platforms, to say the least.

It's a balancing act between privacy / conveniences. Finally, I personally don't see telemetry as an evil necessarily, it depends, just like a car can be good or bad, or something in between.

It's actually the other way around. There's a reason why Microsoft has a monopoly because they don't pay nice. Never have been. At least when you install Linux it installs alongside the other installs it find. Windows doesn't. It completely ignores it so if you install Windows AFTER Linux you need boot to up a live Linux disk and reinstall GRUB.

Trivial stuff, but yes.

rojimboo, as usually happens when I have a problem like this, it occurs right when I have the least time available to deal with it, so I've been able to keep up with the forum, but not so much with actually doing much testing at all, which is another reason why I haven't wanted to really get started on it much yet, beyond the simple preliminaries. Admittedly, I didn't realize that there'd be this much of a delay, and I did want to at least get started on the analysis ASAP, because I figured that if I waited on that, it would ultimately take even longer before I'd be able to get started. As it seems now, it might be another week or a bit more before I'll really be able to get into it much. Trust me, nobody's more disappointed than me, because this just happened right after I bought a bunch of new games in the winter sale, and I haven't even had a chance to try any of them yet!

Shmacky-McNuts (did your mother name you that?), I've noticed that about the time, but I never knew why. It always seemed like Windows was about 4 time zones away from Linux, and if I changed one then it would change the other too, so I never mess with it anymore, so that couldn't have caused the problem. Are you implying that the people who created Linux and the stuff on it didn't take into account the possibility that it might be running on a computer with Windows on a different partition? That's idiotic! But I really need it installed on the HD, not a USB.

rojimboo, I haven't even heard of most of this stuff, but just Wine. It's good information though; thanks.

sanscript, I personally think telemetry is the worst evil in the world, and ethically speaking, absolutely NOBODY has any right to take ANYONE else's information in any way, without permission, and that permission must never be coerced, gained by trickery, or otherwise required in order for a product or service to be available and work as advertised. But anyway, I've noticed the issue with NVIDIA, because I have a GeForce, and it was sort of a pain to get a Linux driver for it.

No it's not. Anyone w/ common sense would use UTC as nothing else is reliable or unambiguous. It sure has nothing to do with low level programing LOL. MS was just trying to not confuse noobs. Anyway if you want Windows and Linux to report the same time...

In Linux:
hwclock –systohc –utc

And in Windows make the registry change:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
“RealTimeIsUniversal”=dword:00000001

'Refresh or Inplace upgrade install' used to be a thing not too many Windows versions ago, though not too sure if it's still a thing in the later/st versions ?. Which allowed Windows to be installed (non-destructively) over an existing installation of itself...

Ah!, apparently it is... https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/fix-windows-10-repair-install

Edit: Here's another guide, just in case you are unwilling/unable to get passed the cookie request in the previous link...

https://www.easeus.com/computer-instruction/repair-install-windows-10.html

You require the convenience perhaps, but as the problem will still exist unless you change one or the other, it will be a possible future risk all the same. The os battle can make changes in the BIOS if I remember correctly. Been awhile having had similar problems with a dual boot.

Jot down the linux change as that one makes more sense. Then that 100% rules out this particular conflict as a culprit in the future. The more you know :)

Hope you made some drive clones. Good luck.

sanscript, that article is weird, but thanks. You mean that fixing or reinstalling Windows is easier than the alternative of using Wine or something similar?

EverNightX, well that's an interesting way to do it. So basically, I'd be altering the way each one works to converge onto the same time? In any case, I don't even bother looking at the clock when I'm in Windows, and there's a clock in the room anyway, so I don't really need the one on the computer, but as for it being the possible source of the problem, i doubt it, since I've had it working like that for about 2.5 years, with Linux not matching Windows.

Trooper1270, wouldn't that erase the extra files though? Or would it make things act weird in any way?

Smack-My-Nuts, I think you're referring to the time issue, so see my reply to EverNightX two paragraphs above.

Using Windows and using it for games at least, yes. Depends on your goal and current knowledge. If you mainly want to play these games then Windows is relatively hassle free, and then play around with Wine in Linux when you want. That's the beauty of dual-booting - you don't have to decide either way right now whether you want to stick with one or the other.

Fiddling with Wine or any kind of derivatives or related tools takes practice. It can get messy pretty fast as mentioned earlier.

Fixing/reinstalling Windows? It's easy for me to say it's not hard because I've done it before, and it could be fixed by creating a new profile and/or running <span class="bold">sfc </span> (at least that's on the top of my elimination-list to try), which is a relatively quick-fix. But if you haven't done it before then you just have to decide for yourself.