Hey there !
I’ve been using Linux for years now. For a while, the WeMod app was working, with quite a bit of tinkering, on linux. Alas, it is no longer the case, the Wand App, that I’ve never seen in action, won’t display anything on linux (CachyOS), and the old WeMod app won’t work because it doesn’t accept credentials anymore (says user’s login and password are wrong, despite them being right).
The fact that Wand display a black windows points toward a Wayland incompatibility in my case, and it does require a bit of work just to get some display.
Moreover, yes, proton is great, and its derivatives (ProtonGE, ProtonCachyOS…) too.
But, it’s really more complex, because each game you run through steam on linux, if it’s not native (and most aren’t) will use a Wine Prefix, located in the steamlibrary/steamapps/compatdata/[APPID]/pfxdirectory. That’s where Wemod has to find the game configuration files.
Usually, we had to install wemod for each game on linux. Or swap the prefix each time a game had to be launched. And in reality, we had to include a steam %command% to start wemod alongside the game and detect it, while having the wemod app installed in the prefix.
So, just porting the app on linux is not an easy task.
Another way to look at it is watching what was done for the linux lookalike of Cheat Engine.
Cheat Engine uses high privileges on WIndows to intercept a process and make memory injections. On Linux, that’s a bit tougher : the memory injector must have admin rights, that means starting it with SUDO.
And the lookalike I use sometimes is PINCE (Pince Is Not Cheat Engine). Works the same, roughly. But you have to start it with sudo in a terminal to give it the admin rights. (There are workarounds to make it start like CE on windows, but I didn’t bother).
Then, it works exactly like on windows. Except the processes might be different. Some games have multiple processes, and the “.exe” is not always the process that allows memory injection.
It really means a lot of work for the Wand Team. Not impossible at all, but a substantial amount of work nonetheless. Moreover, it means the Wand Linux App will require root privileges, and not all users will be fine with that. Most often, users will only trust an open source application with root privileges…
So…
I’m all for a linux version of WAND. The little I’ve used WeMod I was really impressed with the result.
And I’ll gladly test some proto-versions. But I really get that it’s a lot of work, and it might need a “per-game” tuning that would end in a huuuuuge workload.
Have a nice day, you beautiful people.