Battle.net broke in Wine / Proton - here's how to fix for Steam Deck / Linux
Ah launchers, don't you just love them? A reoccuring nuisance for Steam Deck and desktop Linux gaming is that they can and will break and the latest to break (again) is Battle.net. Here's how you can fix it for now.
I want to throw rocks at all the people that were pissed off that I pointed out that battle.net wasnt installable out of the box atm.
I dunno why people wouldn't believe that launchers etc can break on Linux through wine/proton etc, this is something that happens somewhat commonly tbh.
People conflate problems with the launcher with problems with Linux. And problems with Linux are attacks on them personally because theyve made Linux their personality.
Thanks for posting. Encountered this today and gave up after half an hour of fighting battlenet in lutris. Starting the game directly with wine worked well enough.
I'm so happy I finally ditched Battle.net, since Overwatch is now on Steam. Battle.net through proton and wine often crashed or had other issues.
I tried D4 on its free week, and it's definitely preferable to play Blizzard games through Steam and not have to fool with the Battle.net launcher. Also getting to take advantage of Steam shader caches is great for performance of course.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As posted on X (Twitter) by Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais:
Find Proton Experimental in your Steam Library and go into its Properties -> Betas -> and select bleeding-edge from the dropdown box.
Another solution that you can try is to use this as a launch option on any Proton version in Steam:
It can be frustrating when this happens, and it's certainly far from the first time Battle.net has broken along with EA, Ubisoft and other extra launchers.
Thankfully this time it's an easy enough sort until it's fixed properly inside Wine and Proton directly.
Update - 17:17 UTC: If you use Wine-GE, the latest Wine-GE-Proton8-25 release has a fix for it.
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Season of Discovery launched and I was so upset this morning when I couldn't log in. I had to install everything through Steam, even though on this machine I've been using Lutris.