By running everything inside the Steam Linux Runtime container, it forces both Proton and the game it's running to use the libraries within the container. This is important for two reasons.
Proton is built using this runtime. If your system has a library version that differs from the runtime and you don't run proton with the runtime, it can cause Proton to fail.
Example: Your system has library.so (version 4.5.6) but Proton was built using Steam Linux Runtime with library.so (version 1.2.3) - so it expects a different version and fails when trying to run with a different version.
This ensures a stable, non-changing set of libraries EVERY time the game is run, on ANY Linux distribution. Having a stable target has always been the hardest part of allowing games to run on Linux, and this resolves that problem.
WINEPREFIX=~/some/prefix/path PROTONPATH=GE-Proton umu-run /path/to/game.exe
When using UMU-LAUNCHER you can specify PROTONPATH=GE-Proton to make it automatically download and use the latest GE-Proton build. Alternatively you can point it to any existing proton install path. If PROTONPATH is not specified, it defaults to downloading and using UMU-Proton.
UMU-LAUNCHER works as a back-end CLI tool alongside these front-end GUI game managers:
CLI – Command Line Interface
GUI – Graphical User Interface
All tool developers collaborate on UMU's unified database:
Key Features:
We've created a simple search web page for finding database entries:
The web page provides several endpoints that can be queried:
https://umu.openwinecomponents.org/umu_api.php
https://umu.openwinecomponents.org/umu_api.php?store=SOME-STORE
https://umu.openwinecomponents.org/umu_api.php?store=SOME-STORE&codename=SOME-CODENAME-OR-APP-ID
https://umu.openwinecomponents.org/umu_api.php?codename=SOME-CODENAME-OR-APP-ID
https://umu.openwinecomponents.org/umu_api.php?umu_id=SOME-UMU-ID&store=SOME-STORE-OR-NONE
https://umu.openwinecomponents.org/umu_api.php?umu_id=SOME-UMU-ID
https://umu.openwinecomponents.org/umu_api.php?title=SOME-GAME-TITLE&STORE=SOME-STORE
https://umu.openwinecomponents.org/umu_api.php?title=SOME-GAME-TITLE