cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/41516848 Technically this should also work in a similar way for other games and other trackers so I guess this community fits also for this little guide.

I am fairly new to Linux gaming after I recently switched fully to Linux (Fedora 42). As you probably know, most steam games will run in Linux out of the box thanks to proton and Valve.

However in case you want to run games like MTG Arena together with a third party tracker like Untapped.gg things become a little tricky. As I only found outdated threads on reddit I thought we might as well need one here on Lemmy.

Quick summary for beginners: We want to install the Untapped companion Windows (exe file) inside the steam/proton environment that is used by Steam to simulate windows. These simulated environments are called "prefixes" and this was already used before Steam/proton by the popular windows emulator called Wine. Which is why you will sometimes read about "wine prefixes" or "proton prefixes" or tools like protontricks or winetricks that help you to configure those prefixes. Also you will read about "verbs" which are little "helper scripts" or recipes for winetricks/protontricks.

I found this neat little verb someone created for the untapped companion and it probably should work very easily in case you have the flatpak version of steam and protontrick:https://github.com/sabedevops/wine_untappedgg_companion

However I have the native Fedora 42 versions of steam and protontricks which is why also explain the manual steps here using the protontricks built in GUI. Whenever you install protontricks it should come with an GUI app in you applications folder. When opening this app it should list all installed steam apps together with their "app IDs". 

For Arena will look like this:

After selecting the Arena app you have to choose a "wineprefix", just select the "default" one, then select "Run an arbitrary executable" and select your manually downloaded Untapped.gg+Companion+Stable+Installer.exe  This will install the Untapped companion in your MTGA prefix.

Now you could always manually start the companion app within the mtga prefix via the proton-launch command and knowing the path of your steam wine prefix (which might be different depending on your distro of if you used flatpak). You can find your wine prefix folder also via opening the protontricks UI app and select "browse files" after selecting the default prefix for MTGA. protontricks-launch --appid 2141910 "/home//.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2141910/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Programs/untapped-companion/Untapped.gg Companion.exe"

What we actually want is that the companion automatically starts each time we open MTGA via Stream. As described in the github verb above, the trick is to use the Steam game launch options and use the PROTON_REMOTE_DEBUG_CMD variable which will pause the game start and open anything you pass to it before starting the game. So go into your steam library and add the following to MTGA -> properties -> General -> Launch options. Beware of the different handling of spaces in path names and use the "" after "Untapped.gg" and replace the path with the actual path to the compoanion app that you installed above via protontricks: PROTON_REMOTE_DEBUG_CMD="/home//.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2141910/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Programs/untapped-companion/Untapped.gg\ Companion.exe" %command%

Additional Information: The overlay functionality is actually pretty broken (at least in Fedora 42 using KDE Plasma+Wayland) and will cause random window glitches and not show up most of the time. However there is an option in the Untapped app that let's you open your deck window in a separate window outside of the game: Click on MTG Arena -> Deck Wndows -> enable "show player deck window".  So unfortunately no overlay possible right now but at least I can use the tracking and also see my deck statistics while in a match.