Text from my wife just now:

The Sims keeps locking up. I appreciate that you went above and beyond, but it’s done. Stick a fork in it.

I have it running and saving finally. I installed through lutris. From another thread I was going support:

I installed to /home/user_name/Games/the-sims-4/drive_c/users/windows_user/Games/The Sims 4/Game/Bin/TS4_x64.exe and it is saving, it is launching. I will let you know how it is doing once my wife has played a bit. Thank you very much for helping me with this.

I am going to dig into what you wrote because it looks like there is a lot of amazingly useful things in it. I really appreciate your help with this. And my wife is currently making a sim.

Firstly, THANK YOU for the lengthy support write up. I have been trying to make time to try some of your suggestions.

Firstly, I have been trying to run it with PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1 %command% --skip launcher thinking that was one command but having read your comment I realize there are two items in that. So I tried --skip launcher having read a lot of the issues with the game on Linux is the EA launcher. It almost started then I got a crash.

I also tried launching with mangohud and your command for that added to the skip launcher, that totally crashed Steam. I have been unable to download DXVK_HUD, I tried sudo apt install DXVK_HUD and searched software manager.

After mangohud crashed stream I had to restart the computer to get steam to open again.

I went back to PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1 %command% --skip launcher which has worked before, but that is what gave low frame rate, it launched but low frame rate. It also said it was unable to save.

I am trying different versions of proton ge, none of them are working, mostly giving the error screenshot I added above. And despite the skip launcher it still launches the EA launcher, which sometimes forces me to log in, other times it loads the game, and still others it opens the launcher fully and wants me to launch the game from there.

Everyone seems to agree, the problem is the EA launcher, and while I have the fitgirl repack, that removes the launcher, I cannot get it to install.

I managed to get the fitgirl repack installed through another suggestion, and it ran great… except it was unable to save. I thought maybe because it created the directory on install ands I needed to quit and restart. I could not get the game to launch again. The drive has been wiped with a fresh mint install (different issue, I chose to encrypt the home directory and it was causing issues).

So the laptop will play games!

Not wet