Game Trainers Fail to Detect Process on NixOS

Help
1

I’m trying to run games on NixOS, and most games work fine. However, there’s a minor issue: game trainers fail to function properly.
When using Arch, I could launch the game in Steam first, then run the trainer with protontricks-launch --no-bwrap. But on NixOS, this doesn’t work—both the game and trainer launch successfully, yet the trainer cannot detect the game process.
Is this due to a misconfiguration in my Wine setup, or does NixOS handle games differently?

Reproduction Steps:

  1. Download a game trainer from https://flingtrainer.com/.
  2. Launch the game via Steam, then run the trainer using protontricks-launch --no-bwrap. The trainer will report that it cannot find the game process.
2

Remember that steam runs inside a container in order to present an FHS-like environment to the games… you may get more mileage out of running it with steam-run to get it in the same container.

3

I suspect this isn’t a containerization issue. Since trainers are Windows programs, FHS shouldn’t be relevant here - the problem likely lies with Proton.
I tried steam-run protontricks-launch --no-bwrap, but the problem persists.

4

TL;DR: Use steamtinkerlaunch
Unfortunately, my previous approach was incorrect. The issue is indeed caused by Steam’s containerization, and protontricks-launch cannot handle this properly. Even when used with steam-run, it fails to ensure environment variables are correctly passed.
Therefore, by using steamtinkerlaunch, the game trainer can be launched normally, just like on other distributions.