I tried playing the two original Baldur's Gate games on Ubuntu. It's hell.
Long story short: I am absolutely inexperienced with Linux distros but made the switch from Windows a bit more than a year ago. Right now, everyone's talking about Baldur's Gate 3, including a lot of the podcasts and shows I follow: since I never experienced the OG games, I wanted to try them out. They were on sale on GOG, and I had previously set up Lutris so that it interfaced directly with it. But the game refuses to start. Every installation method I tried has miserably failed at some point or another, and when it didn't, the game just won't boot up (either in Lutris or out of it). I'm out of options and I have asked for a refund. Is the situation with the Steam versions any different?Am I missing something? Help!
As I understand it, even the most current version of the game links to a horribly outdated version of openssl that is no longer shipped by modern Linux distributions. The publisher has neither fixed this nor bundled the version they need, so you will not be able to start the program due to missing openssl-1.0.so. Most distributions provide a special package to install this legacy library, commonly named openssl-compat or similar. You could also choose any of a number of highly questionable sites that purport to host downloads of this obsolete library.
Meanwhile, Wine runs the Windows version of the game fine. If I recall correctly, I didn't even need to adjust any settings in Wine to get it to work.