Nice, good to hear it worked out mostly. As for the black menu issue, consider looking at using various different libraries. For example, some games need the actual Windows .DLL files depending in exactly how they use them. The substitutes in WINE are just that, substitutes, so they have very slightly different behaviour in some cases. For GUI libraries if you get something wrong it is easy to have problems like a black menu box from something loading out of order, returning too fast or slow, or just being formatted differently. The native libraries can be used and that can sometimes solve the issue.

Yes, this can be done through WINE.

Depending on your method of install for WINE you will use different specific buttons and so on, but the idea is the same. Take the patch .exe file and run it inside the same WINE prefix as the game is installed in. This can usually be done by opening Lutris and selecting the game, then clicking not in Run but on the WINE icon near it. That allows you to select the .exe file and run it in the same WINE prefix as your existing game install. From there the patch should be able to find the game at C:\Path\to\game and make the required changes.

Hope that works out for you

True, but privacy conscious people tend to also be wary of concentrations of power in a platform, such as Reddit or Twitter. If you are aware of the issues with a closed system you tend to also be aware of privacy issues, security issues, state censorship, and so on, so the user base is more aware in the fediverse and if they are leaving for Reddit that really does say something. I won’t be using their service, I feel very lucky to have found out about this before shifting as I was in the process of finding a stable email host and blending with the VPN seemed financially reasonable, guess I will stay with Mullvad and get a separate email provider.

How did you go? Any luck?

NTFS does not have the permissions structures Linux native filesystems have. All sorts of problems come from using NTFS for executable files. That said, exfat seems better in a bunch of ways, maybe try that?