Linux Gaming

So I'm very new to linux gaming. I swapped like last month and I've really been enjoying how well everything I've tried on Steam just works these days.

But I was looking to try something a little more advanced next. I saw that there's a HD "remaster" mod for Freelancer (which is abandonware now, so easy to find for free online). As it's one of my all time favorite games, and I haven't played it in like 20 years, I thought it might be fun to check it out again.

I saw that it is on lutris and tried installing it that way. The installation goes fine but after it's done, the lutris installer just hangs with "return code 256". Googling it didn't provide me any useful info other than one guy saying just to install it directly with an empty WINE prefix. I have no idea how to do that and it sounds like it might be more of a pain in the ass than I want to deal with.

But I thought I'd just post here and see if anyone else has tried this and gotten it to work. I can always dual boot back into Windows but I'd rather not do that ever again if I can avoid it. For the record, I'm on Pop!_OS.