I managed to get Blizzard installed through Heroic, but when I wanted to see which faction I should play in StarCraft, I cannot set my birth date. The boxes get highlited borders, but no list to choose from. How do i get past this?
Please keep in mind, I have finished StarCraft, Brood Wars and the StarCraft 2 episodic trilogy; also the Nova Missions. I know which factions I prefer in SC and SC2.
I click the down arrows, but all that happens is that the block gets a highlight around it.
You may need to try a different runner/version of Proton. In my experience, menu breakage like that can happen when a game likes one version of Proton, but the launchers work better with another. For example, right now, I run Genshin Impact using Proton 10, but handle the Hoyoverse launcher with regular Wine 10. Since Battle.net shouldn't need to ask your age repeatedly, you may be able to use another runner to answer the question, and then switch back.
Alternatively, it MIGHT be possible to make your selections with the keyboard by using tab to change fields/select the Submit button and enter or space to "press" the button, depending on how well designed Battle.net is for that. The reason I make this suggestion second even though it's easier is simply that I don't have much faith in Blizzard having implemented good keyboard control.
I'm using the 2025/07/19 "GE-Proton-Latest"
Unfortunately, I don't have StarCraft, so I can't do the experimentation for you.
How do I get to run different versions for the loader and the game?
Couple of ways. First, find a version of Proton or WINE that the launcher likes, and get that age check taken care of. Everything depends on this.
The easiest route then would be to switch back to GE-Proton-Latest, and just start the launcher. Since it shouldn't ask for birthday information every time, this may unblock you, and you could be able to just start the game without fussing with things as much.
If the launcher still blocks you, try changing the executable Heroic is launching so it's not the Battle.net launcher, but the game executable itself. The game may start Battle.net as it loads, but as long as it loads on its own, you can just ignore the launcher. If you need to do something in the launcher again in the future, you may need to switch things back to start the launcher temporarily, including going back to whichever version of Proton got the job done for the birth date setting. This is a hassle, of course.
The way I deal with the Mihoyo launcher since it started failing with the version of Proton that Genshin Impact uses is that I set the launcher to a version of WINE that makes it happy, and use the launcher from Bottles. Then I use Steam's "Add a non-Steam Game" feature to add Genshin Impact's executable as a game in Steam. When I want to play, I launch Genshin from Steam. When I need to update the game, I launch the launcher from Bottles, do the update, and then quit. It's awkward, but this way I don't have to change settings back and forth.
I'll also note that you could try installing Battle.net as a non-Steam game this way and see if launching from Steam fixes the launcher. I'm not sure what Steam does differently, but I've had occasions where things behave differently from Steam than anyplace else, even using the same runner.
StarCraft and StarCraft 2 both run perfectly (though I had to scale down from my usual graphic settings, I believe this is due to the "windoze virtualisation" from Heroic). The age doesn't seem to be such a problem, as I have a Blizzard account that I am logged into. Though I like to get things completed (I still will not consider myself a perfectionist), I think this is one I can live with unfinished.
On a related yet different note, can you maybe advise me about the EA App? It is installed, it starts running, the Launch button turns to the black LAUNCHING, then the amber PLAYING (STOP) and then immediately returns to the green PLAY NOW. This is on Heroic, on Lutris I get an Arabic launch but I checked that everything on my system is local or English (I'm in South Africa, mother tongue is Afrikaans).
I'm afraid I've only ever used the EA app via Bottles. I like Heroic in principle, but in practice it gives me problems, and Lutris has never given me anything but problems, so I don't know it well at all. I gave up on it long ago. The behavior you're describing, though, sounds to me like it's attempting to run, gets started, at least from the computer's perspective, and then crashes, without ever actually rendering a window.
This would be pretty unusual. WINE/Proton don't actually virtualize as such--virtual machines are pretty system intensive and restrictive in terms of hardware access. Likewise emulators, for similar reasons. WINE is a recursive acronym that actually stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator," specifically because it doesn't do that stuff. Instead, it intercepts Windows API calls and translates them to their Linux equivalents, from what I've been told, though that's likely a serious oversimplification. (An emulator tries to recreate a fair bit of the target operating system and run foreign code there, and a virtual machine sort of emulates a computer's hardware, which is why installing different operating systems on one is possible.)
In any case, because of the way Wine and Proton work, it's very rare to have serious differences in game performance between Linux and Windows.
This is why I only use the Steam APP, 9 times out of 10, I can get a game running on Steam using Proton. Only some games don't run on Steam, even with Proton, but those are minority cases, compared to all the games that do run.
Sometimes dropdown menus don’t show up properly because of graphics settings or outdated drivers. Try tweaking your graphics options or updating your video drivers to see if that fixes it.
