As mentioned before, installing LightDM is also an option - it writes a new .xsession-errors every session while keeping a single backup that is also rotated at every login. It works pretty well unless you have a server or keep long uptimes for some other reason.

Bleachbit also cleans up this file, but it's a risky tool to use - all too easy to damage your system (by purging locales, for instance).

The cursed Gnome won't be satisfied until the eventual release of GTK666, usable only by those who made the infernal pact to sell their souls to the coveted gnomish Dark Messiah of Adwaita (aka The Only One)... And to think people were laughing at Ubuntu Satanic Edition!

Battlecruiser 3000AD - Basics
Battlecruiser Millienium - Player

Musk is a controlled opposition shill... Showed up in a fancy schmancy Novus Ordo Seclorum jacket yet people still think he's some kind of savior. He's a fake through and through.

Ah, Soylent Green... That's exactly what I thought about when I saw this thread. A must see for anyone who is excited about being fed 'maybe food'.
There's talk that they are already using our fellow humans as a 'secret ingredient' in hamburgers... Who knows, would not surprise me at all.

No love for the old Window Maker? Very lightweight although certainly not everyone's cup of tea. It even has its own distro (Debian-based).

https://www.windowmaker.org/
https://www.dockapps.net/
https://wmlive.sourceforge.net/

Yes, this is clearly not normal Wine behavior. If prefix configuration runs every time a Windows application is launched, something else is causing it to do so.
And that 'something' is probably Lutris's automatic Wine version management (which is enabled by default).

The disk thrashing is most likely due to Wine writing new prefix folders (~600MB-1GB each!), I suggest checking the disk space whenever this happens.

Lutris facilitates some tasks to make Windows games more compatible with Linux (like automatic screen resolution restoration, changing locale on demand, disabling desktop compositor...), however I found that it's best to never ever let it muck around with Wine prefixes and versions. This can cause problems. The default Wine from the repositories is sufficient in most cases. As much as I like Lutris when it comes to keeping a neat game library instead of crammed and unreliable Wine menus, I find its 'Wine management' feature way too intrusive, so I just disable it altogether:

Check under Preferences > Updates > Wine update channel, and make sure it's set to Self-maintained.
Also might be a good idea to turn off Lutris Runtime updates.

Under Preferences > Runners > Wine have Use system Winetricks enabled. Just go through every setting and disable any auto-updates wherever possible. It's much better to have manual control over such things, automatic updates have too many pitfalls. Prefixes may become unusable, or Wine itself may start to behave strangely, like in your case.

After adjusting these options, regenerate your Wine prefix. Back up your games and other actual program data, then just delete the ~/.wine folder.
Then create a new 32-bit prefix with the following command:

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine winecfg

(this is assuming you don't need any 64-bit Windows applications... otherwise just run winecfg and that's it)

You can also use winetricks for the above procedure, but it's very easy to do this in the command line.
Plus it gives you an idea of what exactly you are doing.

You may need to re-enter registration key information or other stuff after putting the games back into the newly created prefix.
Another option is to simply install them again from scratch.

Don't use Lutris to install games. Instead, run installers in plain Wine and then add an already installed game to Lutris using the corresponding option. And avoid clicking on the Manage Wine Versions button beside the Runner settings. Lutris loves to download its own Wine stuff at the slightest provocation.

----

When it comes to the 'minimal' image programs, I once checked out qimgv and it seems pretty good, although I personally prefer viewnior as a bare-bones quick viewer.

There's also fotoxx / fotocx which looks feature-packed but the interface is ... ugh. Another simple viewer with the thumbnails window is phototonic.

The screenshots in Synaptic always behaved weirdly for me, only the top half of an image would ever load. Usually this was enough to check out what I was downloading, but yeah. It seems to be kind of broken.

I agree about the native applications. Most of the beloved Windows programs do have their replacements. A good Linux alternative for IrfanView is xnview, it's not in the repositories but the official site offers a .deb package that should be pretty straightforward to install. https://www.xnview.com/en/

It's not an exact 1:1 clone, but the two have a lot in common feature- and interface-wise. I use it to manage my picture collection and as a basic editor, and don't really miss IrfanView - although I do keep a portable copy of it in the prefix just in case. One useful thing xnview currently lacks is quick batch optimization of JPEGs from the thumbnail view. But this can still be done via the command line as jpegoptim is in the Debian repos.

Lovely mixer, makes a great companion to volumeicon-alsa. It seems to work alright. I don't mind alsamixer's TUI style at all, but a GUI makes it feel so much more comfy.

I think the EQ pane could use a show / hide switch akin to Winamp Classic / XMMS interface. And perhaps make the window width resizable, although it's already a very nice and usable project.

ALSA deserves its own graphical mixer!

A better Tahoma font (from a real Windows installation) may be a good choice, as the one shipped with Wine is very old and looks awful at certain sizes.

I tried and it didn't do much for me, but won't hurt in any case. Wine 10 apparently changed the look of system fonts (again), and in some dialogs the text is now very thin and almost unreadable. The Tahoma trick did not fix this, but the font smoothing options in the registry posted above at least made it look a bit nicer.

I also use Wine. Version 8.0 had some issues with PhotoFiltre and IrfanView, but those got fixed in Wine 10.
Mp3DirectCut, zKanji and GraphicsGale are some examples of what works great.

Installing was easy; just make sure to get the 32-bit dependencies and then generate the 32-bit prefix - preferably as default .wine, as it tends to be more reliable than 64-bit according to the documentation.

When it works, it works fine. Problems usually have solutions.
.NET/Mono stuff can be troublesome, you need wine-mono for these programs, not just regular Mono from the repositories.

If anyone is having problems with blurry fonts and improper scaling of windows in Wine 10, try adding this to the registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers]

(Default)=~ HIGHDPIAWARE

This will make Wine fonts smoother and easier to read:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]

"FontSmoothingGamma"=dword:00000578
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002

Then in terminal: $ fc-cache -fv
(or re-login)

If buttons are missing minimize/maximize/close symbols:

Copy the /usr/share/wine/fonts/marlett.ttf font to $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/windows/Fonts/

BARBEE BOYS - Aimai Tension