Steam not displaying text on wine 1.5 running on Ubuntu 12.04

One alternative to updating your launchers to pass the -no-dwrite option is to disable DirectWrite support in Steam's preferences. While you can do this within Steam if you can navigate the menus and settings dialog box with no text, it is probably easier to change the setting outside of Steam.

With Steam closed, do the following:

1. Run wine regedit.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Valve\Steam in the tree on the left.
3. Look for a DWriteEnable value in the pane on the right. If it doesn't exist, add it as a DWORD value.
4. Set DWriteEnable to 0 and exit out of the registry editor.

Your existing launchers should now start Steam with visible text.

The no-dwrite registry modification should also be possible with this command:

wine reg add 'HKCU\Software\Valve\Steam' /v DWriteEnable /t REG_DWORD /d 00000000

Note if steam is installed under a specific prefix (e.g. ~/.wine-steam) you may need to prefix the command with the appropriate environment variable - so for instance :

env WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine-steam" wine reg add 'HKCU\Software\Valve\Steam' /v DWriteEnable /t REG_DWORD /d 00000000

Source: Wine AppDB entry

EDIT:

No workarounds for displaying text etc in Steam should be necessary with Wine versions 1.7.49 or newer as the bug has been fixed.

Using PlayOnLinux etc, it uses the last known version that worked with the appropriate workarounds etc - but often newer wine versions will work, perhaps better - the info that says 'this is latest version of wine that will work for this' can become out of date with newer releases.

To install the latest wine version (currently):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.7

This is also heavily detailed here.

N.B. As far as I know, Wine has even and odd releases, even (e.g. 1.4, 1.6) are 'stable', odd (e.g. 1.7) are 'staging'. Staging releases genrally work fine, and may work better with some apps as they are more up to date, unless they suffer from regressions. The wiki says:

You should avoid using them [development versions of wine] unless the current stable version of Wine does not support or is incompatible with the application you wish to use.

but that may be out of date anyway... It is recommended by Wine though to test the app in newer versions before reporting any bugs.