How to import games installed on another Linux distribution?

Greetings,

I have 3 games I used to play via Lutris: Starcraft2, Overwatch and Witcher 3(gog version). I installed them on a separate ext4 HDD while my main OS was Ubuntu 18.04. Recently I switched to Arch. I use fresh home directory, so I installed Lutris again on Arch. In Lutris preferences I pointed to external library and choose to the folder when all mentioned games are already installed. But I don’t see them in Lutris launcher and I don’t know how to import them. Google search points me to tutorials how to import games installed with Steam in Windows but now how to import already installed Lutris directories. Is it possible or do I have to reinstall all games?

Sort of. Playonlinux has better functionality for transporting games, but Lutris has better game compatibility.

What you can do, is move your game prefixes to a folder on your new PC, and then sign up for a Lutris account, and add the games to your Lutris account from the Lutris game library:
https://lutris.net/games/

Then sign into your Lutris account with the Lutris app on your new PC, and the games should be listed now in Lutris, and you can right click them and go “add installed game”.

From there, you have to manually set up all the Lutris preferences for the game, which is a hassle if it’s a complex setup, but not too bad if it’s a simple one.

It’s usually not too bad setting everything up by looking at the installer on the game you’re setting up, and just copying everything it does manually using the Lutris gui. Here’s an example:

If you click your game, and then click the “view on Lutris.net” link on the right side of the window, that opens the game page in the web browser, and then you find the installer you want, and click the down arrow next to the install button, and select “view installer script” from the down menu.

It’d be nice if the Lutris team would make some kind of system to set up all the settings from the install script for you, but it’d be tricky, because probably you’d have to create separate import game scripts for each install script, and I can imagine it’s a lot of work upkeeping just the normal install scripts as they are.

Good luck with it :slight_smile:

Probably a better solution in many cases:

Another route you could take, is to install the games as normal, but just copy the game install files rather than the whole wine prefix. You’d just need to select your game directory when the game installer is installing. Most game installers will CRC check, or just skip existing files. So the install would be quick in that case.

It should be possible with Overwatch and Starcraft to. Probably the Witcher 3 gog installer would do something similar.

I use “Grsync” to make a backup of my home folder.

Your games/paths to them will be stored in “/home/your_login_name/.config/lutris” and your Lutris settings and runners in “/home/your_login_name/.local/share/lutris”

I just moved from “Ubuntu MATE 18.04” to “Xubuntu 18.04.3”, and I copied all the files from my old Home folder to the Xubuntu home folder. When I run Lutris all my games and correct paths to them were still intact.