Lutris is a terrible Wine front-end

After several hours of messing around with the install script for World of Tanks Blitz, I finally realized that I had to reinstall the Wine Steam runner. Even after that, I had to manually go into Steam and install the game myself, since the script still didn’t work. And then, after the game was installed, it simply refused to start, for unknown reasons. None of the community’s advice on the forums worked.

Compared to Playonlinux, I was able to get the game up and running by simply installing it manually.

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One post on reddit and one post here and you have decided that lutris is terrible? You never even properly outlined any issues you may have been having, seems a bit harsh blaming lutirs because you couldn’t get one game to run.

My personal experience is Lutris is now where POL should be, with active development and a supportive community. Switching from POL to Lutris can take a little getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it works very well indeed.

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That doesn´t apply to my experiance.
Lutris ist a very good software, with very good kept Install-Scripts, a nice and frendly community and a whol lot of options for the future. Its even updates pretty often aswell as the Install-scripts recieves some love.

I never saw this happen on PoL. But what is the point here? If you want to leave a feedback, I think ppl can handle this. Anyways… What or who is keeping you from using both, lutris and PoL?

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This is true, Lutris is quite a poor Wine front-end because it was never designed to be one.

Lutris is a gaming platform that happens to have support for Wine, if you’re trying to use it like you would use PoL, you’re gonna have a bad time.

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I outlined my issues here: Taking forever to install World of Tanks Blitz

May I ask which features from PoL (e.g.) you’re missing?

Because managing WINE bottles with Lutris is pretty achieveably IMHO. You might right-click a game and go into settings to check “run from terminal”, so you get an output with errors and shit.

Changing wine versions is very easy, winetricks are built in (but only work for me when Lutris runtime is disabled) and so on

Not all functions might be easily accessible for tech-nonsavvy users, but that’s the same in PoL. So what features from PoL are missing?

The only problem is, that often Lutris installer scripts are a little outdated (like in PoL heehee), but that’s part of the community to fiddle around. I for myself would like something like “right-click WINE -> paste own installer script” so that I don’t have to create an installer script on the website and can fiddle around with it

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He isn’t wrong. Most scripts are broken, in my experience.

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If you find a script that is broken, you can fix it, and submit the working version. If you don’t do that, it will stay broken.

Keeping the scripts up to date is community work. Last time I checked the database has over 18000 games in it. Thats too much for a few people to check and keep up to date. But if from all users that we have, everyone keeps 1 or 2 up to date, it is no effort at all.

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This thread is interesting as I haven’t found any scripts in the last few months that needed any fixes at all from me.

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That’s why I pledge to get an offline “insert custom script” install method. I don’t want to do some clicks on a website, write in that browser textfield, save it, open unpublished scripts, click install and see what I did wrong again

I just want to press the “+” in Lutris and then be able to click a button to insert a custom script :slight_smile:

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lutris -d -i localscript.yaml

You need to put your script under script: and fields for name, slug, version, runner etc. See https://github.com/lutris/lutris/blob/master/docs/installers.rst#trying-the-installer-locally

Ah thanks for that!

This needs to be made much more easy so that normal people could test/create installiers, too

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dont’ forget to install wine-staging in add to lutris:
I had to reinstall complety my machine, so I could test lutris with a clean system, and I get issues with some games ( mass effect, world of tank, borderlands )

this Suggest on installing lutris has solved all of my problems.

Mate, I kinda agree with you!

My solution was to use Q4Wine together with Lutris. It was a bit tedious to mix 'em together, but it’s possible. Some Wine games I install using a prefix created with Q4Wine, then add the prefix + wine version to lutris and then the game (or was it the other way around?).

So… yeah, my suggestion is that for some games (where the lutris script doesn’t work), use Q4Wine instead. And then manually add it to Lutris.

Cheers!

FWIW, I think Lutris is actually an incredible WINE front-end, and a far superior experience to POL where I have had endless issues, and I donate money to Lutris monthly to help support it, because of just how amazing it is.

I’m not sure why people feel compelled to come and shit on projects in this way. If you don’t like it, don’t use it.

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The only time in a year and a half that I could make a game work with Wine was with Lutris so, no, it’s not terrible.
I find it very easy to use. It even manages DXVK which is a pain to compile and keep up to date.

Some really updated and “hard” to work games really didn’t work 1st time on Lutris in my case. Path of Exile and Warframe didn’t work with a simple install button.

Nevertheless, I was impressed by how easy it installed Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm, both that required the extra DRM from BattleNet/BlizzardApp.

It does feel like Lutris could work better by separating wine bottles (prefixes) and installing Steam on each of those prefixes and treating games separately, like scripts do for BattleNet games.

Later I tried installing Winesteam games using default scripts and they worked (age of empires III, titan quest), but I do feel like this will break sometime because of the different winetricks dependencies of games.

One thing I will agree that “lutris is a terrible wine front-end” is that there’s no clear mention of how to setup your system BEFORE trying wine/winesteam on Lutris. Which is basically installing Wine on your system beforehand.

So far nothing has “just worked” for me, I’ve been working on getting Fallout 4 to work for weeks now and even after getting the game to work I find out the controller isn’t working correctly.

Not to say that lutris is “bad” but it simply needs to be accessible for anyone new to update or be able to report their working versions with their specs, all of these things being archived is important if we want a healthy and growing community.

I had tons of issues getting Lutris to work on my laptop,but on my desktop, it was too easy, I dont think its lutris itself but other factors as well. I would start all over and maybe watch some youtube videos during the setup to make sure you have everything set up properly.

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I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a game to work properly when installing from lutris. Have no idea why.