Really have been a fan of Lutris for some time, but it seems to have dropped Wine support, and the replacement direction it is going doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. Hope I am wrong, but it is not looking good, so I am looking to investigate alternatives. I see Heroic and I see Bottles as alternatives. Does anyone have experience with either? If so, how does it compare to Lutris?
As far as I can tell, Bottles looks Windows / Wine only. Seems to be more of a prefix manager.
Heroic seems to look more like Lutris.
Not sure I will move away from Lutris yet as I really like the tool, but it is always good to be aware of alternatives.
Here is the link to the message about the upcoming move - link
As you can see, it is a collaborative effort with Heroic, Bottles and Lutris developers trying to simplify the installation and execution challenges of many games and apps in the linux ecosphere.
"With ULWGL – all of that is handled under one unified roof. So the way to run wine games changes:
Launcher passes 'codename' and 'store' to the ULWGL database. The database then provides a ulwgl ID for the game based on the codename and store it received
Launcher then passes the ULWGL ID to the ULWGL launcher
ULWGL launcher then launches the game using proton + valve's runtime + pressure vessel environment (the same thing used in proton in steam), and uses the ULWGL ID to identify protonfix scripts and apply them. Protonfix scripts essentially replace the install scripts various launchers use.
This way all games have the exact same running environment and the exact same protonfix scripts, and work can be done in unison to fix any problems on the protonfix script instead of each and every individual launcher script or other external files."
This is really the key - if you just track the issues with battle.net and getting it running over the last 12 months, you can see why this is a God-send to community and those helping others out in these community forums. EVE Online is another one that springs to mind. Issue with dlss in Marvels Guardians of the Galaxy, driver version error with Avatar, issues with installing EA App - countless other examples.
And at the core of it is Wine - that piece isn’t changing - what is changing is the method for deploying the necessary workarounds and patches for games across launch platforms, hopefully simplifying the configuration in each launcher and delivering a dependable working gaming environment.
Thanks for the updates. Yes, when I was a newb at this a long time ago, I could see how that could be useful. Now I automatically know what an issue is and tweak real fast to get something running. Got screwed up or non-existant text? Load corefonts. Game won’t run? Try different runners or Esync or whatever. Just examples, but I hope I can still do such things and bypass all these old scripts.
I have loaded Steam Proton 8.0 into Lutris manually. I can probably do that again if I had to, but I like my automatic install. Maybe I am getting lazy.
Right now I could load Lutris with all the required runners without an internet connection. I have saved all these things locally. I still want to be able to do that in the future. Guess we will have to wait and see.
Grab the 0.5.16 source from git and manually add the commits you want when you see something on git fixed that annoys you - versions.json files control the pulls from git for runtimes, so manage these yourself, manually adding dxvk and vkd3d to Proton also works so no issues really
Great idea. I store the entire Manjaro repository locally on a NAS. It would be a shame to see something change on that. Pulling that file out of the repository for perm safekeeping.
Thanks for the tip! I totally didn’t think about this aspect!
