More options is never a bad thing.
Nice, but Heroic is just way too superior.
Still want to see it. I hope they implement the proton and don’t just show the games which are native Linux, otherwise it’ll be terrible.
Why would I use heroic over lutris?
Store integration. If you’re in the habit of buying games.
Heroic has built in support for gog, epic games and I think amazon games, but don’t quote me on that. Its all in all very good and at least for me it always worked better than trying to achieve the same over lutris.
built in support for gog, epic games
Lutris also has that.
Maybe it is just a matter of taste. Personally I would never use any launcher to launch my gog games, because I think the whole advantage of gog is to have the game in a convenient zip file.
There are big differences, Heroic present the gog library in a nice way and supports convenience features like cloud saves (must have with big screen at home and remote gaming on Laptop) as well as gametime tracking, some achievements (dont care about those).
Its far more convenient than Lutris for GoG and of course you can easily backup your Games.
Just means more and better support for Linux going forward. This is a good thing.
I get that Sweeny doesn’t like to gargle Gabe’s billionaire balls as much as a lot of the users here, but Epic officially supporting Linux is a good thing.
It’s good for linux, it’s just not impressive for epic at all, they’re starting to catch up to where steam was 20 years ago on linux support.
Epic supported Linux almost 30 years ago. They just didn’t have a store back then.
What missing feature is needed from heroic ? I prefer 1000x time having community driven launcher than official one. Egs is known to be a piece of shit launcher and if any official développement impede on the community one I’m gonna burn something. Also have u tried egs on android ? It unreal how barebone it is. Not sure a linux one will be complete and useful.
Also launcher support ≠ fortnite support
Does getting ones balls gargled actually feel any good?
For the gargler or the gargled ?
I can confirm, that gargeling someone else’s balls can be quite enjoyable.
Make shitty port of shitty software => People don’t use shitty port => Shitty promoter blames the platform
This will only lead to Sweeny saying ‘told you so’ about Linux is not a gaming platform.
They want that fortnite steam machine money
Yep, this is exactly it.
The only reason I even have EGS installed is for the occasional free game they offer. But also Kingdom Hearts. I bought the trilogy on PC long before a Steam release was even announced, and I thought that if Tim Sweeney managed to convince Disney and Square-Enix to finally give the franchise a PC release then he must have thrown ludicrous amounts of Fortnite money to secure exclusive distribution rights.
Will be great if I can get their launcher and games running far more easily on my Steam Deck…
Linux versions of Epic games store and GOG galaxy is still a big win for everyone
just wait for 6 months, and since nobody will use epic on the steam deck, epic will sue valve because monopoly
Not just because it enables more access for everyone, but because it represents a deepening commitment by these companies to Linux as a gaming platform.
The more companies see Linux as a viable gaming platform, the more consumers will. It’s a virtuous cycle, and one that will only help to erode Windows grip on the desktop OS space.
It’s wild that Sweeney would let this happen. He’s been pretty vocally anti-linux in the past. Must be a big enough change to make him consider Linux dollars worth chasing.
It’s because giving away 36a463 games didn’t work…
Consider this a capitulation
But while windows has that grip, more malware and scams will target windows users. I’m getting tired of seeing good things ruined by their own success.
Is gog galaxy for Linux got anywhere or still in deep dev?
Consider considering that it has worked very well on macOS for years, it can’t be that much of a leap to get it working on Linux.
Given that we haven’t gotten it yet, despite years of promise, it seemingly has to be. Isn’t it just a webapp anyway?
I think version 1.0 and 1.5 on macOS were a Web app, but IIRC Gog galaxy 2.0 was finally native on macOS, which they made a really, really, really big deal about. Although, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s just a native app framework with a mostly web-reliant backend.
Given that we haven’t gotten it yet
I can’t speak to their development priorities, but from what I understand, they don’t exactly have a huge dev team over there. I’ve learned to be patient with them.
But I get where you’re coming from
Ah, well if they’re aiming to make a native client I can see it taking a bunch of extra time.
What I mean is that if they wanna make a linux native client that’s not just a web interface in a shell, then, yeah, it’s gonna take a bunch of effort. And their dev team is already stretched between maintaining a windows native and a relatively new macos native client.
But with most of the work already done and having made a macOS native client, porting that to linux shouldn’t be too much more work. A lot of the extra work there should be in leveraging open source libraries to replace whatever proprietary Apple stuff they were using to make it work on macOS. (kind of guessing here)
Aye, I follow you. I honestly couldn’t say yay or nay. Might be as easy as switching some libraries out and making a good GUI in Qt/Adwaita/what have you, like what Kagi is doing with Orion. It could be more involved than that too.
Installing and running programs is wildly more complicated on Linux than macOS. On macOS there is only one way to do it: a self contained .app bundle. On Linux there are….several incompatible standards. And if you do it a different way than a specific Linux user’s preference, they will loudly complain and tell you that you’re doing it wrong. Even if it works.
Installing and running programs is wildly more complicated on Linux than macOS
noooot really, and you’re already coming in with a full head of steam.
This is only really true in the strict context of “what can happen in 2026”, and not in the context of if “ what has been historically accomplished up to today, 2026”
The difference? Pretty much 98% if POSIX apps (including the vast amount of pre-steam gaming, and a lot of current steam games), so don’t let this bitter bitch try to convince you otherwise.
@ayyy, you can complain all you like about how you don’t understand how macOS works or how it is similar and to LINUX and UNIX, but do it somewhere else that doesn’t waste the rest of our time. The rest of us are trying to come together to solve a problem. It’s clear that your only interest is in driving everyone apart, and that doesn’t solve problems. It just creates them.
And no one here is interested in that bullshit
I’m speaking from personal experience. What you and I want and actual reality are two different things. Your belligerent complaining is exactly what I was talking about, and it took less than half an hour for it to happen.
What happened?
What do you imagine just happened? The fulfillment of some fantasy imagined?
Lol
“I can’t work in fast food all my life”
Edit: let dump the pretense shall we?
State your position and your argument, and we’ll go from there. And I’m happy to dump the belligerence and the assumed contemptuousness.
The facts assume no emotion
lmao yep, you’re definitely not being extremely belligerent over nothing just like I was talking about. 👍
They’ll probably do it similar to what steam does. Steam has learnt a lot there over the years. It’s definitely a pro if it can be easily repackaged, paths configured and they follow the desktop standards, but it will also work without. People will certainly complain if they have to fix stuff themselves
Aw hey now, I believe the community can be open-minded about this!
…As long as it’s not Snap. 😂
The one big deal about GOG galaxy, at least for me, is that it’s been available on macOS for years, and that they’re doing everything they can to make sure that all games currently available and playable on macOS will also continue to be playable and available on macOS even after macOS no longer supports the x64 architecture via Rosetta.
If they care that much about keeping Mac games playable even on the new arm/Mx line of chips, then I’m sure they’re gonna put a lot of care into making sure that old games are playable on Linux, although I’m not entirely aware of their development timeline.
I could not really give a shit about what happens with the epic game store.
It is a big deal. If Epic changes some API and breaks Heroic, it is your problem for using an unsupported third party application. If Epic breaks their official client, their QA manager has a problem.
I’m actually worried about that too.
😭 good golden gods the year of the linux desktop is finally upon us.
We just had to wait for windows to get too shitty for average gamer
The year of the linux steam deck
If we have things like Heroic on Linux, and if they are just bringing the Epic Game Store only and not the anti cheat, then who cares. Nothing has really changed then, as we were always able to play all non-online games from our Epic libraries anyways.
Plus you can bet your ass that the new and official EGS app will have SO MANY issues when that is released. It was a mess (still kinda is) even on Windows. So many bugs. I wouldn’t be surprised if many Linux users will just continue using the alternatives for the smaller resources it takes up.
You forgot telemetry 🤗
Oh yes that’s a given!
Epic Games as in Tim Sweeney’s Epic Games?
What are the package names so I can block them from installing please
EGS has some integration with UE so if you’re buying marketplace assets it’s easy to keep them updated and to add them to projects. Since UE can compile to Linux if you’re running Linux, this is a move that makes Linux a more appealing OS for game development.
Sure, it’s all stuff you can do manually. But the sweeter you make the pot the more regular users you attract to your OS.
What is the benefit of attracting more regular users to an OS?
Windows no longer being the dominant OS.
Better software support??? There’s stuff I’m still struggling to replace and I’d rather native linux builds than have to go back for it.
Oh no… It’s stupid 😞
Let me guess. Their kernel malware is going to come to Linux next?
This is generally great news, but even better news would be if it had like 12 users after launching.
Show Tim Shittey that everyone hates him.
Eww Lutris.
It’s kinda sad. I felt the maintainers feeling of being overwhelmed and underappreciated, but that whole discussion in the issue and the later statement to just hide AI use was such a phenomenal PR debacle he’ll probably never get rid of.
Lutris was pretty good…
Lutris was pretty good…
Undoubtedly, the lutris scripts really made it a great community driven project.
Just for gaming purposes, having a unified front end that:
-
lets you start an application with the arguments it needs, whether to use a specific Wine folder, or start an emulator with the right arguments
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lets you tag up each application with some custom arguments - genre, date, and so on - and lets you filter and sort by them
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lets you configure each app with their own box art or whatever as an icon
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keeps some gaming-related metadata; hours played, whether you’ve finished it, …
Essentially, Windows 3.1 Program Manager for the 21st century. Lutris did that quite well. Heroic doesn’t let you add custom stuff, it just integrates with store fronts. RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”.
Lutris scripts were great - just having the required winetricks commands to get something obscure working was awesome, but packaged up in a useful way along with art and metadata was handy. The front-end being “only what you need” was good as well. Shame it’s gone off the rails a bit…
The ability to apply community patches easily was super handy as well. It made installing games like Dungeon Keeper and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines extremely simple.
It’s now been months since I’ve successfully got Lutris to even install a game. It practically turned to slop overnight.
RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”
This definitely does happen sometimes, especially these days, but this is explicitly opposite to old-school Linux design principles. A program should do one thing, it should do it well, and it should be able to be plugged in to other processes in order to accomplish whatever this single-purpose program accomplishes. If you want it to do something else, go get/write a different package to do something different. This is actually explicitly stated in the “Unix Philosophy” papers by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, et al.
The concept suffers a little bit with graphical applications. They don’t exactly have equivalents to stdin, stdout and stderr which you could pipe or read/write willy-nilly.
RetroArch isn’t far off from the philosophy I think, those emulation cores are pretty much independent projects plugged into a frontend. Unfortunately that default frontend is pretty clunky and doesn’t come with sane defaults for known ROMs. Or even sane menu navigation tbh, main menu and game menu looked way too similar last time I used it…
Heroic lets you add plenty of custom stuff. The only thing I’m missing from lutris is tagging/grouping of games, everything else I ever used in lutris is available in heroic.
It lets you “add game”, but then gives you the choice of Linux / Windows with a Wine version / browser, and you have to put in the path.
So for example, in Lutris I could have “every Zelda game” or “every Castlevania game” as a filter. Castlevania needs MSX, NES, Gameboy, SNES, N64, DS, PSX, PS2, and Wii emulation; and one of (Steam, or PS3 or X360 emulation) to be reasonably complete.
I suppose I could create a Linux shell script that daisy-chains into the correct emulator, but that would be quite clunky compared to Lutris, which is still pretty clunky. And I wouldn’t be able to filter to that, nor sort them by release date.
-
but that whole discussion in the issue and the later statement to just hide AI use
Well fuck
Another commenter just made me aware that the maintainer moved back on his hiding of Claude (because it “apparently is a big deal”… yeah, what tipped you off Sherlock?), which is good. But it’s still being used, so… still bad.
I missed this! What’s the tool folks are using instead of lutris?
I personally switched to heroic
Faugus is gaining popularity, but they recently switched from Qt to GTK, so personally I’m now using Vermouth
I’m having a (good) moment with qt atm (excluding kirigami), so that’s a relevant thing to point out!
AFAIK the dev reversed his stance on ai after the blowback. Do you have newer information that contradicts that? Because otherwise you are both just hating on lutris for no reason.
AFAIK the dev had committed a bunch of AI nonsense intentionally not labeling it at such or keeping track of what was slop in any way. Do you have newer information that contradicts that? Because otherwise you don’t know what you’re talking about for no reason.
Certainly:
See the update to the article.
Thats what i am going off of, if you have newer info than that i’m sure happy to listen.
Thanks for the update, so at least he doesn’t hide it anymore. I wouldn’t call that “reversing his stance on AI” though, he didn’t say he’d stop using the slop cannon. Just that he doesn’t hide it anymore, which quite frankly is the absolute bare minimum.
Yeah thats fair. Personally i’d prefer he didnt use them at all either but i can also sort of understand a (afaik?) hobby coder wanting to reduce their workload, iirc there were even some mental health issues involved that got alleviated by the ai help. And as long as the ai code is identifiable i can mostly live with it.
I’ve got a nice bridge in New York, I’ll sell it to you cheap.
Is that a “no, i dont have any”?
That’s an “if you believe that you’ll believe anything”. You’ve got no credibility in this conversation anymore.
yeah Lutris is a shame how far it’s fallen. used to be decent, the user scripts were invaluable for some games but now I won’t touch that thing with a 10ft pole.
Most of the stuff can now be accomplished via stream/steamrun anyways.
What is wrong with it? Never had any problems running games on Lutris and it doesn’t require steam (DRM) which is pretty nice.
Dev shit all over it with AI slop code
Has that caused problems? I don’t really care if they are just using AI. If they are breaking things because of it and not validating anything then that is a larger concern.
Even if it runs fine there are still problems
- Slop code can’t be licensed, the license Lutris had is invalid. That means you can’t even fork it unless you can identify the point slop started and fork prior to that.
- There’s no guarantee the developer who uses slop code even knows what it’s doing. Github is full of nonsense like that now.
the license Lutris had is invalid.
That part isn’t true whatsoever. Public domain doesn’t work like a poison pill. If I put the collected works of Arthur Conan Doyle on my website, that doesn’t mean the site can’t be CC BY-SA 4.0; it means someone is free to take that specific part without worrying about CC BY-SA 4.0.
Even for the slop code where it’s more mixed in, it’s on the person trying to take it to affirmatively show the part they’re taking was generated by an LLM, i.e. you can’t just say “this is slop, I’m taking this” and expect a project to have to affirmatively defend that it’s human-written.
And lastly, AI assistance doesn’t automatically even poison the code being created/changed with it. This one is murky, but so far, the general consensus is that so long as you, the human, worked on it – i.e. that you didn’t just let the slop machine run wild and take whatever it outputted without your own changes – it’s still your copyright.
—someone who doesn’t do slop
Don’t all the big software companies use AI, are you suggesting that everything actually has an invalid licence?
The way the Linux kernel developers use llms is to help identify potential problems, the llm doesn’t write any code. It’s a human that looks at the potential problem to determine if it actually is one and then writes the code to fix it.
Microsoft generates large swathes of code and judging by how poorly it preforms when they immediately push it to production there is little to no human oversight.
To answer your question, no to my first example and yes to my second.
In a good and just world, this would be the case.
