Seems like every week over on GamingOnLinux there’s an announcement of a new launcher.
Personally I only use Steam & Lutris. Lutris for my gog games and BattleNet, Steam for everything else.
I don’t know of a good reason to use Heroic, or any of the other new ones over Lutris / Steam, but maybe I’m missing out.
I use Steam for probably 80% of the games that I play regularly,
PrismLauncher for Minecraft (modded and vanilla java),
Heroic for gog and Epic,
Lutris for BattleNet (as well as the original non-“Resurrected” Diablo 2), Amazon Games App (free twitch/prime gaming games), EA App (got a few free games through EA Origin several years back), Ubisoft Connect, and the launcher version of Minecraft Dungeons. I’ve always found the lutris interface a little clunky and unintuitive, but games and things will usually work okay if I can get them installed (which will often take me a few failed attempts before I work it out).and finally the official itch.io app is really very good, lets you choose native linux versions of games that have 'em, as well as rather seamlessly making wine prefixes for windows versions of games.
I did also used to use EmulationStation Desktop Edition as a front-end for a few different emulators, but it seems I didn’t reinstall it when I did my latest OS reinstall a few months ago, I guess I’ve just been playing a lot more newer games (or just running retroarch without es-de).
I guess it depends on where your games are. I have a few games on epic and gog, and for that Heroic works great. So personally, I just use that and steam. The nice thing about heroic is that it lets me select steam’s installed proton versions, so I don’t have to install proton multiple times.
At the end of the day though, if you can launch the games you want to play, stick with what you got.
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I couldn’t get Minigalaxy to install any of my games when I tried it a year or so ago. I ended up just using Heroic Games Launcher and linking my GoG account to that, works like a charm.
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Like you, I only use Steam and Lutris. I use Steam for basically everything, even some non-steam games like Gears of War 1, and then I use Lutris for other games like BattleNet games and some Ubisoft games like Assassins Creed Valhalla.
For Steam, there’s not much of a question; they have a native app that gets the job done.
For Epic and Gog, Heroic makes a good launcher in general.
For Amazon games, I use the “nile” launcher.
As for EA, I’ve managed to install the EA App manually to a fresh 64-bit prefix; I just made sure that I run “winetricks d3dcompiler_47” in that prefix, and that DXVK is installed.
I use steam, and if something I want to play isn’t there, I just throw it in a bottle.
I use Steam and Heroic on my Deck, didn’t tried anything else now, should I try Lutris? I’ve heard good things about it, but for now using Steam and Heroic for my GoG games seems enough.
Lutris is great especially if you have games that need a little tweaking that aren’t a part of Steam, GoG, or Epic. If all your games are on one of those three, I’d stick with Steam/Heroic personally.
Lutris is the easiest way to get WoW up and running on Linux, for example. If it weren’t for that, I probably wouldn’t have Lutris on my PC.
Yeah, I would like to try Diablo IV on my Deck one day, I’ll try with Lutris, should be easier than installing battle.net and the game manually.
It’ll be loads easier. The Lutris installer is set up to automatically handle an error that Battle.net throws when you try to launch it, some BS about the way they package their QT platform. It’s just a terminal command away from being fixed, but future updates run a real risk of breaking it again. It happened to me, and I spent ~30 minutes trying to get it to work again before I gave up and just… Reinstalled the damned thing with Lutris, and it worked like a charm.
Speaking of Diablo, I got a notification while I was typing this message… 😂
I just played my first hour! ITS SO GOOD OMG…
but back to the topic lol… Yes I WAY prefer the lutris method to get battle net going. You just one click install it basically, whereas on steam it’s a whole process of finding different launching files, etc… Much worse.
BUT AGAIN D4 IS SO GOOOOOOOOD
I wish I wasn’t boycotting Blizzard.
I’m not going to bend about it, but part of me is curious what the hubbub is about. I’m surprised they’re still capable of putting out a good game tbh.
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What does Bottles do that others don’t? I’m just curious.
I find that Bottles is more like just setting up your own wine prefix and keeping it organized. I was a Lutris user for years, but switched to Bottles last year and never looked back.
It’s more convenient than Lutris for installing adhoc games, or multiple games in one bottle. Don’t get me wrong, when Lutris works out of the box it’s great, but oftentimes there’s no recipe on Lutris for a game (eg when they’re relatively unknown or new games) or the recipe is severely dated.
