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Needing Game Launcher Advice (lemmy.zip)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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hey, I’m planning to turn a PC into a dedicated gaming device

I already chose my distro and DE, but I’m not sure about the game launcher, help me choose

I’m used to Bottles + RetroArch/Ludo, tried Lutris but didn’t feel that comfortable for me, didn’t try Heroic nor Meteorite

while both Bottles and RetroArch/Ludo have a grid/game UI, I’m planning on getting a joystick eventually, so a unified frontend with joystick support would be handy

Steam Game Mode seems okay but I would prefer something else if I can

Pegasus looks amazing, mature, customisable and supports multiple sources

OpenGamePadUI really caught my attention, minimal, relatively stable despite its age, multiple sources

but Im still not sure, help me choose

also, have you tried UMU? I’m still trying to get used to the UMU way instead of plain Wine

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[–] 8 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Heroic been treating me good. Has gamepad UI, proton downloads and all the necessities. UMU is a project to run non-steam games through proton, wine itself is not really game-oriented and lacks certain patches (and dxvk along with vkd3d by default - and that's practically how games run on linux in the first place if I may simplify.) If umu is in your distro's repos it should be seamless, first launch of the game using umu will be longer because umu downloads its own proton/runtimes - there also may be an update like once a week or two to the same effect

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Im trying to understand how UMU uses prefixes

    plain Wine prefixes work just like a Windows drive, I just execute WineCFG or regedit or install more software in the same prefix if I need to

    but UMU seems even more focused to the one program per prefix approach

    I know it uses a read only runtime, but how does it use prefixes? Bottles doesn’t treat them like they do with Wine ones (allowing you to add shortcuts for different programs in the prefix for example, but Bottles offers you to use Game Files outside of the prefix too)

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Basically it creates a new prefix for every game you have. They're extremely similar to wine prefixes. You generally don't have to worry about them, but if you need to mess with them or install a program you can use Protontricks, which is also included in Heroic's menus.

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