Lutris is a game manager and helpful game installer for Steam Deck and Desktop Linux that brings together your game library from Steam, Humble Bundle, GOG, EA, Emulators and more. The latest release has improvements across the whole app to make it smoother.
The v0.5.15 release is not all about big headline features, but improvement the way most things inside it work. For instance, having it download components it needs while the app is open instead of displaying a basic "updating runtime" box makes the app starting and initial experience feel a whole lot cleaner and nicer overall.
Here's all the main new stuff:
- Download runtime components from the main window, the "updating runtime" dialog appearing before Lutris opens has been removed.
- Add the ability to open a location in your file browser from file picker widgets.
- Add the ability to select, remove, or stop multiple games in the Lutris window.
- Redesigned 'Uninstall Game' dialog now completely removes games by default.
- Show an animation when a game is launched.
- Add the ability to disable Wine auto-updates at the expense of losing support.
- Add playtime editing in the game preferences.
- Move game files, runners to the trash instead of deleting them they are uninstalled.
- Add "Updates" tab in Preferences control and check for updates and correct missing media in the 'Games' view.
- Add "Storage" tab in Preferences to control game and installer cache location.
- Expand "System" tab in Preferences with more system information but less brown.
- Add "Run Task Manager" command for Wine games.
- Add two new, smaller banner sizes for itch.io games.
- Sync Steam playtimes with the Lutris library.
Bug and crash fixes:
- Fix the export / import feature.
- Fix some crashes happening when using Wayland and a high DPI gaming mouse.
- Fix crash when opening the system preferences tab for a game.
- Reduced the locales list to a predefined one (let us know if you need yours added).
- Fix Lutris not expanding "~" in paths.
- Ignore Wine virtual desktop setting when using Wine-GE/Proton to avoid crash.
- Ignore MangoHUD setting when launching Steam to avoid crash.
Find out more on the official site and GitHub.
Update: a quick bug-fix release was put up shortly after with v0.5.16 having these changes:
- Fix bug that prevented installers to complete.
- Better handling of Steam configurations for the Steam account picker.
- Load game library in a background thread.
QuoteOn a less positive note, I’d like to address the painful direction the Lutris Patreon (and financial support in general) is taking. The current earnings of the Lutris Patreon is about half of what it was in September 2020. This was a time before the Steam Deck when Lutris was far less complete than what it is today.
Lutris was never created in the goal of making money but the direction the Patreon is taking only cements my conviction that making a living writing open source software is nothing but a dream. I fully understand that the current economic situation makes things harder for most to give to open source projects and can’t thank enough all of you who still make monthly donations! I’m slightly hopeful that the introduction of cloud saves in Lutris will change the direction the Patreon has taken. While self hosting your cloud saves with Nextcloud will be the default option, it will also be possible for $5 Patrons to host your saves on Lutris.net. In any case, working full time on Lutris will soon come to an end since it is not sustainable and I will eventually run out of savings. Do not believe the whole “Free as in speech, not free as in beer” discourse. Free software is free in the monetary sense too. The only people who make money writing open source software are the ones under the umbrella of a large corporation.
While this may sound sour, I must repeat: Lutris was not created to make money and I’m really happy with what it has become and with the state of Linux gaming in general! It is just frustrating to see thousand of dollars spent in ugly JPEGs of monkeys (glad the NFT fad is over) while the work of open source developers is consistently under-valuated. To the people who do support Lutris and other open source projects, thank you so much, you are heroes! And for those who can’t afford to support financially, don’t worry about it, just enjoy the software!
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