The Playtron team working on PlaytronOS has grown recently, with the creator of the popular app Lutris joining up.
What is PlaytronOS? An upcoming specialised Fedora Silverblue based Linux distribution from Playtron. Designed to work with Steam, Epic Games, GOG and more. It's backed by the likes of Samsung, Square Enix, Circle & Mysten Labs and is taking aim at both SteamOS from Valve and Windows from Microsoft to give a simple interface to get gaming on handheld PCs and more.
A first Alpha of PlaytronOS was just recently released so they're actually beginning to show what they're doing.
Now, in a post on Patreon, Mathieu Comandon the creator of Lutris announced how they're "Joining forces with Playtron". As Comandon explained:
Having a console like experience on Linux was something I’ve always wanted but building a full OS for Lutris was always out of scope given the effort required to maintain it. Maintaining the Lutris project is already quite a substantial load and we wouldn’t have the manpower to drive such a project. But with joining forces with other projects and getting support from investors that’s a whole different story. My plan was to find a job after the SCaLE expo, ending a period of only relying on savings and donations. I put aside the other prospects I had and got in touch with Playtron. A few weeks after, I was joining their team as a developer to work mostly on the UI side of things.
The post also briefly touches on some issues like PlaytronOS not currently supporting actual Native Linux games, and crypto/web3, which I touched on in previous articles too. The post also notes how like with SteamOS, the development of PlaytronOS "directly contributes to the evolution of several open source projects".
So now the Playtron team has developers from Lutris, Heroic Games Launcher, ChimeraOS, winesapOS and Box64 to name just a few.
Lutris fans will also be happy to know a new release is "on the way" that will have "many fixes, notably for the Ubisoft integration" along with "better support for umu and Flatpak". More about Lutris can be seen on the official website.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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nebadon2025 Sep 9
This makes me less interested in playtron not more, i stopped using Lutris years ago, it will certainly be interesting to see where this all goes, but Playtron really is not something I am interested in much at this point, it still seems like pie in the sky to me. What I am worried about is when Playtron fails what happens to all these projects that anchored themselves to it.. it could potentially be really bad for Linux gaming.
Last edited by nebadon2025 on 9 September 2024 at 4:27 pm UTC
Last edited by nebadon2025 on 9 September 2024 at 4:27 pm UTC
6 Likes, Who?
So does anyone know a good replacement for Lutris that isn't Heroic Games Launcher?
2 Likes, Who?
I use Lutris, and it has been more or less fine, but I guess I'm hearing that it won't be updated anywhere near as frequently in the future. Should I be looking for an alternative?
1 Likes, Who?
So does anyone know a good replacement for Lutris that isn't Heroic Games Launcher?I jumped to Heroic a couple of months ago and it's a breath of fresh air. But if it's not for you, I suppose Arch Wiki has you covered. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gaming
There's a section on launchers in there.
Edit - oh, and I just noticed that Liam covered another alternative earlier today!
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/09/nonsteamlaunchers-v394-gets-save-backups-using-ludusavi/
Last edited by scaine on 9 September 2024 at 5:05 pm UTC
2 Likes, Who?
What is PlaytronOS? An upcoming specialised Fedora Silverblue based Linux distribution from Playtron.
I have seen today Gardiner Bryant on Youtube today testing this alpha. And it has clearly signs from arch and chimera os.
Not sure how that can even fit with Silverblue. ? It was something from The Bootprocess.
But i am kind of curious why does that ask for a EULA?
Last edited by Alexander on 9 September 2024 at 5:37 pm UTC
0 Likes
Not overly extatic that the project siphons all the devs but! it's still Linux based so there is a poasibilit that with SteamDeck it will bite oven more pie from Windows, which is good.
0 Likes
mr-victory Sep 9
good replacement for LutrisBottles can manage Wine prefixes and install some dependencies. It can also install some launchers like Ubisoft connect and EA app iirc.
I use Heroic or plain old command line for managing Wine.
Last edited by mr-victory on 9 September 2024 at 6:32 pm UTC
2 Likes, Who?
mr-victory Sep 9
what happens to all these projects that anchored themselves to itI'm not optimistic about Playtron's feature but IMO devs can find more time to work on upstream projects while they (the devs) are under the Playtron umbrella and continue normally if/when Playtron goes under.
0 Likes
So does anyone know a good replacement for Lutris that isn't Heroic Games Launcher?I jumped to Heroic a couple of months ago and it's a breath of fresh air. But if it's not for you, I suppose Arch Wiki has you covered. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gaming
There's a section on launchers in there.
Edit - oh, and I just noticed that Liam covered another alternative earlier today!
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/09/nonsteamlaunchers-v394-gets-save-backups-using-ludusavi/
Can you install and add games that aren't on any of those platforms? Iso's and cds ect
Does it have a mangohud toggle as well like lutris does?
I've never used anything other then lutris (then emulationstation for my main GUI) so abit unsure about the alternatives
1 Likes, Who?
nebadon2025 Sep 9
You absolutely can add any executable to Heroic Launcher, i don't really have any games i play from CDs to test it, but it you can run it in wine, it can run in Heroic Launcher pretty much.
So does anyone know a good replacement for Lutris that isn't Heroic Games Launcher?I jumped to Heroic a couple of months ago and it's a breath of fresh air. But if it's not for you, I suppose Arch Wiki has you covered. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gaming
There's a section on launchers in there.
Edit - oh, and I just noticed that Liam covered another alternative earlier today!
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/09/nonsteamlaunchers-v394-gets-save-backups-using-ludusavi/
Can you install and add games that aren't on any of those platforms? Iso's and cds ect
Does it have a mangohud toggle as well like lutris does?
I've never used anything other then lutris (then emulationstation for my main GUI) so abit unsure about the alternatives
6 Likes, Who?
the development of PlaytronOS "directly contributes to the evolution of several open source projects".
I guess it could be truly beneficial for all at the end. But recently I've gotten really tired of the "it serves a greater cause, so anything bad that might happen is okay" notion. Web3 is the red flag for me here. But who knows, maybe with all that corporate backing, this could help with low hanging fruit such as anticheat on linux for example. We'll see.
Last edited by Pyrate on 9 September 2024 at 8:49 pm UTC
1 Likes, Who?
This... looks bad. Literally nothing good happens when crypto is involved, I thought we already learned this lesson. From what I'm seeing on reddit there has already been people during the past couple of months warning about signs of something very fishy going on with this project. Many question asked and just "trust me bro" as the answer for everything. WTF is the Lutris dev doing here? Does he really need the money so badly? Seeing this I worry about the future of Lutris even more now. And I see Square-Enix is involved... the same Square-Enix that sold Tomb Raider and Deus Ex to invest in crypto...
10 Likes, Who?
This... looks bad. Literally nothing good happens when crypto is involved, I thought we already learned this lesson. From what I'm seeing on reddit there has already been people during the past couple of months warning about signs of something very fishy going on with this project. Many question asked and just "trust me bro" as the answer for everything. WTF is the Lutris dev doing here? Does he really need the money so badly? Seeing this I worry about the future of Lutris even more now. And I see Square-Enix is involved... the same Square-Enix that sold Tomb Raider and Deus Ex to invest in crypto...Earlier reports on the project have revealed plenty of eyebrow-raising things, too - for example, claiming that Fortnite and Roblox wouldn't have to worry about their anti-cheat being hacked because Fedora Silverblue is immutable, whilst simultaneously claiming that there'd be an AI assistant from Perplexity that will play your games for you if you get stuck (rather incompatible with anti-cheat, methinks), along with the first announced handheld using it being strangely focussed on "Web 3.0"/"blockchain" stuff and talking about the OS as if that's what it's for. And there were some shenanigans with a video sent to the press using content that wasn't theirs, too.
Too many red flags, for me.
Last edited by Pengling on 10 September 2024 at 12:08 am UTC
14 Likes, Who?
pleasereadthemanual Sep 10
Does he really need the money so badly?Opportunities to be paid to work on open source are rare. Opportunities in a space you're interested in are vanishingly rare.
No matter what happens with Playtron, all of us will hopefully get some interesting software out of it to hack on. The bits of it that are open source, anyway.
11 Likes, Who?
This... looks bad. Literally nothing good happens when crypto is involved, I thought we already learned this lesson. From what I'm seeing on reddit there has already been people during the past couple of months warning about signs of something very fishy going on with this project. Many question asked and just "trust me bro" as the answer for everything. WTF is the Lutris dev doing here? Does he really need the money so badly? Seeing this I worry about the future of Lutris even more now. And I see Square-Enix is involved... the same Square-Enix that sold Tomb Raider and Deus Ex to invest in crypto...Earlier reports on the project have revealed plenty of eyebrow-raising things, too - for example, claiming that Fortnite and Roblox wouldn't have to worry about their anti-cheat being hacked because Fedora Silverblue is immutable, whilst simultaneously claiming that there'd be an AI assistant from Perplexity that will play your games for you if you get stuck (rather incompatible with anti-cheat, methinks), along with the first announced handheld using it being strangely focussed on "Web 3.0"/"blockchain" stuff and talking about the OS as if that's what it's for. And there were some shenanigans with a video sent to the press using content that wasn't theirs, too.
Too many red flags, for me.
This worries me too. I don't want to be skeptical, but I can't help it with this. I hope I'm wrong and that this stuff like crypto and ai ends up falling to the wayside as the project develops, but I just have a really bad feeling that this could end up being a bad thing for the Linux gaming community.
And if/when this falls apart will these devs be willing to pick up the separate pieces and continue on like before or will they quit because they were used to getting paid?
Last edited by Leahi84 on 10 September 2024 at 10:37 am UTC
2 Likes, Who?
This worries me too. I don't want to be skeptical, but I can't help it with this. I hope I'm wrong and that this stuff like crypto and ai ends up falling to the wayside as the project develops, but I just have a really bad feeling that this could end up being a bad thing for the Linux gaming community.Remembering things like the GameTrac/Gizmondo and the Infinium Phantom, I think that the bad feeling is justified!
3 Likes, Who?
the development of PlaytronOS "directly contributes to the evolution of several open source projects".
I guess it could be truly beneficial for all at the end. But recently I've gotten really tired of the "it serves a greater cause, so anything bad that might happen is okay" notion. Web3 is the red flag for me here. But who knows, maybe with all that corporate backing, this could help with low hanging fruit such as anticheat on linux for example. We'll see.
The moment they mentioned anything about crypto and Web3, that was a red flag for me because I don't want any of that crap on my gaming systems and I'm still not convinced that they would ever solve the kernel anti-cheat situation even though they made a bold claim on their website that it can play all Windows games.
Last edited by ToddL on 10 September 2024 at 1:18 pm UTC
5 Likes, Who?
Caldathras Sep 10
claiming that there'd be an AI assistant from Perplexity that will play your games for you if you get stuckGood grief!! What's the point of playing games at all, then! This is the sort of prosthetic I can do without ...
4 Likes, Who?
Apparently it will also have fun for you, so you won't have to experience that.claiming that there'd be an AI assistant from Perplexity that will play your games for you if you get stuckGood grief!! What's the point of playing games at all, then! This is the sort of prosthetic I can do without ...
4 Likes, Who?
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