Lutris These Balls (And other hilarious jokes)

I have recently been experimenting with Lutris...#

...and i have to say I am impressed. It has given me real hope for the Year of the Linux Gaming Desktop:tm:. Lutris (or at least the way I and many others are using it) is a platform for running games that are not native to Linux. Although it can be used to launch your few native games - the main purpose is for getting games to work outside of that. If you have not done your own experimentation with Linux gaming you might be wondering why this is such a task. The answer is fairly simple, while Yes: most games that are not designed to run on Linux should be able to be ran with help from tools like Wine and Proton (more on this later) the reality is that it's rarely that simple.

Tweaks and Setup#

For many games (if not all) getting them installed and working in wine/proton is not a one and done thing. There is almost always some custom tweaking you will need to do to get this particular game working. Perhaps it requires some obscure library to be installed, or some extra wine compatibility layer to be installed. Or perhaps you may even need to go searching the depths of the internet for someone providing the game files as you are not able to use the windows installer. While I imagine some people are fine with this extra overhead on every new game they wish to play (especially as some people end up playing like 3 games over and over), for a gamer like me who likes to play a large variety of games, I don't want to end up in the situation where trying out a new game requires hours of annoying setup - especially if this is a multiplayer game and I would have to explain to my friends while I won't be able to play with them right away as I first need to go deep into reddit to find out how to get this game to actually launch with sound. The reason to me why Lutris is so great: is because it fixes this. It provides the tools for this unique tweaks to be kept in a script, and the community is large enough that the likelihood is for any game that some kind and cleaver soul has already discovered how to fix the issues and written the code to automatically do it. This means that for the Lutris end user - installing a new game is as simple as searching it's name up in the lutris search - and clicking the install button. Thats it. That is how game installing is supposed to be, it's largely how it is within windows (where these games are actually designed for) and while it may not be perfect (largely for the lutris community not being that big) it's certainly good enough for me to get excited about the future of gaming on Linux.

Protons and Neutrons#

Another great benefit for the Linux gaming community recently has been Valve's Steam Deck. This is a commercialized gaming device sold by a major company that is actually running Arch Linux behind the scenes. This means that game developers now have market pressure to make their games run with Linux (or at least have good compatibility with Proton). Talking of Proton, alongside the Steam Deck, valve has been working on it's own compatibility tool (similar to wine) with the main purpose being for running games. As this tool is being made by a large (and rich) company with a dedication towards gaming: it has massively improved the performance and compatibility of many games trying to be ran on Linux. If tools and communities like Lutris can make getting a game working in layers like Proton a single search and click process - then Linux gaming would feel pretty ready to go.

"NVIDIA Fuck You" - Linus Torvalds#

Another large factor effecting Linux gaming (especially open source Linux gaming) has been the issues of NVIDIA drivers. Unlike AMD's GPU drivers which are Open Source, NVIDIA has kept theres behind closed doors. This makes the open source driver options vastly inferior to the NVIDIA copies and also means that no community effort can truly be put into making the closed source NVIDIA drivers better on Linux. Recently NVIDIA has open sourced their Kernel modules which has given a lot of insight to the workings of the drivers but still doesn't let the Linux community really have the power to make Linux gaming a better experience.

TL:DR#

Since my writing is not the best nor really proofread I will summarize this blog-post. Lutris is great, if you want to try and move to gaming on Linux I 100% recommend checking it out. The Steam Deck has made great market pressure for improving gaming on Linux and I believe this will only continue. NVIDIA needs to open source their drivers.

Also by making this blog post, I have now broken the curse of having only 1 blog post which simply describes how you setup your blog.