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
Pegasus is my go-to but it takes a bit of tweaking and learning. It’s kinda like the arch of frontends; very versatile, lightweight and customizable, but also a bit of a learning curve. Steam games get added automatically, but with other emulaed or wine games you’ll need a scraper like Skyscraper or you can edit the metadata files yourself. You can also point to bash scripts to do essentially anything you want on the OS side. Launch anything, any emulator, any game, any bash script, wine, whatever your heart desires.
There are also tons of themes in every style, my top pics are Retro Mega Next for browsing and Library for a grid layout. It is also natively built for use with controller so it is easy to use. It’s also cross platform, I currently use it on Fedora, used to use it on Windows and have also used it on Android and Steam Deck. And if you want to go even deeper than that, it runs on QML, and you can customize any and every sigle part of the launcher and frontend with the QML files or even make your own theme. The rabbit hole is deep and very fun to explore and it’s such a flexible frontend
I have a HTPC which i use for watching stuff and playing games. I run Bazzite with Plasma Big Screen and launch games using Bottles and console emulators. Bottles, Lutris and most emulators have features for adding games to the system menu and they work just fine.
I use a gamepad (8BitDo Ultimate 2C) to control the PC and sometimes also a tiny keyboard for typing. It’s a bit rudimentary at times and took some time to get used to but it gets the job done without signing in to Steam or any other online service.
Heroic and Steam, don’t need anything else.
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
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)
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.
Heroic has an option in game settings “run exe on prefix” and also winetricks gui. UMU has its own proton version, you can use it if you need to
+1 for Heroic!
