A user asked on the official Lutris GitHub two weeks ago “is lutris slop now” and noted an increasing amount of “LLM generated commits”. To which the Lutris creator replied:
It’s only slop if you don’t know what you’re doing and/or are using low quality tools. But I have over 30 years of programming experience and use the best tool currently available. It was tremendously helpful in helping me catch up with everything I wasn’t able to do last year because of health issues / depression.
There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. In many ways, it couldn’t have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn’t AI that laid off thousands of employees, it’s deluded executives who don’t understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.
I’m not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don’t like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I’m not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.
Anyway, I was suspecting that this “issue” might come up so I’ve removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what’s generated and what is not. Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society, this requires changes at a deeper level, and we all know that nothing is going to improve with the current US administration.
Up until recently, Lutris worked perfectly for me. Ever since around the release of Wine 11, though, cant get anything to even install, let alone play. This might explain my increasing frustration with the app.
Guess I’m going back to using Bottles for the odd game or app I don’t feel like trying to shoehorn into steam.
I am very much a beginner, and until now lutris was kind of my default answer for “how the hell do I get that windows exe installer to spit its entrails so I can run it through wine” (or even native engines like VCMI, Daggerfall Unity and Creatures Docking Station).
For everything that doesn’t come from Steam, obviously.
What is the more direct way? Does Bottles do that? I haven’t tried it yet.
There’s actually a number of options. Lutris and Bottles are both built on top of Wine. And there are other apps that use Wine to make it all work, but I’m not very familiar with anything else…yet!
Bottles can be a little tricky to get used to - one of the biggest issues is that it sandboxes the Wine runtime, so you’ll often need to move your .exe into the right file path. But, other than that I found it pretty easy to use! So if you need something that you can “drop in” to replace Lutris, it’s worth a try! It has some helpful preconfigured runtime environments, depending on if you are running a general propose application or a video game. For the power users, you can even start with a blank slate.
Interesting. I am mostly interested in running games. I’ll have a look into how Bottles work then.
I feel like for most if not all of my use cases that are not specific games, I can find some decent stuff running natively.
Oh, definitely. One of the best things about Linux and the free software movement, innit? But, the ‘applications’ preset in bottles is great for that one tool that is just hard to live without, or some specific tool created by the community that may or may not ever get a native port (SAK.exe for managing Switch ROM files comes to mind for me).
For now I think the thing that I’ll miss the most will be Virtual Desktop. I haven’t tried my headset with this PC yet, I have a more recent one that’s still on Win11 for that, but I know SteamLink is completely broken for me and VD is what makes PCVR even possible for me.
I blame Valve for that need by the way. They had a version of SteamVR/SteamLink that worked well enough a couple versions back, they broke it in newer versions for my headset, and I can’t even go back to the one that worked because the only option is “previous” and we’re past that. Many reports later they still haven’t fixed it.
I am trying to give their programmers credit where I can; first, the massive influx of time and money into gaming on Linux has had obvious, amazing benefits. And my recent gripes would be about a persistent bug that has crept into Steam OS desktop mode; but it’s a one line shell script to fix, and they just moved to a much more recent kernel, not to mention officially tackling support for third party handheld PCs, so…yeah, that all sounds like a headache on crack.
But, honestly, I hear ya all the same. I think we feel confident holding these guys to a high standard for good reasons, so hopefully it all comes out in the wash.
Edit: I don’t know much about virtual desktop options that run native, but wish you luck. Seems like lots of stuff going on in that area these days…
Thank you, I think at some point I’ll end up getting the Frame, or at least a newer headset that’s guaranteed to be supported by their API, so I certainly hope it’ll work on Linux.
Sure, they’ve done a lot to make the transition to linux easier, and that’s great. Especially right now with Microsoft going to shit harder than ever. To me it sounded a bit overdramatic around Win8 when they went all “Microsoft gaming is over” but they were definitely right to start working on it.
But specifically for VR I tend to think they should be held somewhat accountable because, they sell VR games. I bought games there with the expectation they’d work, and they did, for a while. The fact they suddenly don’t without anything changing on my end is bad. Especially since one solution would be letting us go back to the version that worked.
Unfortunately for now the only good workaround I know is VD, which is Windows-only proprietary software.
Oh, I assume a solution like Sunshine/Moonlight on Linux don’t provide what you need?
If you’re talking about games, I usually just add the exe to Steam as a non-Steam game and enable proton for it