Ditch Steam!
John Knight stress-tests Lutris and finds some gaming heaven and hell – though hopefully, it’s more of the former.
John Knight attempts to wean us off the delicious teat of Steam and move us to a more open gaming platform that helps us run all our favourite games.
Rather than being some sort of ask in cream,
Lutris (https://lutris.net) is a gaming client for Linux, with a focus on gaming preservation and centralisation. From a single interface you can run anything from old Sega games to modern AAA games using Wine or Proton. According to its website, “integration with stores like GOG and Steam allow you to import your existing game library, and community maintained install scripts give you a completely automated setup”. The Lutris downloads page has instructions for installing on a wide variety of distributions, as well as links and recommendations for playing Windows games through Wine.
Blank slate
Open Lutris and you’ll be presented with a lot of blank white space – so other than changing the colour scheme to black, you’ll want to add some games! Lutris has an extensive gaming database on its website, which you can browse using the search bar on the right. Enter a search term and a list of games appear in the main field. Don’t get your hopes up: they’re not all free, and for most you’ll either have to buy something or download some kind of ROM.
Select a game and you’re given the option to install it or view it on lutris.net, with info on how well it will run and any issues you may encounter. The Lutris database can be browsed either through the app or in your web browser, with each category based on ‘runners’. Click Install and you’re taken through a series of GUI prompts, ideally with all optimisations pre-prepared.
If you don’t own any games, Lutris has a collection of free and open source games you can play, with dedicated buttons for this at the right of the window.
The Running Man
Runners are really what power Lutris. Runners are programs managed by Lutris that can run games, whether it be Linux itself, Wine, DOSBOX, MAME,
gzdoom and so on. Each installer script is assigned a runner, and programs usually become runners if they can run a variety of games, not just one or two.
To see what’s on offer, there’s a button to Manage Runners near the top-left of the window. Although there are services such as Steam and browser links, most of these runners are emulators. Any runners that are not installed will be greyed out, and if you look around the window there will be two buttons: one to install a runner and one to configure it.
Rather brilliantly, instead of you having to find binaries for your system or compiling something, Lutris has pre-made packages and will download and install them. To add a game manually, click the + sign at the top of the window and click Add Game. The ‘Add a new game’ window opens in the Game info tab. Here you enter the name of your game and select its runner; you can also enter the year it was released. If the runner you need isn’t in the drop-down list, the ‘Install runners’ button opens the Manage Runners window, where you can get more.
The next tab is ‘Game options’, which changes depending on the runner being used. For instance, with PSP games you choose an ISO file, and with Steam games you enter the application ID, with an extra box for any launch arguments. Moving along, the ‘Runner options’ tab has switches to override the default configuration, such as whether to run in fullscreen or to start Steam in Big Picture mode.
Lastly is the ‘System options’ tab, where the real tweaking lies. The ‘Default installation folder’ is worth defining, but we particularly like the option to switch resolutions, as well as the switch to restore your resolution on game exit. It’s well worth clicking the ‘Show advanced options’ button, because there are excellent features available, such as restricting the
game to a single CPU core, or switching to a US keyboard layout. When you’ve finished, click the Save button, and your game should appear in the main list. Select your game and click the Play button on the right – all going well, it should launch. If not, you’ll need to go back and tweak some of those options (right-click on the game and choose Configure).
So much wining
Lutris enables you to import existing games, adding them to your menu in big batches. These include games from Linux itself, gog.com, Linux Steam, and the Windows Steam client using a Wine runner. Note that you can only import Steam games that are already installed locally.
To import games, click the + sign in the top-left corner and choose Import Games. The window is split into tabs based on the runner used. Each tab has a list of games to select – just click ‘Import games’ when you’re done. The games you’ve imported should be in your menu; click All from the Runners menu if you can’t find them.
In our experiments with gog.com we found some games just wouldn’t import, such as Tomb Raider 2 or the original Mortal Kombat DOS games, yet Tyrian
2000 had an automated installer script. It failed, admittedly, but at least it had one. Whether a game has an installer or not is hit and miss: some do, some don’t, and anything missing an installer has the option to write one yourself.
Annoyingly, Blakestone had fullscreen issues, running in a tiny window surrounded by black. Using gog.com’s manual Linux installer, it ran perfectly in fullscreen and made a menu entry in KDE, which Lutris didn’t manage. The same thing happened with Cyberia.
On the bright side, PSP ROMS worked perfectly.
Windows gaming is where Lutris really shines. It’s fine having Steam and Proton, but not everything is available as a Steam app. Overwatch is a prime example – some people are using Lutris just to play that! Whereas Valve’s Proton takes a one-size-fits-all approach, Lutris uses individual scripts that optimise settings for each game, such as specifying which version of Windows to simulate, which version of Wine to use, and so on. For some Steam games Lutris will run Windows Steam through Wine, instead of Linux Steam with Proton – though you will usually be given a choice between the two.
We used Warframe as a test, which is free to play with only a Silver rating on Proton (meaning compatibility is hit-and-miss), but has a gold rating on
Lutris. Warframe came with the Windows client as the only option, but heavily optimised, with Esync and DXVK enabled. It downloaded a specific version of
Wine, and chose Windows 7 as its environment. That was encouraging, and results online have generally been pretty impressive.
Prime time
Lutris is certainly ambitious, but do you need it in your life? Well it’s not without problems. Firstly, it’s still buggy and for most games the one-click experience we’d hoped for simply wasn’t there – especially with old emulated titles, which require you download a disk image and then point the installer at it. The fullscreen issues with Linux gog.com games actually made things more inconvenient, and a server error with gog.com temporarily broke any import functionality.
A central place for all your games is a nice thought, but convenient installers require scripts be written for each game, which is simply impossible for the entire history of gaming. Adding ROMS manually will just be a pain. So if you’re a retro gamer, no, it’s probably not what you’re looking for – but for modern gaming
(Fallout 4???–Ed), it’s a different story. Whether you want to centralise your games or not, if you’re serious about modern PC games on Linux you need Lutris. Even putting non-steam games aside, there are plenty of games that don’t work under Proton but do work under Lutris, so by combining the two your gaming library can be potentially massive.
Even though it will take time for Lutris to mature, it already has a large fanbase. As Linux gathers momentum as a viable gaming platform, Lutris is sure to be at the heart of gaming-focused distributions.