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Lutris game launcher has a huge new Beta update out for testing

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Lutris is the impressive all-in-one solution for managing games on Linux, bundling tons of sources of Linux releases from different stores under one roof as well as emulators, compatibility layers and more.

Just recently on October 19 they put up the Beta of the new 0.5.8 release, and it includes some pretty huge changes and improvements all across the application. The way it actually works under the hood has been completely changed in many ways, along with the way you add games to it.

Instead of manually importing games, it now attempts to sync up with your library across other stores like GOG, Humble and Steam. Adding games from the Lutris website using their scripts to set things up is also now in its own section, just called Lutris and it no longer depends on having install scripts for 3rd party services as Lutris will now run stuff with an "auto-generated" script but scripts on the Lutris database will take precedence if available.

Actual installers have changed too and they now give a choice between downloading the files needed, or custom provided files and game banners and icons are now downloaded directly from the services linked. When installing from GOG for example, it will now attempt to pick up bonus content like soundtracks and manuals and offer to download them too when you pick a game. For people writing runners, the scripts that used to support all the different way to run games, you can now write them in JSON instead of Python, which opens it open to even more people although that way only covers simple methods but some of their runners have already moved over to JSON like dgen, ppsspp, citra, ags, virtualjaguar.

Lots of UI changes to make it cleaner, like the big sidebar moving to a smaller sleeker section at the bottom as shown above with the platform details and play button. There's also now a Favourites section, so you can set a few of your favourites to have them in a dedicated area.

Since this is a Beta, keep in mind there will be bugs but what they're doing with it really does sound good. Once the issues are ironed out, and Lutris 0.5.8 is released in full it should be a big improvement.

See the release notes and download from GitHub. See more on the official site.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Apps, Beta, Open Source | Apps: Lutris
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Sir_Diealot Oct 20, 2020
All stuff I don't care about. I hope it's still possible to manually install games, no scripts or anything. That is currently possible, although clearly not intended.

Also did they drop that useless Gnome dependency? By the looks of it, no. This is the only thing pulling in GNOME desktop and whatnot on my system, and probably for no good reason.

Also why would the change of scripting language open up script writing to more people? With the complexity of these scripts it hardly matters which language they are written in. It's usually just a sequence of external calls.
a0kami Oct 20, 2020
Quoting: ShinyaOsenI think this is what you're looking for https://github.com/lutris/wine/issues/34#issuecomment-693937620

Perfect, thank you kindly! :)
benjamimgois Oct 20, 2020
Epic games store stopped working on lutris for me, does it happen for anyone else ? It happens in the stable and beta release
dpanter Oct 20, 2020
Quoting: Liam DaweUnless I am missing it, there doesn't seem to be a way to connect an account without syncing.

Out of curiosity, what's your issue with syncing?
Simple, I do not want forced automatic syncing.

I only want the games I choose to manually add to be listed. Currently installed version 0.5.7.1 allows syncing on/off per account. My expectation is for this functionality to remain the users choice in 0.5.8 as well. Can anyone confirm? Screenshot in the spoiler.
Spoiler, click me
fenevadkan Oct 20, 2020
have they fixed c64 games launching already?
EagleDelta Oct 20, 2020
If anyone is having issues with Steam sync in the beta, there is a bug where they have the wrong case when looking to see which Steam user in your `localusers.vdf` file was the most recent. There is a bug fix up and waiting for merge.

If you want the fix in your beta now, you can edit the file `/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/lutris/util/steam/config.py` and change `"mostrecent"` to `"MostRecent"` on line 63. DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING ELSE!

If something does break, you can do a `sudo apt install --reinstall lutris` to reinstall the old stable release, then reinstall the beta DEB file from there.

Not sure if this is the same on other Distributions.

UPDATE: A fix has been push to the github repo that works a lot better than mine, but it's more complicated. As Steam was originally created on Windows, it can still be a bit fast and loose with case in text files. The update in Lutris will now properly sync Steam in the 0.5.8-beta as it does a case-insensitive check on the required config file option. I don't believe this fix is in the beta DEB file yet.

Quoting: Li0NeTWaiting to itch.io support too

Last I saw that is planned for 0.5.9


Last edited by EagleDelta on 21 October 2020 at 2:32 pm UTC
legluondunet Oct 21, 2020
Quoting: dpanterSimple, I do not want forced automatic syncing.

Good, like I said before, you don't have to give your different games providers credentials to Lutris and just continue to add manually games or install them by scripts installers from Lutris Website.
dpanter Oct 21, 2020
Quoting: legluondunetlike I said before, you don't have to give your different games providers credentials to Lutris
And like I said before, that is not an issue.
Forget it, I'll just have to update and find out for myself.
EagleDelta Oct 21, 2020
Quoting: dpanter
Quoting: legluondunetlike I said before, you don't have to give your different games providers credentials to Lutris
And like I said before, that is not an issue.
Forget it, I'll just have to update and find out for myself.

From what I've gathered using it, there's no automatic syncing. At least I haven't noticed it. As to Lutris having access to these services. This is no different than what we do in general tech to ensure interoperability between tools and services. They are just API calls that either use existing credentials to access your account or a use-case specific API key or token.

In Steam's case, it is actually using the login credentials that Steam already stores on your system. Lutris doesn't store those credentials, it just reads from the file that Steam places in your Steam configuration directory.
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