It predates Heroic by at least a few years, but yes, they are similar in purpose.

It’s a launcher that uses Wine variants (“runners”) to emulate the Windows runtime environment, like Lutris.

https://usebottles.com/

What’s easy to use is pretty subjective. As a game developer, you’re already at least a step or two removed from the proverbial average computer user. I suggest downloading live images of a few different distros and desktop environments, and playing with each for a while to get a feel for the differences.

I’m a gamer and developer, too. KDE Plasma is my desktop of choice these days.

I need to be able to use Unreal Engine

Someone else asked about this just 8 days ago, here:

https://beehaw.org/post/21209323

Regarding that particular requirement:

The Unreal Engine for Linux page indicates that they offer pre-compiled builds for Ubuntu 22.04.

It’s possible that those pre-compiled builds might work on Linux Mint, since Mint is based on Ubuntu. I would probably try this before committing to the officially supported Ubuntu version, both because it’s nice to have a newer distro and because Mint has a good track record of avoiding Ubuntuisms that are not generally well received (e.g. Snap).

If you don’t mind some extra work, you can apparently build Unreal for other linux distros. See here:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/linux-development-quickstart-for-unreal-engine

With views like that you probably support AI too.

Or I probably smell bad. Or I am probably a monster. Or I probably do whatever else you can imagine that might sway community opinion against me for contradicting you.

Once again, you are wrong. In both senses of the word.

I suggest learning what words mean before you go round using them in public, especially in accusations. It might help you to avoid embarrassing yourself. And, if arguing with people is what makes you happy, consider learning to avoid informal fallacies while you’re at it.

It’s theft. You are stealing from artists.

No, duplication is not theft. Reproducing is not stealing. Not in the dictionary sense. Not in the legal sense. Not in any sense at all.

It might be copyright infringement, inappropriate, and/or rude, depending on the particulars and the jurisdiction. But your claim that it is theft demonstrates that you either have no idea what you’re talking about, or you are deliberately misleading people.

Please stop.

I think they know this, and were aiming to exploit that initialism by associating its negative connotations with the totally unrelated thing that they don’t like.

If it works and the user is happy, why not Judy go with it?

There’s nothing wrong with Judy using a distro that works well for her. ;)

There’s also nothing wrong with sharing information so others can learn, identify patterns, and perhaps find something that works better for them.

If you post your system specs and the distros that had that problem, it might help someone else who runs into the same thing. Or it might even hint at a cause more specific than “wasn’t running CachyOS”.

CachyOS claims performance improvement by compiling its packages with CPU-family-specific optimizations. Okay, but most games are not CPU bound, and even those that are mostly spend their CPU time in game code, not distro package-provided code.

CachyOS claims interactivity improvement by using the BORE scheduler. Okay, but that’s unlikely to help games unless you’re running other tasks that compete for CPU time while you play.

So for most gamers, I wouldn’t expect CachyOS to offer much improvement in either area.

My understanding is that lutris is a program whereas as Plasma is a desktop environment

Yes, that’s right.

so I guess I would be looking for plasma to start regardless and if connected to a ps5 controller then open lutris to big picture mode.

Plasma (like many other desktop environments) can automatically launch whatever you like when you log in, if you create an XDG Autostart file for it in the $HOME/.config/autostart/ directory. (Hint: It uses the .desktop file format.)

You could write a script that checks for a Playstation controller and launches Lutris if one is detected. You could then reference that script in the autostart file’s Exec= line.

The simplest way I know of to detect a Playstation controller in a shell script would be something like this:

#!/bin/sh
udevadm info -t |grep -q DRIVER=playstation && echo "Hello, Playstation!"

You would have to make the script executable, and replace the echo command at the end with a lutris command line, of course.

Terminology correction to your original post: Booting is something that a computer does when you power it on. Launching a game or game launcher (on a machine that has an OS) is not booting.

This could use some clarification. Do you mean that you want…

• Lutris or Plasma (depending on a detected game controller) to automatically launch as soon as your computer finishes booting, instead of the display manager that normally presents a login screen?
• Lutris to automatically launch when you log in to a Plasma session while your PS5 controller is connected?
• Lutris to automatically launch whenever you connect a controller while already logged in to a Plasma session?
• Something else?

The possibilities really depend on what you’re after.

avoid older office PC’s with AMD graphics though, since none of them are going to have Navi graphics.

The key word here being older. These days, AMD CPUs have a couple of Navi graphics cores built in, and they’re good for both office tasks and video encoding.

It recognizes well-known device IDs, and tags matching devices in such a way that they will be treated like game controllers by downstream hardware management components. For example, giving unprivileged users permission to use the device, or labeling it as a “joystick” so it won’t be ignored by certain game support libraries.

FYI, the game-devices-udev package is Arch-specific. In the Debian family, steam-devices is the roughly equivalent package.

Some things to consider:

Do you have the game-devices-udev package installed? Its udev rules might be needed for some software to detect your controller and its features.

Have you tested for different behavior when connecting your DualShock 4 via Bluetooth vs. USB?

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/blob/proton_10.0/docs/CONTROLLERS.md

I won’t watch the video, but as someone who has been running Windows games on Linux since well before Steam for Linux existed, my view is that comparing performance on different distros is pointless these days.

Game performance depends very little on which Linux distro you use, because sufficiently recent versions of the performance-sensitive components are available on all of them, and because gaming runtime environments like Steam and Flatpak provide their own versions of several of these components anyway. (Also, desktop environments have generally become good about turning off expensive compositing operations while games are running.)

Pick whatever distro is comfortable for you to use and maintain. That might be bleeding edge Arch, or low maintenance Debian, or user friendly Mint, or whatever. They can all play games very well once they’re set up for it, and the setup is almost never difficult if you’re willing to learn how.

As for comparing Windows to Linux for running Windows games, I would expect performance to be close enough that the difference doesn’t matter in most cases. Game-focused Wine builds and API shims like DXVK are already very capable, and continually improving. Windows might have advantages from being a game’s native platform, but Linux has advantages from resource efficiency.

So, a review “showing almost no difference in performance between gaming distros and Windows 11 LTSC” doesn’t surprise me at all.

My opinion: the gaming performance differences these days are mostly minor, and less important than having my computer serve me (not some invasive corporation).

SteamOS is not designed for general computing, so if you use your machine for anything outside of gaming, a desktop distro would be a better fit. (If I were to do this as a first step away from Windows, I would probably choose Linux Mint and switch to the KDE Plasma desktop environment after installing the OS.)

You could then install Steam and get all the gaming goodness without giving up productivity apps. Maybe use Steam’s Big Picture Mode if you really want a console-like interface.

Doesn’t Steam run basically everything, including the client itself, inside the Steam Container Runtime now?

What makes you think that? I don’t remember any announcements to that effect.

Last time I checked, Steam used pressure-vessel (the container) only for games, not for itself. But I haven’t been following changes in that area lately.

!heritagefoundationcrazyboard@sh.itjust.works

Made with Godot. 93% rating on Steam.