Essentially, Windows 3.1 Program Manager for the 21st century. Lutris did that quite well. Heroic doesn’t let you add custom stuff, it just integrates with store fronts. RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”.
Lutris scripts were great - just having the required winetricks commands to get something obscure working was awesome, but packaged up in a useful way along with art and metadata was handy. The front-end being “only what you need” was good as well. Shame it’s gone off the rails a bit…
The ability to apply community patches easily was super handy as well. It made installing games like Dungeon Keeper and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines extremely simple.
It’s now been months since I’ve successfully got Lutris to even install a game. It practically turned to slop overnight.
RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”
This definitely does happen sometimes, especially these days, but this is explicitly opposite to old-school Linux design principles. A program should do one thing, it should do it well, and it should be able to be plugged in to other processes in order to accomplish whatever this single-purpose program accomplishes. If you want it to do something else, go get/write a different package to do something different. This is actually explicitly stated in the “Unix Philosophy” papers by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, et al.
The concept suffers a little bit with graphical applications. They don’t exactly have equivalents to stdin, stdout and stderr which you could pipe or read/write willy-nilly.
RetroArch isn’t far off from the philosophy I think, those emulation cores are pretty much independent projects plugged into a frontend. Unfortunately that default frontend is pretty clunky and doesn’t come with sane defaults for known ROMs. Or even sane menu navigation tbh, main menu and game menu looked way too similar last time I used it…
Heroic lets you add plenty of custom stuff. The only thing I’m missing from lutris is tagging/grouping of games, everything else I ever used in lutris is available in heroic.
It lets you “add game”, but then gives you the choice of Linux / Windows with a Wine version / browser, and you have to put in the path.
So for example, in Lutris I could have “every Zelda game” or “every Castlevania game” as a filter. Castlevania needs MSX, NES, Gameboy, SNES, N64, DS, PSX, PS2, and Wii emulation; and one of (Steam, or PS3 or X360 emulation) to be reasonably complete.
I suppose I could create a Linux shell script that daisy-chains into the correct emulator, but that would be quite clunky compared to Lutris, which is still pretty clunky. And I wouldn’t be able to filter to that, nor sort them by release date.
Just for gaming purposes, having a unified front end that:
lets you start an application with the arguments it needs, whether to use a specific Wine folder, or start an emulator with the right arguments
lets you tag up each application with some custom arguments - genre, date, and so on - and lets you filter and sort by them
lets you configure each app with their own box art or whatever as an icon
keeps some gaming-related metadata; hours played, whether you’ve finished it, …
Essentially, Windows 3.1 Program Manager for the 21st century. Lutris did that quite well. Heroic doesn’t let you add custom stuff, it just integrates with store fronts. RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”.
Lutris scripts were great - just having the required winetricks commands to get something obscure working was awesome, but packaged up in a useful way along with art and metadata was handy. The front-end being “only what you need” was good as well. Shame it’s gone off the rails a bit…
The ability to apply community patches easily was super handy as well. It made installing games like Dungeon Keeper and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines extremely simple.
It’s now been months since I’ve successfully got Lutris to even install a game. It practically turned to slop overnight.
This definitely does happen sometimes, especially these days, but this is explicitly opposite to old-school Linux design principles. A program should do one thing, it should do it well, and it should be able to be plugged in to other processes in order to accomplish whatever this single-purpose program accomplishes. If you want it to do something else, go get/write a different package to do something different. This is actually explicitly stated in the “Unix Philosophy” papers by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, et al.
The concept suffers a little bit with graphical applications. They don’t exactly have equivalents to stdin, stdout and stderr which you could pipe or read/write willy-nilly.
RetroArch isn’t far off from the philosophy I think, those emulation cores are pretty much independent projects plugged into a frontend. Unfortunately that default frontend is pretty clunky and doesn’t come with sane defaults for known ROMs. Or even sane menu navigation tbh, main menu and game menu looked way too similar last time I used it…
Heroic lets you add plenty of custom stuff. The only thing I’m missing from lutris is tagging/grouping of games, everything else I ever used in lutris is available in heroic.
It lets you “add game”, but then gives you the choice of Linux / Windows with a Wine version / browser, and you have to put in the path.
So for example, in Lutris I could have “every Zelda game” or “every Castlevania game” as a filter. Castlevania needs MSX, NES, Gameboy, SNES, N64, DS, PSX, PS2, and Wii emulation; and one of (Steam, or PS3 or X360 emulation) to be reasonably complete.
I suppose I could create a Linux shell script that daisy-chains into the correct emulator, but that would be quite clunky compared to Lutris, which is still pretty clunky. And I wouldn’t be able to filter to that, nor sort them by release date.