Linux versions of Epic games store and GOG galaxy is still a big win for everyone
Not just because it enables more access for everyone, but because it represents a deepening commitment by these companies to Linux as a gaming platform.
The more companies see Linux as a viable gaming platform, the more consumers will. It’s a virtuous cycle, and one that will only help to erode Windows grip on the desktop OS space.
It’s wild that Sweeney would let this happen. He’s been pretty vocally anti-linux in the past. Must be a big enough change to make him consider Linux dollars worth chasing.
Is gog galaxy for Linux got anywhere or still in deep dev?
Consider considering that it has worked very well on macOS for years, it can’t be that much of a leap to get it working on Linux.
Given that we haven’t gotten it yet, despite years of promise, it seemingly has to be. Isn’t it just a webapp anyway?
I think version 1.0 and 1.5 on macOS were a Web app, but IIRC Gog galaxy 2.0 was finally native on macOS, which they made a really, really, really big deal about. Although, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s just a native app framework with a mostly web-reliant backend.
Given that we haven’t gotten it yet
I can’t speak to their development priorities, but from what I understand, they don’t exactly have a huge dev team over there. I’ve learned to be patient with them.
But I get where you’re coming from
Ah, well if they’re aiming to make a native client I can see it taking a bunch of extra time.
What I mean is that if they wanna make a linux native client that’s not just a web interface in a shell, then, yeah, it’s gonna take a bunch of effort. And their dev team is already stretched between maintaining a windows native and a relatively new macos native client.
But with most of the work already done and having made a macOS native client, pouring that to linux shouldn’t be too much more work. A lot of the extra work there should be in leveraging open source libraries to replace whatever proprietary Apple stuff they were using to make it work on macOS. (kind of guessing here)
Aye, I follow you. I honestly couldn’t say yay or nay. Might be as easy as switching some libraries out and making a good GUI in Qt/Adwaita/what have you, like what Kagi is doing with Orion. It could be more involved than that too.
Installing and running programs is wildly more complicated on Linux than macOS. On macOS there is only one way to do it: a self contained .app bundle. On Linux there are….several incompatible standards. And if you do it a different way than a specific Linux user’s preference, they will loudly complain and tell you that you’re doing it wrong. Even if it works.
Installing and running programs is wildly more complicated on Linux than macOS
noooot really, and you’re already coming in with a full head of steam.
This is only really true in the strict context of “what can happen in 2026”, and not in the context of if “ what has been historically accomplished up to today, 2026”
The difference? Pretty much 98% if POSIX apps (including the vast amount of pre-steam gaming, and a lot of current steam games), so don’t let this bitter bitch try to convince you otherwise.
@ayyy, you can complain all you like about how you don’t understand how macOS works or how it is similar and to LINUX and UNIX, but do it somewhere else that doesn’t waste the rest of our time. The rest of us are trying to come together to solve a problem. It’s clear that your only interest is in driving everyone apart, and that doesn’t solve problems. It just creates them.
And no one here is interested in that bullshit
I’m speaking from personal experience. What you and I want and actual reality are two different things. Your belligerent complaining is exactly what I was talking about, and it took less than half an hour for it to happen.
What happened?
What do you imagine just happened? The fulfillment of some fantasy imagined?
Lol
lmao
Aw hey now, I believe the community can be open-minded about this!
…As long as it’s not Snap. 😂
The one big deal about GOG galaxy, at least for me, is that it’s been available on macOS for years, and that they’re doing everything they can to make sure that all games currently available and playable on macOS will also continue to be playable and available on macOS even after macOS no longer supports the x64 architecture via Rosetta.
If they care that much about keeping Mac games playable even on the new arm/Mx line of chips, then I’m sure they’re gonna put a lot of care into making sure that old games are playable on Linux, although I’m not entirely aware of their development timeline.
I could not really give a shit about what happens with the epic game store.
😭 good golden gods the year of the linux desktop is finally upon us.
We just had to wait for windows to get too shitty for average gamer
It is a big deal. If Epic changes some API and breaks Heroic, it is your problem for using an unsupported third party application. If Epic breaks their official client, their QA manager has a problem.
I’m actually worried about that too.
Eww Lutris.
It’s kinda sad. I felt the maintainers feeling of being overwhelmed and underappreciated, but that whole discussion in the issue and the later statement to just hide AI use was such a phenomenal PR debacle he’ll probably never get rid of.
Lutris was pretty good…
Lutris was pretty good…
Undoubtedly, the lutris scripts really made it a great community driven project.
Just for gaming purposes, having a unified front end that:
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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
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lets you tag up each application with some custom arguments - genre, date, and so on - and lets you filter and sort by them
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lets you configure each app with their own box art or whatever as an icon
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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…
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.
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.
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but that whole discussion in the issue and the later statement to just hide AI use
Well fuck
I missed this! What’s the tool folks are using instead of lutris?
I personally switched to heroic
Faugus is gaining popularity, but they recently switched from Qt to GTK, so personally I’m now using Vermouth
I’m having a (good) moment with qt atm (excluding kirigami), so that’s a relevant thing to point out!
AFAIK the dev reversed his stance on ai after the blowback. Do you have newer information that contradicts that? Because otherwise you are both just hating on lutris for no reason.
AFAIK the dev had committed a bunch of AI nonsense intentionally not labeling it at such or keeping track of what was slop in any way. Do you have newer information that contradicts that? Because otherwise you don’t know what you’re talking about for no reason.
Certainly:
See the update to the article.
Thats what i am going off of, if you have newer info than that i’m sure happy to listen.
I’ve got a nice bridge in New York, I’ll sell it to you cheap.
Is that a “no, i dont have any”?
That’s an “if you believe that you’ll believe anything”. You’ve got no credibility in this conversation anymore.
yeah Lutris is a shame how far it’s fallen. used to be decent, the user scripts were invaluable for some games but now I won’t touch that thing with a 10ft pole.
Most of the stuff can now be accomplished via stream/steamrun anyways.
What is wrong with it? Never had any problems running games on Lutris and it doesn’t require steam (DRM) which is pretty nice.
Dev shit all over it with AI slop code
Has that caused problems? I don’t really care if they are just using AI. If they are breaking things because of it and not validating anything then that is a larger concern.
Even if it runs fine there are still problems
- Slop code can’t be licensed, the license Lutris had is invalid. That means you can’t even fork it unless you can identify the point slop started and fork prior to that.
- There’s no guarantee the developer who uses slop code even knows what it’s doing. Github is full of nonsense like that now.
the license Lutris had is invalid.
That part isn’t true whatsoever. Public domain doesn’t work like a poison pill. If I put the collected works of Arthur Conan Doyle on my website, that doesn’t mean the site can’t be CC BY-SA 4.0; it means someone is free to take that specific part without worrying about CC BY-SA 4.0.
Even for the slop code where it’s more mixed in, it’s on the person trying to take it to affirmatively show the part they’re taking was generated by an LLM, i.e. you can’t just say “this is slop, I’m taking this” and expect a project to have to affirmatively defend that it’s human-written.
And lastly, AI assistance doesn’t automatically even poison the code being created/changed with it. This one is murky, but so far, the general consensus is that so long as you, the human, worked on it – i.e. that you didn’t just let the slop machine run wild and take whatever it outputted without your own changes – it’s still your copyright.
—someone who doesn’t do slop
Don’t all the big software companies use AI, are you suggesting that everything actually has an invalid licence?
The way the Linux kernel developers use llms is to help identify potential problems, the llm doesn’t write any code. It’s a human that looks at the potential problem to determine if it actually is one and then writes the code to fix it.
Microsoft generates large swathes of code and judging by how poorly it preforms when they immediately push it to production there is little to no human oversight.
To answer your question, no to my first example and yes to my second.
Dont forget Faugus - it has slowly but surely replaced heroic on my devices.
👍
Thanks for adding it :-) the icon is somewhat cute too :-)
Yes. We have Heroic, Lutris and Faugus and I really appreciate the work the developers have done. However, I’m 91.7% sure that I will move to the native version as soon it is available. In my experience native versions overall works better than third party ones.
While I do agree that native is often better, in this case I don’t. I actually even use Heroic Launcher on Windows for Epic Games aswell.
I get that Sweeny doesn’t like to gargle Gabe’s billionaire balls as much as a lot of the users here, but Epic officially supporting Linux is a good thing.
This is generally great news, but even better news would be if it had like 12 users after launching.
Show Tim Shittey that everyone hates him.
I think https://usebottles.com/ is a much cooler and secure concept if you can get it working your application.
Its definitely more complex, but does a much better job of isolating applications like EG.
Epic Games as in Tim Sweeney’s Epic Games?
What are the package names so I can block them from installing please
EGS has some integration with UE so if you’re buying marketplace assets it’s easy to keep them updated and to add them to projects. Since UE can compile to Linux if you’re running Linux, this is a move that makes Linux a more appealing OS for game development.
Sure, it’s all stuff you can do manually. But the sweeter you make the pot the more regular users you attract to your OS.
What is the benefit of attracting more regular users to an OS?
Better software support??? There’s stuff I’m still struggling to replace and I’d rather native linux builds than have to go back for it.
They want that fortnite steam machine money
Apparently unreal engine may work better in linux now, tho.
Just means more and better support for Linux going forward. This is a good thing.
Let me guess. Their kernel malware is going to come to Linux next?
I thought Tim sweeny + Tencent hated Linux
They somewhat do - locking users into a platform is a whole lot harder (i’d say unachievable) on linux than on windows.
