0.5.0 is coming...

The past few week have been totally crazy. The evolution of projects such as Mesa, Vulkan or Wine has been phenomenal, and this reflects on the Lutris project, where we have to keep up with those evolutions and ship a product that leverages them as much as possible.

With a growing pile of issues accumulating on github and users or contributors getting confused but long standing issues, I figured it was time to do something about it to keep the project healthy. 

Therefore, I have decided to focus the next following months catching up with some of the long awaited features and bring the project up to where our user base expects it to be!

In the past few days, we have pushed a couple releases which should bring the 0.4.x release cycle to an end. All remaining issues targeting that cycle have been resolved and we are now ready to tackle the development of the 0.5 cycle. As a quick reminder, this series focuses mostly on bringing a refreshed UI along with an integration with GOG.

But the desktop client is not the only aspect of the project requiring attention. The Lutris moderation team needs better tools to work more effectively and the users need a better process for submitting issues. There are plans to push updates to the website and shipping those features as part of the Big Moderator Update that is still currently ongoing. 

In a similar fashion, another aspect that will receive a lot of attention is providing users with tools to check if their Linux system is properly configured to play games. We already have started bringing a lot of useful warnings for users such as detection of missing Vulkan libraries or Wine not being installed system-wide. Having a better initial setup step should solve a lot of issues that users encounter on some specific setups.

Know that I'm absolutely thrilled to be able to focus solely on Lutris for a while. Linux as a gaming platform has  reached an unprecedented peak and it feels like we have reached a level of maturity allowing us to play practically any game very smoothly. While I play Quake Champions or Batman Arkham Knight in a way that is almost indistinguishable from the native experience, I cannot help and think about all the open source developers who have made this possible. 

Yes, sadly, this hasn't been a very good year for native games. It seems that a lot of publishers have given up on Linux as a platform after a poor experience in 2013~2014. But now, the platform is ready. In the next year, we have to make the experience even greater, grow the number of people who play on Linux and win the trust of game publishers back!

PS: This just came in the mail

It is a Pinebook, the development laptop for the ARM version of Lutris, guess that this is also coming in the following months!