Ubuntu Summit recap + new future proof Lutris machine

Back from Riga

The 2023 edition of the Ubuntu Summit is over and once again, it was an amazing event! Many thanks to everyone at Canonical who have worked hard to organize a community focused conference of the highest quality, with a special shout out to Mauro Gaspari who made sure gaming on Linux was well represented! 

It was a pleasure meeting with Dennis Sädtler from Legendary and OBS and Pawel Lidwin from Heroic Games Launcher. It was also great seeing Arek Hiler and Thomas “Glorious Eggroll” Crider again, as well as everyone I had met last year in Prague.

The videos for the talks will soon be available. There will be a separate announcement when they are published. In this announcement, I will also provide some more details about our recent decision to keep Wine up to date.

Meanwhile, here are a few photos of the event...

From right to left: Glorious Eggroll (Proton-GE / Wine-GE / Nobara), Arek (Proton / Wine), Pawel (Heroic Games Launcher) and Mathieu (Lutris) in front of the iconic Freedom Monument in Riga.

Arek going in-depth in the different APIs that make up Proton and Wine.

Glorious Eggroll explaining why Proton is the best thing that has happened to Linux gaming

The closing party for the summit, featuring the amazing Ubuntu-inspired art from Sylvia Ritter (https://www.sylvia-ritter.com)

Donations are back up!

In the last post (https://www.patreon.com/posts/91365345), I was expressing some concerns about the consistent decrease of donations on Patreon. Thanks to your support, the Patreon donations are now going up again for the first time in over 3 years! 

Some of you have requested more content posted on Patreon and you can expect more posts in the future. With 2023 being the best year so far for Linux gaming, let’s keep the momentum and this upward trend going!

Hardware upgrade

The first PC I built with the purpose of being a game console was in 2018. It was a Ryzen 5 2600 that received several GPUs over the years: GTX 970, RX580, RX5700XT. The second “Lutris console” was based on a Ryzen 5600G with no GPU (there was a GPU shortage and this machine was meant to follow Valve’s recommendation for targeting the Steam Deck so it was all APU based). This machine later received a RTX 3060 and was re-purposed as my main workstation. The “Lutris Console 1” has remained my main gaming machine in the past years and while it’s still very serviceable (I finished Cyberpunk 2077, The Last Of Us, Dead Island 2 on this machine), it is starting to show its age in some cases (Most notably in The Last Of Us and Starfield). Many new releases list the Ryzen 5 2600 as the minimum requirement to play the game.

I believe Linux gaming has become good enough that it is worth investing on hardware that can showcase the best Linux can do. HDR gaming is already possible in a Gamescope session and is around the corner for Plasma 6. We have support for most common APIs used in gaming today, RTX, DLSS, FSR. I want this device to serve as reference hardware for our future rating system, just like the Steam Deck is the reference hardware for Deck Verified games. 

I would also like this machine to be powerful enough to handle more demanding tasks such as virtualization, 3D modeling, running game engines like Unreal Engine 5, something that can be used not only to play games but also to create them. This could ideally result in some guides in video format about not only gaming but digital creation on Linux in general. 

The machine is a Ryzen 7800X3D with a Radeon 7800XT and 64 GB RAM on a 4k HDR display, for those interested in the full hardware specs, the parts are listed here: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/strycore/saved/#view=jCPjGX . This build is by far the priciest machine I will have put together so once again, your donations will be greatly appreciated! 

Upcoming bugfix release

We are preparing a new version to address some issues found after the 0.5.14 release.  Although we might have some nifty things like the ability to select multiple games in the UI, there won’t be a lot of new features and we mostly aim at increasing stability and improving user experience. If you think some issue can be fixed in make sure to leave a comment on the associated ticket on Github.