Fresh new release, sad Patreon and Ubuntu Summit

New Lutris Release!

Based on my optimistic predictions from the Github milestones, it looks like this release is 5 months late... But there it is! Lutris 0.5.14!  Based on the amount of testing that went into the development of this release, I didn’t feel it was necessary to ship any betas or release candidate and go straight for the stable release. During the past few months, Lutris has been receiving a consistent flow of contributions, which has helped a lot with the quality of this release.

There were 2 major goals for this release. The first goal was to create a new integration for EA App, which has now replaced the Origin launcher. We’ve kept the Origin integration around so you can migrate your games. You can copy your Origin games to <prefix>/drive_c/Program Files/EA Games and reinstall them in EA App, the launcher will detect the existing files and won’t re-download the games. Make sure to keep your user folder around in case some games don’t support cloud saves.

You can keep your EA games from your Origin install

Compared to the existing Origin integration, detecting installed games turned out to be much more difficult than I had planned to be. The user’s game library is encrypted for no good reason, and it is possible to decrypt it, as explained in this post: https://erri120.github.io/posts/2023-01-18/

This was my first introduction to Ghidra and new reverse engineering techniques. I had some limited success on that front, so the EA App integration stalled for a while...

Trying to make it look like I know what I'm doing with Ghidra

That’s until someone pointed out an alternative method of detecting installed games, without resorting to decrypting files! From there on the rest of the integration was very straightforward and went to create a Need For Speed shortcut on the Steam Deck!

Appreciating NFS on the Deck

The other big goal of this release was making sure the currently supported wine build was used by default. A nasty bug was introduced in 0.5.13 where wine would default to all sorts of things, the system Wine, some old Wine build or worse a League of Legends build!
From now on, Lutris will not only download updated versions of Wine-GE when it starts but also apply updates to VKD3D and DXVK based on your hardware. We can now detect whether your setup only supports older versions of DXVK / VKD3D or doesn’t support Vulkan at all. We currently have support for most wide spread recent GPUs but we still need information for older GPUs.

You can get information about your GPU’s supported APIs on https://www.techpowerup.com

Use the following API: https://lutris.net/api/hardware/features?pci_ids=10DE:2504%20196E:138E,1002:1638%201002:1e36 and replace the PCI IDs with your own to check if we support your GPU, you can get the PCI IDs when you start Lutris from the command line (most setups will only have one unless you have an APU or 2 GPUs):

The PCI ID for a RTX 3060: 10DE:2504 196E:138E

A new feature for this release is the experimental support for runners installed through Flatpak. Given its goal of sandboxing applications, the Lutris Flatpak has to provide the dependencies for itself but also all of its runners and any Linux native game. This results in a very heavy build process for the Lutris flatpak which is based on a Gnome runtime but has to provide things like Qt5 for MAME or Dolphin... The ideal scenario would be a slim Flatpak for the Lutris UI, providing only the needed dependencies for the client and all runners provided by Flatpak, including generic 32bit and 64bit runtimes aimed at running older Linux games.
While Flatpak is currently supported, some good progress has been made on the Snap support. Eventually, anything that applies to Flatpak will also apply to Snap.

While we’re trying to maintain a balance between adopting new Python features and keeping compatibility with older versions, I was pleased to see Lutris 0.5.14 running without issue on the Debian 10 based TwisterOS on a Raspberry Pi 400.

Twister OS ships with a very old Lutris version, but you can install the new one!

I have high hopes for the Raspberry Pi 5! What do you think will run on it, with mature Vulkan drivers? Bioshock? Skyrim? BOTW?

We’ve also moved from an Ubuntu 18.04 base to a Debian 11 base for building our runners. We have yet to update the Lutris runtime to Debian 11 but so far the older runtime hasn’t shown any conflict with the new runners. The next release should have a more fine grained way for handling runtimes.

The slow and consistent decrease of financial support

On a less positive note, I’d like to address the painful direction the Lutris Patreon (and financial support in general) is taking. The current earnings of the Lutris Patreon is about half of what it was in September 2020. This was a time before the Steam Deck when Lutris was far less complete than what it is today.

The saddest graph

Lutris was never created in the goal of making money but the direction the Patreon is taking only cements my conviction that making a living writing open source software is nothing but a dream. I fully understand that the current economic situation makes things harder for most to give to open source projects and can’t thank enough all of you who still make monthly donations! I’m slightly hopeful that the introduction of cloud saves in Lutris will change the direction the Patreon has taken. While self hosting your cloud saves with Nextcloud will be the default option, it will also be possible for $5 Patrons to host your saves on Lutris.net. In any case, working full time on Lutris will soon come to an end since it is not sustainable and I will eventually run out of savings. Do not believe the whole “Free as in speech, not free as in beer” discourse. Free software is free in the monetary sense too. The only people who make money writing open source software are the ones under the umbrella of a large corporation.

While this may sound sour, I must repeat: Lutris was not created to make money and I’m really happy with what it has become and with the state of Linux gaming in general! It is just frustrating to see thousand of dollars spent in ugly JPEGs of monkeys (glad the NFT fad is over) while the work of open source developers is consistently under-valuated. To the people who do support Lutris and other open source projects, thank you so much, you are heroes! And for those who can’t afford to support financially, don’t worry about it, just enjoy the software!

Upcoming talks at the Ubuntu Summit

I’d like to finish with something more cheerful and announce that I will return to this year’s Ubuntu Summit in a little less than 2 weeks. The event will take place in Riga, Latvia and is free to attend for everyone.

During this event, I will be presenting 2 talks.

First, I will discuss the future of the Lutris runtime and how we can use Flatpak or Snap to maintain compatibility with our games.

Then I will tackle the subject of system requirements in games, how Lutris uses feature detection to provide DXVK / VKD3D and how we can expand this method to other aspects of system requirements.

Glorious Eggroll will also be present and will talk about the amazing Proton GE!

If you plan to attend the summit, come say hello and share a few drinks!