Seems like every week over on GamingOnLinux there’s an announcement of a new launcher.
Personally I only use Steam & Lutris. Lutris for my gog games and BattleNet, Steam for everything else.
I don’t know of a good reason to use Heroic, or any of the other new ones over Lutris / Steam, but maybe I’m missing out.
I use Lutris, Bottles, Heroic, and Steam depending
Heroic I use for the regular free game from epic, Steam for steam games, Lutris and Bottles I pretty much use for everything else, starting on one, and if it doesn’t work (as happens sometimes) trying the other
Probably not the most efficient way to do things, but it works for me
What does Bottles do that others don’t? I’m just curious.
It’s more convenient than Lutris for installing adhoc games, or multiple games in one bottle. Don’t get me wrong, when Lutris works out of the box it’s great, but oftentimes there’s no recipe on Lutris for a game (eg when they’re relatively unknown or new games) or the recipe is severely dated.
I find that Bottles is more like just setting up your own wine prefix and keeping it organized. I was a Lutris user for years, but switched to Bottles last year and never looked back.
Honestly I’m not totally sure, I’ve heard that it handles sand boxing differently but I don’t know the details
I just know that on occasion I’ve had some windows programs fail to install while using lutris, and I’ve tried bottles and it worked, I probably could still get it to work in lutris if I tried, but It works most of the time in my experience so It’s the first piece of troubleshooting I try
I’ve been using steam and heroic games launcher
SteamOS launcher is awesome.
I use steam, and if something I want to play isn’t there, I just throw it in a bottle.
Lutris and Steam. Also tried Bottles with very mixed results and Heroic Games Launcher that sometimes just works and then sometimes just doesn’t. Never tried PlayOnLinux, is there any advantage to it?
I used PlayOnLinux exclusively a few years ago. It serves the same function as Lutris, essentially, but Lutris tends to be… Better, and easier to work with in my experience.
I usually just use Steam or Lutris.
Heroic is also pretty good though. Especially the UI
For Minecraft I use PrismLauncher
Personally I like to have as few launchers as possible for my games, lol. I have Steam and Lutris right now, but I’ll probably install Heroic at some point for Epic Games content. I prefer the UI of Heroic to Lutris for GoG/Epic games, plus it’s stupidly easy to claim the free Epic game from Heroic. I haven’t tried it from Lutris to compare.
As I said in another comment, I probably would just run Steam/Heroic if it wasn’t for World of Warcraft. Lutris is the easiest way to get it up and running on Linux.
I just use Steam with Proton
I like to use steam and heroic for all the games i bought that have drm. Bottles is my nextstop for all the non legit content,since its all sandboxed i can feel safe running content from source that arent safe.
Never heard of Heroic, I just rock the same setup as you. Steam for games I have there, Lutris for everything else except Minecraft (for which I use MultiMC).
Steam, Lutris for league of legends and GOG’s games and even Heroic Launcher for GOG’s games with cloud sync for save data of games or Epic. Everyone works very well on Arch.
I use Steam for probably 80% of the games that I play regularly,
PrismLauncher for Minecraft (modded and vanilla java),
Heroic for gog and Epic,
Lutris for BattleNet (as well as the original non-“Resurrected” Diablo 2), Amazon Games App (free twitch/prime gaming games), EA App (got a few free games through EA Origin several years back), Ubisoft Connect, and the launcher version of Minecraft Dungeons. I’ve always found the lutris interface a little clunky and unintuitive, but games and things will usually work okay if I can get them installed (which will often take me a few failed attempts before I work it out).and finally the official itch.io app is really very good, lets you choose native linux versions of games that have 'em, as well as rather seamlessly making wine prefixes for windows versions of games.
I did also used to use EmulationStation Desktop Edition as a front-end for a few different emulators, but it seems I didn’t reinstall it when I did my latest OS reinstall a few months ago, I guess I’ve just been playing a lot more newer games (or just running retroarch without es-de).
Only Steam. You can get non-steam Windows games running using Proton too. I had trouble getting Ubisoft (AC Valhalla in particular) working with Lutris and Wine, but it was super easy with Steam using the “add non-steam game” option and trying different Proton versions till one worked (might’ve had to use a GloriousEggroll version, don’t remember).
Only Steam and Lutris here as well. I’ve tried using Bottles but I couldn’t get it to run anything to save my life.
Steam for most games. GDLauncher or ATLauncher for Minecraft (I have both installed, mostly use GDLauncher though), and my emulators are installed separately and I just launch them from my dock.
