I’m sure there will be a lot of people where it works just fine but I’ve seen really common complaints regarding it. Issues like steam input not working, confusion over file system permissions, the flatpak version using its own drivers which may be outdated, etc… It can be a hassle, and there’s no real benefit to it compared to just using your package manager.
Well alright, here you go:
According to what I’ve read about and experienced, using compatibility layers such as Wine and Proton can give you a wide variety of results, depending on the game.
I agree with this but I generally find that performance is a bit worse, so I’m just setting expectations. One thing Proton does offer is pre-caching shaders which can help games not stutter compared to Windows, so you might get way less stutters even if your FPS is a bit worse than Windows.
I’ve had so much success with Proton in Heroic Games Launcher
You definitely can use Proton with Heroic but you generally shouldn’t need to. Wine-GE’s performance is very comparable to Proton and usually Proton can cause issues when ran outside of Steam, which is why it isn’t recommended to do so and why all these launchers prefer Wine-GE. I tried to make the guide as simple as possible, so I decide to list the best option rather than a list of options.
There are distros designed for gaming that come with lots of stuff already packaged with the installation.
Definitely. I actually do use Nobara which you might tell from one of the screenshots’ background. I might do another post on distro choice but I felt like it’s a big topic that can get too opinionated, especially with recent Fedora controversies. I didn’t want to recommend Nobara only to have a lot of “Well, actually…” comments.
Maybe add something about Steam and its offerings of native Linux games.
I thought about it but didn’t feel like it warranted talking about. If there’s a native Linux version, you’d hit install and it should work. It didn’t really need elaborating so I decided to focus on the things people can need help with.
Great job and thank you!
And thank you for the feedback!
Thought about putting it on github /gitlab?
I’m not opposed to it, but is there demand for it to be on GitHub?
It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on non flatpak for steam and flatpak for heroic.
Steam’s Flatpak version has some issues, the way it’s sandboxed causes things to not work as it should. I’ve seen people complain about controllers not being detected via Steam Input, confusion around permissions, minor bugs among other things. There’s really no reason to use that instead of your package manager.
On the other hand, Heroic actually recommends the Flatpak by default since it’s stable, has no issues, isn’t distro-dependent, etc. There’s no reason not to use it instead of your package manager.
I actually did use Lutris but while doing some research for this people told me to give Heroic another shot, many saying that it replaced Lutris for them. I tried it for a bit and I agree, Heroic provides a simpler experience I think most people will appreciate.
Aside from having better QoL like automatically downloading game images and first-class support for Epic Games and GOG, it’s less confusing when adding drm-free games. Lutris scripts are also a bit of a sore spot for me because I found that they’re often outdated and can cause more issues than they fix when you’re trying to run something.
Obviously it’s all preference but I think Heroic won me over and I’ll stick with it unless I specifically need the wall of options Lutris provides.
Thank you for the kind words :)
I’ve been meaning to post some of my stuff to Flatpak when Godot 4.4 releases but never bothered to look into it. This is perfect, thanks for sharing!