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Lutris 2025 review - Great progress, but the road is still long
Quoting: Lutris 2025 review - Great progress, but the road is still long —
My experiment with Lutris today proved many of the points and fears I had. One, if you're savvy, you can probably do a better job yourself. Two, Lutris struggled with some relatively "simple" titles. But at the same time, WINE games can be very tricky, especially the ones I chose. That said, I am not sure why Max Payne wouldn't work as smoothly as when I ran it myself. That's the big one. Three, getting everything working perfectly, Linux gaming wise, isn't easy. This is why Steam hides all the gory details. Lutris does require a lot more involvement. Not a bad thing, but this highlights just how hard it is to provide good support to so many different sources.
If I compare my success from 2019 to the one in 2025, then I feel the program's UI has improved a lot. This is a far more polished and elegant tool than it was six years now. Nicer, more accessible, more transparent, with a more intuitive workflow, better explanations, more automation, more flexibility, and vastly more gaming support. But the problem is, such a colossal effort is probably not doable. Even Steam only does Steam. Lutris tries to do more than fifty different platforms! That's insane! Heroic, sweet, but extremely difficult. I am not surprised that there would be glitches and errors and problems. I can't fathom the amount of effort needed to get all these working smoothly. And obviously, my games didn't quite work as I hoped.
I think Lutris is on the right track. But I don't know if it can get to the point of unbeatable, because that will require 100x more effort than what it takes now. I know that old, niche games will always be hard. For most people, the top 10 or 20 AAA games will be all they care about it, and if Lutris can do even just a few hundred popular titles across the five most popular stores, plus a few emulator ROMs, some DOS and WINE games outside of Proton, seamless Steam integration, and game chat, it will have already accomplished more than anyone else in this space, other than Valve, that is. And for a community project, this is uber-insane. We ain't there yet, but all in all, I like how things are going. Now, this ain't the end of it. I will spend more time in the coming weeks testing various games, and I will report back with my Lutris findings part 3. Hopefully, that will be a happy, glowing essay. Hopefully. And so, on this mildly optimistic note, fare well.