Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Controller] - Steam Controller related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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I am new to Linux, why is Heroic better than Lutris?
I'm not sure if this has changed, but Lutris for a long time was largely a collection of community install scripts. It used to be one of the better ways to install games on linux, but it was never super reliable, with the install scripts frequently breaking from updates or other changes. This was less of an issue when it was a more popular install platform, but now that a lot of the userbase has moved on to other launchers, the number of broken install scripts are increasing. It also typically installs the windows version of launchers (like epic/etc), which is an extra level of complexity and potential issues compared to stuff like heroic that communicates with storefront APIs directly.
Heroic is generally a more reliable option for people who want to play specifically Epic/GOG/Amazon games, while other launchers like Bottles and Fargus have become more popular for stuff not installed directly from a game store. I'm not sure exactly why, but it also seems like most of the time when people ask for help with installing a game through lutris, it's usually a pirated copy of the game, and it's difficult to tell if the problems with the game are due to lutris or an issue with the bootleg nature of the game.
I haven't used either, but there was some drama a few weeks back where the Lutris dev decided to start including AI code. They also preemptively went nuts over expecting people to be mad about it. Because of that, they decided to hide any signs on what code was written by the AI so people couldn't easily tell and fork it.
If you want to use AI for code, that's your prerogative. I personally don't like it but I don't get to decide what people do with the code they write. Hiding it is just scummy.
Lutris is now being slop coded for one thing
Both Lutris and Heroic are front ends that manage the compatibility tools and runtime environments of Windows applications.
Lutris provides deeper, more advanced configuration options. It's better if you want to tinker. Lately it's been having some difficulties with zombie processes and failing to shut down games.
Heroic is a more streamlined experience with most of the advanced options tucked away in sub-menus, and it has storefront integrations for GOG, Epic, and I think Amazon. For downloading and installing games, it's comparable to Steam. I use it exclusively for games I bought on GOG.
Faugus Launcher is similar to Lutris, but lightweight, reliable, and without the zombie process issues. I use it for most non-Steam games.
Bottles is a Flatpak app that runs apps in a sandboxed environment, i.e. it doesn't expose your filesystem to the apps. It also tends to have fewer compatibility issues than other runners.
It's worked more reliably for me, though it also isn't without it's issues.
Heroic is an alternative frontend for digital game stores (which are not natively supported on Linux). You can sign in with your Epic or GOG account and play, update, etc. your games just like you would with Steam.