Tech Over Tea - Creator And Lead Developer Of Lutris | Mathieu Comandon

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Linux gaming has really only been in a good state since post 2018 and even then it was a bit rough, only now after the Steam Deck can we really say it's good but Mathieu has been around a lot longer than that with the Lutris project since 2009 closing in on 15 years of development. =========Guest Links========== Website: https://lutris.net/ Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@lutris Github: https://github.com/lutris Mathieu Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@mathieucomandon ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I think this is episode 203, I want to say, but it is also the first episode we're recording in the year of 2024, and today we have a really interesting guest on the show. Welcome, Matthew Commandon, from the Lutris Project, the founder and, I guess, biggest contributor on the project still? I don't assume anyone's contributed more to it than you have. No, I don't think so,

but yeah, I have, like, good contributors too, I mean, yeah. It's grown quite a bit over the years. I only heard about it maybe, like, three or so years ago, but doing my research on it, I didn't realize just how long the project had

been around for so it's going to be uh this year it's going to be 15 years old wow like the project yes it started like in 2009 um and even before that i had like a like a few ideas about like running games on linux but not the Lutris project, maybe some side ideas. But yeah, this year is going to be 15 years old. Jesus. 2009, the first prototype. If you look around, you may find an old blog in French where I talk about the first announcements for Lutris

and yeah that was a really different world back then. So I'm sure most people probably know but just for anyone who doesn't give a brief explanation on what Lutris is and what problem it's trying to solve. So the initial goal of Lutce was making it easy for everyone to play as many games as possible on Linux. So that was meaning gathering a whole bunch of tools, what we call runners, which is a concept that is a bit opaque for some. is a bit opaque for some because it refers to a collection of software that we ship and that's used to run the games actually. So we have Wine which is like the biggest one but we also have MAME, we have RetroArch, we have Dolphin, basically any, like we have GZDoom, we have ScumVM, basically anything that can run like multiple games that will serve as the basis of a runner.

So, and it will handle like several gaming platforms. So, for example, Wine, it will be Windows games, DOSBox for MS-DOS games. And you have those multi-platform runners to like MAME, RetroArch. But over time, I mean, gaming on Linux improved quite a bit. And the goal for Lutris has kind of evolved with that, in the sense that it was less and less of a challenge to get the games running on Linux.

So we didn't need as much tinkering as we used to. So we were in a position where we got the games running on Linux, and they're running really good. And now the goal is just keeping that around. So we have those games running, a huge number of them. And let's make sure that they stay that way for the foreseeable future. And I'm not saying just two or three years

in the future. I'm talking about 20, 25 years. Let's make sure that we keep our legacy of video games playable for the foreseeable future. And yeah, that's been the new priority for Lutris. Because it was more than just running games on Linux. That's pretty much a solved problem. Valve has helped a lot with that.

So yeah, we focused more on keeping those running and improving the situation. There's obviously still a couple of issues, most notably with weird anti-cheat stuff, especially when you're dealing with the rootkit style anti-cheat that you see in a're dealing with the rootkit-style anti-cheat

that you see in a lot of Riot games, for example. I know there was a time where a lot of people were playing League of Legends on Linux, for example, and as of late, they've started messing around with their anti-cheat system. That's caused a lot of problems there. Yeah, so right now you can still play league of legends we've had like an update recently okay uh but yeah that was like a few weeks ago it was broken and then we had a fix

for it but uh don't hold on to it like too too much because uh there was a live stream from Riot Games where they said they would introduce Vanguard. So that's the anti-cheat that's used for Valorant. That's coming end of February, beginning of March. And if that's the case, that means like no more League of Legends on Linux at all. Like no fix will will ever fix that. I mean, there's no solution for making that run. So yeah, you can just say goodbye to League of Legends.

And for the longest time, League of Legends has been the top game in Lutris, the one with the most installs. And that's just going to go away. And that's kind of too bad. It's kind of the same for any game that's based on a live service. It's not quite the same as with anti-cheats, because anti-cheats, I mean, the game is still maintained.

You can still play it on Windows. But over time, like all those games that depend on a server, like on some online service, once the online service becomes unavailable, whether it's like anti-cheat does not work or the game server just shut down, then you cannot preserve that data game. Yeah. Unless you come up with some solutions where you reimplement the backend server, which

is a lot harder, then yeah, those games are gone so i don't know how what to make of it because um in this that sense i mean fortnite already like isn't we can't preserve it league of legends like you can't preserve it either if you don't like have a way to to run like the the back-end service um so i'm not sure what to position myself with that it's like a really tricky thing like that yeah those online games the good thing is that a lot of online games now work even those using eac but or battery you have a lot of publishers that said yeah yeah, okay, we'll enable the Linux bits for EAC. And now you have a bunch of games that still work. It's just that it's not the same EAC. You have EAC that's just like the normal anti-cheats.

And then you have the EAC that's the full-blown kernel level mode. And Vanguard is basically the same thing as this setting for EAC. So that's unlikely to work ever in Linux. So yeah, I mean, that's not really a good solution unless we see some kind of bridge from the Linux kernel to the anti-cheats. But that's kind of involved that's not something

I'm capable of doing with my skill sets. I know there was some discussion or work on something similar to that being done with the wine team. I don't know how far that moved past like the early stages and that obviously would be a giant project

to do it would be a giant project to do um it would be awesome if it could happen at some point but i i just i i wouldn't put my money on it happening i would want the like the preferable solution there is vanguard to do something similar to what was done with eac and battle.i where they do offer a version that does work properly on Linux but that still doesn't deal with the like the ultimate uh preservation issue like you're still going to have this issue where if you're playing a game like Genshin Impact for example when the servers go down yeah it's all gone it's gone yes um yeah that's that's kind of tricky because do we want really games to interfere with

the kernel like to have like kernel access to to your system so that's i mean it's also it's at the same time a blessing and a curse because those games they don't work so that's too bad but also we're kind of protected on linux from those games that's't work, so that's too bad. But also, we're kind of protected on Linux from those games that's kind of overreach, that do things that maybe they shouldn't be doing. I mean, it's not really... I mean, games using kernel-level features, I mean, maybe we should find some better solutions than that.

So yeah, maybe we're protected against the game itself that could be doing anything on your system. But also, you can't play the game. So that's, as I said, it's a blessing and a curse because I do know that most Linux users, the way, like the mentality of Linux, is that they wouldn't want those kernel entities running on the system. But also they power those games that are really popular.

So it's a big trade-off to make. So you trade off, like, more security, like, more, like, your privacy in your system. But also you don't get those popular games. It's kind of tricky. There like no good solution um running a vm most of the time is not a solution because those games will also detect that you're running in a vm yeah you can for a lot of cases get like really hardware spoof vpn um vms but it's a lot more complex than just you know firing up virtual box and just being done with it like you got to really understand how a virtual machine works what you need to configure what little things it's going to look for that might set it off like

a basic thing like if you have a have a CPU being reported by your VM and that clock rate it has isn't exactly what the clock rate of that chip should be, like, that's enough to set off some of these VM detection systems. And that's just a basic, basic one that you can hide. It goes so much deeper than that. And it's just... It's not something the average person's ever going to be able to do.

Like, they want to be able to just fire up a game, and it hopefully just works. Yeah. I mean, the best solution right now is just to use some kind of streaming service. Yeah. I still have a subscription to GeForce Now, and that works well enough if you want to play Fortnite or Destiny 2. And that works well enough if you want to play Fortnite or Destiny 2. The Riot games are not on there. So there's no solutions really for Valorant.

Pretty much if you want to play Valorant or League of Legends in a few months, you will have to do all boot with Windows. I mean, there's no way around that, I think. So yeah, or find some other games to play. I don't know. I've never been a big fan of League of Legends, so I'm not losing anything. But yeah, I know it's really, like, it's hugely

popular, and that's too bad. But yeah, I mean, this has been, like, the biggest game on Utrecht for ages. I wish there were a solution. I could do something more, but sadly, yeah, that's not the case.

I hope that maybe Riot will push back. They've talked about introducing Vanguard into League of Legends for years now, and they're only talking about doing it now, so maybe they will postpone it, even further,

never do it maybe, I don't know. They do have a Mac version of League of Legends. Yeah, which is funny because my understanding is you can't do Ring Zero anti-cheat on Mac. Yeah, on Mac. I don't know, They don't have like, there's not a whole ton of works involved to port League of Legends on Linux. If you use things like DXVK native, which will let you like not have to rewrite

your entire like graphics stack, they could port it pretty easily. I mean, it wouldn't be much more effort than maintaining the Mac version. So yeah, I mean, they wouldn't be much more effort than maintaining the Mac version. So yeah, I mean, they have the means to do that, they just don't want it. That's too bad. Yeah, I think that's where it'll come back down

to. They just don't want to do it. I would... Obviously, I don't have numbers on this, but I can't imagine the audience on macOS is that much bigger than the audience on Linux. I mean, if we take the numbers from valve like the the steam survey the the linux users are there are more linux users than max at least for video games i know that's like for like a general computing usage there's

like probably more oh definitely yeah uh but when we're talking about the gaming um max have been like so it's been such a struggle to keep games running on mac because they keep like deprecating like 32 bits and now they're switching to whole new architecture and you still have some compatibility layers and everything to get your games running. But it's a process, really. So Macs have really become like this weird platform to run games on. So I hope, like on Steam itself, that's done already. If you combine desktop Linux plus Steam Deck, we're already more than Mac users. And maybe

that will, I mean maybe some publishers like Riot Games, like Epic Games they will take that into account and say okay well we have this platform that has more potential gamers than Mac so maybe

we should support it. Wasn't there a statement from... I think there's a statement from Epic Games or something like if Linux has 300 million users we'll support Linux or it was some dumb number like that where it's just like oh yeah no but that's also like a statement from like Tim Sweeney yeah Tim Sweeney said it a little while ago, yeah. Yeah, it was like, not really that long ago, I think it was a few weeks ago, and it was saying, yeah, like a few million users, which it has already, I think. The Steam Deck already has shipped a few million units.

Yeah, here it is. Fortnite on Steam Deck. Tim Sweeney says Valve needs tens of millions of users to justify it. Yeah, and I guess there's probably like... It's going to get there, like tens of millions of users. If it's not there already, it keeps...

The Steam Deck still is on top of the... On the Steam sales, you can still still is on top of the Steam sales. You can still see it on top, like, all the time. It doesn't drop. No, and it keeps, like, bringing up, like, the Linux stats every month. It gets, like, a little bit bigger. The Linux stats are funny because of the Steam Deck. When you look at, like, the hardware survey, it's not the Linux hardware survey now.

It's just the Steam Deck hardware survey the entire the every single top thing is just the steam deck so i think like go on um it it would be like maybe better to have a separate steam deck uh category and the linux one so we would see because right now it's like the the steam deck kind of eclipses like the whole rest of the Linux desktop. I mean, which is not really a bad thing. No, it's not. It just makes the numbers kind of weird.

It makes like Linux a really successful platform. Not like ZenSense. Because I think... Yeah, I think if you go to like this specific linux section it says like 256 hard drives and now like the biggest hard drives on linux which is entirely because of the original model steam deck which is the one that most people were buying the uh the the mid-tier one um he said it's not a it's not a bad thing it just makes the numbers it it makes the numbers really weird and sort of not as meaningful as they used to be but you know if you really care about steam hardware server anyway yeah i mean it does like have a some limited value they They still are useful.

They are not to be treated as the ultimate truth. But it gives a general understanding where Linux gaming is headed to. It's a nice way to have a look

at the trends and everything like that. It's still useful. I don't see it as, like some people, they will go crazy when they have like a Steam survey on the desktop. And they're like, oh, yeah, I got the Steam survey. I mean, yeah, it's kind of random. It doesn't mean much.

But yeah, it's still some valuable valuable because it's one of those few sources that we have to compare like ourselves to like the the windows uh gamer mass or the mac gamers and now that it's closing in on two percent like the early on you saw the numbers just weirdly changed like when you have less than i remember when it was less than a percent like the numbers would just jump up and down every single month it wasn't really indicating it that well just because the user base was so small that any tiny amount of extra linux users who got the survey really it really heavily influenced what was going to happen now that we like closing on two percent like the numbers are a lot more they're growing but they're a lot more

stable than they were before yeah because when it was only desktop linux um i think one of the things that would influence like the numbers was uh like during the the, there would be more people on vacation and more people using Linux. So you would see the numbers going up. And then in September, you would see the numbers going back down. And it was doing the same thing every year. I don't know if we're going to see that anymore

because of the SIM deck and people have just this device that's running Linux constantly. But now I'm not like, yeah, I'm still hopeful that with that video game aspect kind of solved, like we have a major part of the gaming ecosystem that's pretty much a solved problem. I'm hoping that will help seeing like the the numbers

in like linux desktop the regular one like not steam deck go up as well uh so yeah that's uh that's something i'm hopeful in the future yeah i'm definitely hopeful for that as well um let's actually get back to the the main reason i brought you here the lucha stuff not just general linux stuff um so most people when they start one of these like gaming projects they have a specific game in mind that they are trying to play did you have a specific game at the time that was like this is the reason why i'm going to start this project or was just like i generally want to make gaming better in this in this space well yes and no so i had something uh in mind uh so let's think it was like 15 years ago or more that was even before lutris existed but i was tinkering with like getting games to run on Linux. And one of the big games at the time was The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion.

And my first UI I wrote in Python was this kind of mini configuration tool for launching Oblivion on Linux that would apply some settings, that would apply some command line arguments, that will, I think it was replacing a texture somewhere to fix a bug. So that was like really simple, really basic. You had like three buttons on the window or something.

And in some way, that was kind of what got it started but also so at the time there was this uh there was uh play on linux was already there but by that but play on linux was huh uh yeah 15 years ago yeah it was already in the subject i play on linux was out for about two years by the time that Lucha came out. I'm not exactly sure when Play on Linux came out, but yeah, it was here a few years before. I want to say it was 2007. Yeah, that might be...

Yeah, so that would be like two years. And I think it was heavily focused on Windows games and one big issue I had was not only with Windows games because at the time we were like one wine wasn't as good as it is now and Linux native games weren't as bad as they are now. So they were better. Because a lot of the Linux native games, they come out, they run great.

And over time, they kind of break themselves. Like compatibility becomes worse and worse and it becomes harder to keep those games running. So all the games you had at the time, they were working great. And now those games, they are kind of hard to get working. So we had a lot of hopes regarding native games

and also open source games that were pretty much one of your only options when running Linux, is you had to use a lot of those open source games. So Open Arena, Xonotic, all those games, we wanted to give them more exposure. So that's why I wanted to do the yeah super tuck scout is one of them like one of the big ones um and i didn't want to focus only on windows games for that reason i wanted like to to be like open to um native games to windows games and one why not add in the bunch

also all the emulators so that we would have pretty much any game playable? That was basically spending a lot of time tinkering on Linux, getting emulators to work, configuring them, and trying to find the best settings. And I was like, OK, well, this involves reading a a lot of tutorials this involves a lot of tinkering some emulators you can install them with your package manager some you cannot you have to download them you have to compile them so why not make like some kind of unified platform where you can pay pretty much anything so that's what's like the the basis of lutris was always to be able to play in everything uh from windows games from amiga games dos games and linux games of course

so yeah it started like with like that one game oblivion but the goal of the project was always like a multitude of games. So it's sort of to be like a unified platform where everything can be done from this one place, which is especially a big deal now with all of these different launchers that exist. You know, you have your Steam launcher, Epic Games launcher, GOG's got a launcher, like everybody's got a launcher. But with this, you can just be like, okay, I want to play this game.

You go to the game. It'll open up the launcher and whatever stuff it needs to do. But you have this single access point to get all of that content you want to get to. Yeah. Which is... Kind of like this unique stuff. I mean, you have stuff that's similar with a heroic launcher as well,

but to a lesser extent because there are not as many integrations. You have something similar in GOG for Windows. I mean, Galaxy has never been released on Linux, but there are some integrations, which are the basis for the Lutris integrations. We do use those. I mean, they're written in Python as well, so they are a good inspiration for writing the Lutris ones. But yeah, that's a really neat feature to have all the launchers grouped together. But also no it doesn't matter

if it's windows or linux or anything it can be like a playstation 3 game it can be like an nintendo switch it can be like nintendo it doesn't it doesn't matter anymore so yeah that's also like um like abstracting the plat the game platform and only caring about what game you want to play. That was like one of the goals. So I don't know if you've read the Wikipedia page for Lutris. I don't know if you ever feel like doing that. But on the page, it says Lutris began as a piece of software called Oblivion Launcher, citation needed.

Is that true? Can you give them a citation? Yeah, that was what I was talking about previously. So you may be able to find it in the Ubuntu French forums. Back then, I made a post. I probably can't find the source code for that Oblivion launcher if I look into my hard drives. But yeah, that's perfectly true. That's what was the basis of the first Python code.

None of that code made it through the actual Lutris. The actual basis for the Lutris project was a framework called quickly that was created by a French Ubuntu developer called Didier Roche and that was basically a way to scaffold your application so that you had like the the whole like UI already built you had like a window uh already made for you you had like the the launchpad integration so people don't really use launchpad now but it was like the equivalent to github so in one command you could just build your application into a package and push it to launchpad so it would be like you could make a dead file out of your software with one line. So that was like really convenient to, to get started on Lutris.

I just had like to build the code inside the implication, but all the scaffold was already done. So that was pretty cool. So I'm sure, like, especially back in those early days, now, not so much.

You were probably asked a lot like why didn't you just go and work on play on linux or why are you making your own thing when play on linux is around or anything like that like so yeah why um why not get it why did you get involved with it back then i could i considered to Play on Linux for a moment. I did. And the reasons why I didn't follow through with that is that first, Play on Linux is geared toward Windows games only. I mean, at least it was the case back then. Now I know that they also have support

for DOS games and SCUMVM games. But it was really important for me at the time that we also supported native games and also emulators and all that stuff. The second

aspect was that we were, like, Play on Linux was using the WXWidgets toolkits, which I didn't really know about, didn't really want to get into it. And also it's reworked by doing a combination of Python and Bash, where every Linux window would be its own Python program, and you would have Bash scripts linking those together.

And I was like, that's a kind of weird way to do things. And I'm not sure if I'm not installed on this kind of architecture. So I'd rather do something on my own that's not linked to... And it's open source, so if there's anything in Play.onLinux that I need, I'll just go and read the source code for Play.onLinux and I'll kind of do my own thing based on it, which has very rarely happened, to be honest. I mean, I've never, I don't think

that I've ever read the source code for PlayOnLinux to write some ludicrous features. I've done that with Heroic. That has happened like for like getting proton back um but yeah i've read like some parts of the the the planet's source code but wasn't like i mean sometimes it was useful but never like to to port some features like yeah i would say like the galaxy integrations were much more useful but that was many many years later uh plant leagues nowadays is a lot less it gets a lot less attention i know

that it still is being worked on uh just at a much slower rate but i'm sure you also get a lot of comparisons with the bottles project as well i mean bottles came later yeah no it's fairly recent like nowadays i'm sure you get comparisons with uh bottles i'm very glad about that bottles i mean we have like uh we're pretty close like i have a pretty close relationship with like the bottles developers i've noticed also i was i've read some of the uh the bottle source code and i was like oh right wait i wrote that that's some codes that's from root so i was like, oh, wait, wait, I wrote that. That's from Rutris. So I was like, okay, that's cool. Yeah.

It's always cool to have like some open source project that's kind of like reuses some, some idea and not like those things like from, from scratch. And, and in a way, bottles is the software that a lot of people have asked me to write right and I didn't want to write so bottles is like wine only and it's like kind of this I mean people have always been asking for a wine prefix manager and I'm it was never clear to me what that meant, because you can sort of manage your wine prefixes with Lutris, but it's not the forefront. It's not the main goal of Lutris.

It's not to tinker with your wine prefix, is to get the game running as fast as possible and keep it that way and not have to go into the settings at all. So bottles take this kind of different approach, which I'm very glad they did. So that if someone tells me, oh, can you write a wine prefix manager, just tell them no just use

bottles it's her for that so yeah i'm pretty glad that i can just redirect people uh to that software instead of having to to maybe have to write some new stuff that i wouldn't want to so what were they meaning by wine prefix manager then? What would that actually entail? I'm not sure at all. I mean, maybe a way to create wine prefixes without the concept of a game.

Like having a little button with create prefix in some location and then you add your game inside. I mean, there's a lot of options in bottles. I mean, a lot of things that Lutris can't do. So I'm guessing that's all of this. But managing a prefix is a pretty broad term.

So I'm not really sure myself what they mean by that. I've always had enough concern in Lutris to do whatever I needed to do with wine prefixes. One thing you touched on earlier was native games. So that obviously had a lot, especially a couple

of years after that, then you had the original version of SteamOSOS and that was a a big shift in what Valve was doing because I remember from the time that was when Windows was first coming out with the like their Windows Store and I know that valve was fairly worried about what was gonna happen whether the platform was gonna become similar to what Mac OS is where yes you can download things from the web,

but most people don't. They all download it from this store, so they weren't really sure what was going to happen and sort of used Linux to hedge their bets. So when SteamOS came along, what were your initial thoughts about it? Did you think that they were going about it in a... Did you think that native gaming was actually going to become

a widespread thing or did you hope maybe they did something different i mean now now i sure did i sure hope they did something different like now now yes but at the time i was really excited about SteamOS and all those Linux native games that we would see. But that quickly became a bit sour because we noticed that all those Linux ports we were getting often had a lot of issues and they often had a big performance hit. they often had a big performance hit.

It was not uncommon to have a 30% less performance on Linux than on Windows because those games were doing... They had translation layers that did basically what

DXVK does, but in a much less efficient way. So, yeah, that was the case for feral interactive games. Like all games, like Borderlands, I think Borderlands had a pretty

big performance hit. Tomb Raider also was not as good. And it became kind of better the ports released by virtual programming so that was one that made people upset it was not native enough it was too much of an abstraction layer

so people were upset about The Witcher 2 which on top of that when it released, The Witcher 2 was a big mess because virtual programming were still experimenting with their, I think it was called Eon. So Eon was their product used to basically wrap a Windows game into a native Linux executable. And for a lot of people, that was not good enough.

It was not native enough. Mostly because it didn't work very well. I mean, I'm sure if they had pushed Witcher 2 in a playable state from the launch day, I'm pretty sure people wouldn't have complained as much as they did about Aeon. Because they did release some titles like Dirt Showdown. Dirt Showdown was pretty good.

I mean, it had a really good performance. And I remember seeing some benchmarks where the Eon version from virtual programming would run better on Linux than the Windows native version did. would run better on Linux than the Windows native version did. Maybe with some very special second sense with like Bioshock Infinite or something like that. But yeah, it was still like hacky. It was still...

I mean, in some way, it was not nearly as good. And now you have all those native ports, like today, they're still around. You can still download most of them on Steam. But in most cases, we'll just have less problems just downloading the wine version and learning it with Proton. And you have on GOG, for example, GOG won't sell you the native ports.

So you'll have just one option. You'll have the Windows version, which is not a bad thing, to be honest, because the Windows version will work with DXVK, whereas the Linux ports might run or might not run. I mean, it depends on how lucky you are with how the game has aged all those things

my understanding of the issue with the native games is a lot of them basically how would I say it the games are ported in a way that makes them still operate the same way that like a regular package would where if a package gets abandoned and its dependencies start getting very very

shifted from what is available on your system you're just gonna have the game not work so you you sort of need people to like maintain their games like they maintain anything else and that's just not the way that games get made games are generally released and then maybe they get some patches afterwards but you know if a game was released on windows 7 it's still it's probably not still being maintained today it was just released and that's day it was just released and that's that's just it yeah but on linux the situation is a lot worse because most linux ports are contracting jobs so it's not someone from the gaming like studio that ports the game it's like a contractor and then when the the contract is done when the game is shipped it's over like the game doesn't get updated anymore. Unless there's like a very special request

from the publisher to keep updating the game. I mean, that was something with Rocket League. They ported the game on Linux. And it was one of the best Linux porters that did that. I mean, I think it was Timothy Bassett that worked on this port. And he worked on the initial like Quake 3 Arena

Linux version. But then like Psyonix, they updated their engine to, I don't know, DirectX 11 or 12. I don't know. And they were like, oh, we're not redoing this work all over again.

And plus, they were also migrating to the Epic Store, which doesn't have native Linux support. But yeah, that's basically it. They were like, oh, we're not going to repay a contractor to redo the work for Linux. Yeah, that's why most Linux ports, they don't get updated. And in some cases, you will have community-made patches, which are really hard to do without access to the source code. I think in the case of Unreal Tournament, the first one,

the guys from old Unreal, they have access to the source code. They just can't publish it. Right, right. But yeah, as you say, games need to be maintained. And the only way to have a game that works in the foreseeable future is to have access to the source code. Like Quake 3, Quake Arena, it's open source. So to this day, it works well.

You have like a Vulkan port. You have like, yeah, you have like not only one option, but you have like tons of options to run like Quake 3. Same thing for like Quake 2, you have like open source ports. I mean, yeah, like having open source options is the definitive way of having Linux native game. If your game is closed source, then you kind of need to run it into its own sandbox.

Yeah. Which Wine is. So Wine will run your game made for Windows 95 or Windows XP. It will be glad to do so. I know that Wine means Wine is not an emulator, but in some way it emulates like an old Windows system.

Whereas we don't have a way currently to emulate an old Ubuntuuntu 10 for example like or ubuntu 606 we no longer have a way unless we run like a virtual machine you can do this even then that's an option just stick it in the docking container uh docker only has like you can only run like these are so old like in docker so if you want you can pretty much run ubuntu 12 i think okay but not not run like debian 3 or ubuntu uh fix or a stuff that's really really old and even then you you're relying on your host systems, like drivers, like graphics drivers and kernel to run the game.

So a lot of the cases, you'll have problems with the kernel or the drivers. And also, when we're talking about really old games, sound is going to be a big issue. when we're talking about really old games, sound is going to be a big issue. Because I've worked on some kind of like Docker layer for running old games. And it kind of works. Except that you still need to have like a translation layer for OSS.

And just yesterday, I was trying to get it working again, like Heretic 2. Heretic 2, which is a game that has been abandoned by everyone, by its publisher, by its developer, by Loki. I mean, Loki doesn't exist anymore, but there is no real community patch for it. And I still can get it running on Linux, but getting the sound in this game is like plain impossible. Even harder than that, and that's that one I abandoned a long time ago.

Because the reason I keep going back to Retic 2 Linux is that the Windows version is also a pain to get working. Mm-hmm. The other one that's painful for Linux is Kingpin, Life of Crime, which is impossible to get the sound working. You can get the game working with a lot of work, or at least you could like a few years ago

but to get the sound working and kingpin and so like really uh close to the hardware like the sound hardware so good luck getting any sound of that version so just play that for kingpin it's just better to play the windows version for heretic 2 i'm still working on it i don't play any games that old so my my game experience is quite pleasant but i yeah when when you get to a certain age it's just like what do you what do you do then because it's not old enough like you know if you go old enough right if you go back to like the DOS era we have emulators for that era and most of them work pretty well obviously you still get you don't

get perfect sound because back then you had like a lot of games were built around a specific sound card so you still have issues there with like recreating the sound like it should be. In Dustbox, now you have like some really good emulation like for like the Roland MT-32 and a lot of those exotic sound cards. And they sound really good. I mean, I've not done a lot of tests for this, but I know that they've made a lot of progress, especially

in DOS bus staging, which is the one we use in Lutris. They did work a lot on improving the sound quality in DOS games, especially those that use those high-end sound cards like MP32, which were supposed to be

the end of the line back in the day. I think that now we are able to have this again. And to be honest, I think that DOSBox may be a solution to running those old Linux games because I have some Windows 3.1 or Windows 98 games that I run to DOSBox instead of Wine. So I need a full copy of Windows installed, like a full copy of Windows 3.1 or Windows 98. But in the end, if you're working with a game that really is too old

to work with wine reliably, then DOSBox is your next best bet. Or like a PC emulator, like is it x86box? Not to be confused with Box86. So 86 Box is like the fork of PCEM. And also, you can emulate PCs with MAME. So MAME will emulate like an old 486, which you can then install Linux on. The problem is still, how do you get acceleration on it, like graphical acceleration? Something I talked to recently while I was at the Ubuntu

summit was there is this emulator called TechnoParrot. TechnoParrot is, it doesn't run with a K, techno with a K, and Parrot like the bird. Yeah. And it's meant for arcade games. It's like the successor of MAME. It's like MAME, but for like modern arcade games, which modern arcade games are basically PCs. And some of them, some of them are Linux PCs, not Windows PCs. And some of them are Linux PCs, not Windows PCs. So

you have an emulator on Windows that runs Linux games with something that works kind of in a similar fashion than Wine. It's like Wine, but for Windows to run Linux programs. And

also it emulates some of the hardware that was shipped with those arcade machines. So this means that you can run those Linux games emulated in another more modern operating system. But this is something that we don't have on our side. But this is something I would like to see, like an emulator of Linux from 2005, for example. And it emulates everything from the hardware,

like the graphics card, it gives you, I don't know, like a TNT2 or a creative sound card with the OSS API, and the Mesa from back in the day, and the kernel from back in the day. So anything that we will throw at it, it will be able to run it. But that's really more, it's really focused on the preservation aspect,

because as I said, most of those games, you can run the Windows version of it. You'll have much better support for it. You'll have more mods for it. You'll have more community patches. In general, just sticking to the Windows versions, I mean, it's sad to say, but yeah, was also at the Ubuntu Summit recently,

wrote this blog post saying that Win32 is the most stable API for Linux. Yeah, I've heard that plenty of times before. Yeah, and this is true. I mean, this is true because now you want a binary. If it's like an old binary, you have like a lot more chances to run that old binary

if it was made for Windows rather than it was made for Linux. Like, I don't know if you ever tried to get a Netscape navigator for Linux running on a modern distro. I haven't thought of doing that, but... You have like software, like Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux. Right, right.

A real player for Linux. And all of those, you can't run them. I mean, you can run them in Wine if you want, if you tinker enough. But running them on Linux is kind of like a lost cause at this point, unless you work like in a VM. Yeah. I mean,

not that we would need those software, but yeah, for, as a, for a competitive, from a compatibility perspective, it's there like more, there's more stability in wine than there is like just running natively.

And I think this is something that can be fixed eventually if we cared enough. Because the reason why it's like in this case is most of our software is open source. So we just move on. I mean, we just leave all the closed source software just rot. Yeah. It doesn't get maintained.

Yeah. Maybe you don't want to run something like Netscape Navigator, but I think you are right about wanting to preserve these old games. So, you talk a lot there about game preservation. Are you the sort of person who cares about physical hardware

preservation, or do you want it just preserved in some form um so i i value like the hardware preservation i i think that's people who do like collect old games maintain old game collections and maintain like the old hardware uh working is really like a honorable goal. I think it's needed, but also I think that that is really not the goal of Flutris. So the goal of Flutris is keeping games playable, like in the simplest way possible on your current hardware without needing ordering systems on eBay,

without needing like original medium eBay, without needing original medium. Because at some points, whether we talk about game consoles or computers or cartridges, like floppy disks, all that stuff, it will break at some point. I mean, at some point, it will deteriorate. So whether it's in 20 years, like 50 years, in 100 years, those things are not eternal.

So we need to have something to keep them alive, like without depending on the hardware, without depending on the original media. So yes, it's nice to have like like that kept alive but as long as it works i mean um rust will do its job eventually and at some points you'll no longer have like a single super nintendo working in the world at some point there will be like no longer no no Super Nintendo ever working again. Unless there's some other models, but then the cartridges

will disappear. Nothing material is eternal, while digital data can be replicated and also improved open. You can improve the game, you can play your playstation games

upscaled you can upscale them like four times or six times the original size so they look a lot better on like on your high-res monitor you can apply like shaders you can use a safe states to beat those old school games that were like way too hard to beat back then and then you can use safe states to beat those old school games that were way too hard to beat back then. And then you can use safe states to finally beat them and appreciate the whole thing. So yeah, in that regard, Loot Race is really more focused

to just being able to play the game, not having to deal with like a physical collection and someone's gonna say oh but you know that there are fpgas are designed to recreate the hardware you're specifically talking about like the original hardware obviously there are people doing like recreations especially for that like i know there's some there's definitely nes stuff out there i don't know if there's SNES stuff But there are people that have like actually gone like literally just remade the entire system And you can have like a modern version has HDMI output all of this stuff But yeah, I mean a lot of those like mini consoles like SNES classic

Yeah, those are just mostly emulators, but you have What is it, the Mister, I think. The Mister is like an FPGA platform that's capable of running a lot of things. And that's good. That's good as well. Especially if it gives you a way to to play your car original cartridges that you couldn't play without like an original console but then i mean some some people say that they will be like way better than emulators i mean i don't i haven't experienced really those FPGA systems.

But as far as I can tell, emulators are really pretty good already. So I don't see what could be improved from those emulators. If there are some things that make it better, I mean, sure. I mean, I'm all for it, but I'm more in the position where emulators are really good enough for like most

things and like 99.9% of people can't make the difference between an emulator and FPGA it's pretty much good enough I like taking some of those early 3D games and then just upscaling it to 4K.

They look really nice. The models are obviously low-poly models, but it looks way better than it would ever have looked on an original console. I know some people like that original... I appreciate people who like that original experience, right? But I like save states. Save states, for me, are, like, one of the biggest things.

Like, there are so many old games, especially, that are really bad with how they offer you saves or they have continue systems where if you, you know, you die five times, you restart the entire game, things like that. I'm just, like... I get wanting to have like the classic experience with it but for me it's not my thing i i appreciate it but it's just not my thing

it's not my thing either and you know back then you had to enter cheat codes that you had into like uh magazines or like yeah or uh have something like a Game Genie if you wanted to circumvent some stuff. But yeah, that makes the games a lot more accessible. Or if you had games that had poor controls, like the control scheme was kind of messed up, you can make the game playable just by remapping everything and giving like better controls or games that were only playable like on keyboard and mouse now you can make them

playable on a on a joypad or or the other way around if you want i mean yeah everything is possible so you can you can really improve uh what i like is when i see like games that are like totally like reverse engineered like diablo for example diablo has like so many source ports so you have like so many ways to run diablo now that are sure you could run like the original diablo but then you can also run one of the many Devolution X or any of the other source ports that improve on the game. And it's like what you said earlier,

is that games, they need to be maintained over time. And if it's not the original publisher that does it, then the community eventually will take care of it. For some games. In cases where a game is popular. that's that's a big problem for games and this is what you're saying before about um like these live service games that have these reverse engineered servers so there are games like uh i mean harrier does not like that it exists but there is a reverse engineered server for genji impact that exists um there is a reverse engineered server for Genshin Impact that exists there is a reverse engineered server for Final Fantasy 14 but like these are giant games if you're a

live service game that has you know 10,000 players 5,000 players the chances that someone is actually going to go through that process and actually reverse engineer a server is so much less likely that

when these games are gone they are just gone and i i get people not caring about it because right now you know they care about what's happening they care about the current content and most people aren't programmers and can't sit down and actually go and do something like this, especially a reverse engineered server, like, that's a massive project, but, I don't know, it, it would, like, you know, I, I can go back and play, you know, I can go back and play, like, the first Pokemon game, for example, and it's, it's in the exact same state it was, was always in, like, there's, you know, it you know it's not attached to some server somewhere it's not it hasn't got like a bunch of patches that has like changed the experience it just is the game that it always was and that is nice but i i i understand like from a business perspective why these live service games exist like they are a great way to make money that's that's why they're done but i don't know making that yeah making that the only thing that makes keeps the game

alive and say okay well we're going to keep this live service running and the day we're stopping this live service the the game is gone. So some publishers are nicer about this than others. I know the Dragon Quest MMO is getting a single player version soon which is really cool. I've noticed I had a game like on

EA app that I wanted to try and that had an anti-cheat and then I noticed that it was taken down. It's called Knockout City. I think I know that one. And that one, they made the game free, and they made the server free. Wow.

I thought that was a pretty nice move. That's, OK, you're shutting down the servers, but you're giving away the service but you're giving away the the server the the server so you can host your so i didn't get the the server to run in wine because it's involved like installing postgres database and redis and i was like maybe maybe i don't want to install like postgres in. Maybe I can just use a native one. And at some point, I didn't care enough to keep going at it. Yeah.

Yeah, I was like, oh, this is pretty cool that they are giving this stuff away and being nice about it. In some other cases, you have games that were using GameSpy, which is no longer a thing. But now you can use OpenSpy, which will let you play Unreal Tournament 2004 or all those games, like older games, that used GameSpy in the day and now can't run online um you have

also like efforts like pretendo that will reimplement services for the wii u and the 3ds oh also yeah i mean i kind of want to try it and see if I can get Splatoon multiplayer working with Pretendo. But yeah, I was already pretty excited that I had Splatoon on the Steam Deck working with the gyro. So that means I could control the camera by tilting the Steam Deck and that was working perfectly. I was like, that's really cool. by tilting the Steam Deck and that was working perfectly. I was like, that's really cool. According to their numbers, it is 62% working on Splatoon.

So maybe it's a little bit too soon to do that one, but it's coming along. So at some point you'll be able to do it. Yeah. I mean, I'll have to see how it works. I mean, the thing is, when I tried it, it wasn't like the CMU. So CMU is the emulator used. It wasn't the CMU from Lutris.

It was a CMU from Emudeck. Because Emudeck had this little script to install the Jiro mapper. I was like, OK, I'm going to try that. But also, it wasn't the latest version of CMU that supports Pretendo. So I'll have to look into it. But yeah, I just

think that's kind of neat that it's possible now to have access to those online games. Yeah. Wouldn't it be cool if, you know, they abandon the game and they're just like, hey, I have the software. Like, that would just be cool. Like...

Yeah. Sometimes people just don't wait for the authorization. They will just, like, reverse engineer the service, which is, like, I don't know how... I mean, sometimes some services must be easier than others to reverse engineer the service, which is like, I don't know how, I mean, sometimes some services

must be easier than others to reverse engineer. But yeah, that's, I mean, it's always harder to keep something like this running than just like the game itself. Like we think about the game, you have it, but the service, I mean, you don't even have the code, you don't have the binaries, you don't even have the code you don't have the binaries you don't have anything like you think about like the early id games for example with like here just have the source code like the game's abandoned whatever i don't care go do whatever you want um i mean they haven't done that in a while yeah it's it's they're old old

stuff but even so like the fact they did it for anything is kind of crazy. I can't think of any other big studios, at least, that ever did that. Some games were open source, but nothing as big as the id Software games. It's software games, yeah. Yeah, maybe since the Bethesda ZeniMax acquisition, they stopped doing that. Because if we look at the timeframe between when Quake 3 was released and when it was open sourced, then by that standard,

we should get open source Doom, like the 2016 one maybe. I don't know. Maybe not like Doom, but at least like Volten's Chain, like the newer Volten's Chain game would be open source. But yeah. Or Rage, maybe. Do you remember Rage? I do remember.

I don't think I ever played Rage. Yeah, that was kind of neat. But yeah, we haven't seen like a recent release open source. And I hope that at some point we will. I mean, it would... I mean, sure, like back then, the games were like smaller in size. They were less complex.

They were less middleware because now you have to take care of, okay, I can release the source code, but I can't release this copyrighted middleware stuff. That's like in... That was like a challenge of like open source game like in the past it was you first have to remove a bunch of stuff that you can't ship open source because you don't have to write to them and then you can make the game open source yeah yeah so that that's that might be like a bigger problem like for modern games yeah i've looked at some of the uh most games will include like a list of um

like libraries and stuff they have included in them uh especially like especially the big games where you know they're probably gonna get audited and asked about like what's in the game and you can usually see a good list to like what they have and whilst there's a lot of open source libraries for sure there's also a lot of stuff where they've paid a lot of money for it and those companies uh definitely don't want that publicly released because you know even if it just gets publicly released even if if it is proprietary people are going to try to reverse engineer it all that stuff and they just don't want to deal with that yeah yeah exactly um what i'm hopeful is that maybe we'll see like more uh decompilations that's something we we see more and more like recent the recent years uh we're saying like especially for n64 games

or like playstation games. I'm hopeful. For PC games, especially, why not having decompilations for Linux games so that we can just swap out the old audio APIs or the old graphics APIs for more modern

ones or have just something that can be built on more modern ones, or perhaps just something that can be built on more modern systems. My favourite of one of these decompilations is a game that I grew up playing a lot of, the Jak and Axta series. The Open Goal project is really cool. They've actually

gotten, I believe they've gotten the first game fully working on PC now which is super cool like really really cool i don't understand how it's done i i don't get it at all like these people know exactly they they are a lot smarter than i am and i am very happy they're out there. Oh, yeah. And I have no idea what's going on there, or how they do that, or how you would get started in such a project. But yeah, I'm really glad that some people have the skills

to work on that sort of thing. It's really cool. If I'm not mistaken, there was a really old compilation of StarCraft where you could play StarCraft on Raspberry Pi. Okay. And that was like, I think at least 10 years ago. Yep, yep, that is almost 10 years ago. 2014, going on 10 years this year nice Open Pandora is what it's called

Open Pandora is like the or is this a different one the hardware that was like before the Steam Deck that was like this little Linux handheld so yeah it was running on Open Pandora but yeah I remember about that Pandora console

I kind of really badly wanted one before there were Steam Decks. I don't even know what this one was, I must have missed this. It was like, kind of like a Nintendo DS but it ran Linux. Oh. Oh, okay. Hmm. Oh. Oh, okay. And it was really expensive for what it was, so that was- that's why it didn't get a lot of traction, but

it was really neat, I mean, um, having, like, a fully, like, portable Linux desktop in your hands, that was really cool. This is really cool looking! Okay, yeah, I can see why you wanted one. Mm-hmm. That's awesome! Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, okay. I definitely would have wanted one back then if I knew what it was. Yeah, and I think that's like the modern version of it is called the Pyra.

Ah the Dragonbox Pyra, yes. Yes so... Oh it looks exactly the same. It's kind of the same thing yeah and you have your little uh I don't know XFCE or GNOME desktop on it and... I'm gonna say that's XFCE or Gnome desktop on it I'm going to say that's XFCE I've seen you have like some x86 emulation on it, I've seen people

run Windows games on virtualizing like the x86 CPU that's so cool that is awesome virtualizing the x86 CPU. That's so cool. That is awesome! So this is from 2016 and then... Wait, the first production model had been...

Ah, so they shipped the first production model in 2020. Okay. Geez, they took a long time to get that shipped it was a thing for i mean i waited for that like for a really long time and was always like a little bit too too pricey for what it was i mean it was really like a an enthusiast product so um you're like if you have have a lot of money to spend into those kind of things, I mean, it's fine. It was never the really good deal you could have with the Steam Deck, where the Steam Deck is

a powerhouse, but it's still pretty cheap. So here you have something that's not nearly as powerful, but is also a lot more expensive than a Steam Deck. So it's like, yeah, maybe it doesn't make a lot of sense unless you really want one and have that kind of money to spare. The Steam Deck has the advantage of the console market, though, where they can sell it at a reduced price and then make up the difference on game sales. reduce price and then make up the difference on game sales. Yeah, and I'm not even sure they're losing money on the Steam Deck sales. I mean, if they have a good deal of AMD on their chipsets...

I can't imagine they're making that much money on it. They might not be, especially not on the cheaper models. But when you bring up the price a bit, like for the 1TB model, for example, then, yeah, I can imagine that they're making some money at least. Hmm, maybe. Well, either way, it's a crazy powerful system for what it is. I've got one sitting back on the shelf there.

crazy powerful system for what it is. Like, I've got one sitting back on the shelf there. I'm genuinely impressed with how, like, with what that thing can run. Like, I'll boot up a modern game, like, a relatively modern game that, I was like, it just runs fairly well. Maybe I need to turn down the settings a little bit, but the fact that

you can play, like, Elden Ring, for example, on a handheld console, and it doesn't instantly turn off by running out its battery, like, that's wild. That is absolutely crazy. Yes, yes, absolutely. This is something that I've dreamed of, like, for the longest time, and it was like, yeah, it's finally here. I wanted this kind of form factor, like, but in a console form factor. And this was something I was dreaming of. And I was like, yeah, they made this.

And I found a grand total of one game that I couldn't play on the Steam Deck. And that is the new Avatar game. That is... I forgot about that one. It's a game that I got for free with my new processor.

Ah. They were giving that game away with Ryzen 7 CPUs. And I had some trouble initially getting it to run on my computer. And I was like, okay, I'm going to try it on the Steam Deck. And while it did launch, I could only run the benchmark for two or three seconds.

And then the game would crash because there's simply not enough RAM. It's a RAM issue. If the Steam Deck had like 32 gigs of RAM, it would handle this game. But right now, since you have to share like 16 gigs with both the game, like the RAM and the VRAM, then at some point

it will make some games not playable. Right. And that's the only one. I mean, you have people saying, oh, Starfield is not playable on the Steam Deck. Well, I've put a lot of hours in Starfield on the Steam Deck. I can tell you that. Yeah, all those games that are,

The Last of Us also, like, some people said that it wasn't really optimized for the Steam Deck, but it received, the game received, like, a lot of patches, and now it runs a lot better. So, yeah, even, like, the high-end stuff, and even then, I mean, the Steam Deck is

not really, like, it's not the best case. You have a lot of other games, like platformers or indie games, that are much more enjoyable on the Steam Deck. But even the more AAA ones are really nice and enjoyable. Yeah, don't expect to play the latest Unreal Engine 5 uh you know unreal engine 5 game at max settings like that's just not gonna happen but yeah if you want to turn the settings down a bit or your like i play a lot of um i i played a lot of vampire survivors on the steam deck uh that's that's a game that's horribly optimized on no matter what it plays on um games like that play

fine no issue at all um yeah i've been playing the uh the yakuza series on the steam deck as well and i i'm just impressed that it like yeah i i've always wanted a handheld system that can play my pc games and yeah they've existed in the past but this is the first one where it's like legitimately powerful enough to be a good experience. Yeah, it ran Linux and it's like not overpriced because you had all those like INAOs and all that stuff that were like Very expensive. They were here before the Steam Deck but they were like very expensive.

And also you have to take into account that they were shipping with Intel GPUs. And that was before the good Intel GPUs existed. So you had basically laptop performance on your handheld at a premium price and with Windows. And I don't know if you could install Linux on those devices. I'm not sure, but you would maybe hit some driver issues. Yeah, now you have the Lenovo Legion.

That runs Linux pretty well, even if it's, like, not... It's not an AMD RDNA 2 as a GPU. I mean, it will still run Linux. Why didn't you mention Ioneo? Because they actually have their own Linux distro now. This is a fairly new campaign. I don't know what they were doing at the time, but, yeah, now they actually do have their own Linux thing. Yeah, they do have Linux now,

but they didn't, like, before the Steam Deck was a thing. Yeah, it's only, like, this year they started doing it their own Linux thing. Yeah, they do have Linux now, but they didn't before the Steam Deck was a thing. Yeah, it's only like this way they started doing it. They shipped to Windows. And Windows on a handheld device is... Windows is not made for a small form factor device, we'll say that. It can work, but... I mean, as long as you run like the steam the steam deck ui sure yeah i guess you're good i mean it would be it would be the same thing i mean you could

say the same thing for kde i mean kd kd is like not really made for yeah that's very small from four factor as well i mean kdDE is pretty similar to Windows in its presentation. But I went to Europe a few weeks ago, and I didn't have a laptop. I had a Steam Deck. That was it. I mean, I had a tablet that I barely never used. Yeah, most of the things I wanted to do,

I did on a Steam Deck and it was like fine. But yeah, you could use one as a laptop replacement. So when the Steam Deck came around, obviously that would have gotten a lot of attention onto Lutris as well. So what was that sort of, like how much extra attention did Lutris as well. So what was that sort of, like, how much extra attention did Lutris start getting? How many

people did you get just not understanding what the project was altogether? Just, what was the general experience like when that came around for you? Um, a little bit stressful, to be honest, because at the beginning I was like, oh, the Steam Deck is being released and I don't have a Steam Deck.

I don't have a way to test on the Steam Deck. And that was when I had to, I reached out to Valve and they, they did send me like a dev kits. Oh, wow. So I was like, okay, cool. Now I can progress on Lutris on the Steam Deck. I think the first version of Lutris that was shipped on the Steam Deck was kind of rough

and kind of like pushed a lot of people away. And that's why, I mean, all things considered, there are a lot of people using Lutris on the Steam Deck. But what you will see in the media is not, a lot of the time, is not centered toward Lutris. You'll have a lot of things that use EmuDeck,

a lot of things using Eric, or a lot of things using Eric, or a lot of things using just plain Steam without using any kind of other software. So the Steam Deck gave more exposure also to all those other projects. And it's clear that the loot races still use quite a bit

on the Steam Deck, but I'm not sure it's increased its usage overall by a whole lot. I mean, I don't think it was that much that's

noticeable because people they wanted if they wanted just epic games they would install Heroic

if they wanted I don't know I know that a lot of people wanted like

EA app would just install EA app on because yeah it's about like if you only care

about just one or two games, then Lutris starts to make less sense. Lutris is really optimized to let you manage your game collection, and that is, like, quite a bit of a large collection.

I mean, yeah, you still have the convenience of being able to install games, like, really easily, like, you still have the convenience of being able to install games really easily in a few clicks. You have an install script and all of that. But it's not that hard to install EA app just on Steam or install doing the same thing on Heroic. Heroic will save you the trouble of installing an extra launcher, so you only need Heroic.

You don't need the Epic Game Store. You only need that. So yeah, Hello Twist was always focused on making the original launchers work. I mean, not for GOG,, I mean, we can bypass GOG Galaxy. But in the case of Epic, I mean, especially since we received a donation from Epic for bringing the Epic Game Store to Linux.

Wait, what? I didn't hear about this. We received the Epic Mega Store to Linux. Wait, what? I didn't hear about this. We received the Epic Mega Grants in 2019. And that was, I mean, we had some discussions with the team, the Unreal Engine team.

And it was very clear that I received that grant because Lootwist was able to run the Epic Game Store. If it was a reimplementation of the Epic Game Store, that would maybe be different. But what they wanted was the actual Epic Game Store running on Linux. And that was why they gave the grant.

So I wasn't going to say, okay, I'll take your money, but then I'm going to replace your store with another open source launcher. That wouldn't make a lot of sense. And especially, I was also glad that a lot of people would ask for that. A lot of people would ask for an open source representation. I was glad that ErrorAid came along and did that, a lot of people asked for an open source representation, I was glad that ErrorAid came

along and did that. Just as like the same thing as Bottles did the same thing with the Wine Manager that I didn't want to implement. I must have completely missed that story when that happened. that story when that happened then uh uh yeah it was like in 2019 uh like in the mid-2019 i think uh and like linux was starting to get pretty big but it wasn't like as big as now because do you remember what year the steam deck wasn't uh 2018 right okay so it was like just after like linux game was starting to come like a an actual platform that you could obviously wine was there for a long time before but yeah having proton made it a lot easier so so that's yeah having proton and before proton having dxvk i mean there was yeah yeah there was Yeah, there was a few months where DXVK was a thing

and Proton was not yet a thing. And that was my initial surprise. I mean, it was more of a surprise than Team OS or the Steam Deck. That was the biggest surprise, that was Proton. Because that was basically doing what Lutris did for the past several years. But in Steam, which is not a small open-source project

like Lutris was, which is a massive game launcher used by millions. And at that point, I was so much working on making things more stable. at that point I was like so much like working on making things more stable and I was like how is it possible that a big company is using that solution because it's in my eyes

it was not stable enough we're not ready yet but what I didn't know was that Val was going to put an enormous amount of resources into those all those projects. They would push the wine development, they would push the DXVK development, they would push Mesa development even. So even the drivers at the driver level, they would bring improvement in

gaming. And I wasn't aware of that Because if they were just going to take wine at that point in time, and DXVK at that point in time, I was like, that's crazy, because it's good. I mean, it's enjoyable that they're taking that into consideration. But it's also kind of a crazy idea,

because it's almost a tinker toy at this point. And for a big company like Valve doing the same thing as we were doing, it seemed like out of this world. And in the end, it turned out really great because this meant that we got all the improvements from Valve into Lutris as well. So every GOG game, every Epic game, every Ubisoft game would benefit from those improvements done by Valve.

It's great that they didn't try to do something themselves. Like that, you know, that's what you expect most companies to do. They'll like come into a space and be like, that, you know, that's what you'd expect most companies to do. They'll, like, come into a space and be like, okay, you guys are doing your thing over there, but, yeah, we're not gonna do that. Like, maybe we'll take that project and then make, like, a proprietary

fork of it. No. No, they didn't. They just, well, like, okay, we're going to be good members of the open source space, we're gonna contribute back upstream. We're going to do our thing and make everything just generally better. And that's really surprising that it happened,

but I'm happy that it has and I'm happy that it's just, it wasn't just like a short-term project. Like they are very committed to doing this. And, you know, with the Steam Deck coming out, it seems like they're committed for like the long-term here. This isn't just, you know with the steam deck coming out it seems like they're committed for like the long term here this isn't just you know a one-time project that they're gonna ditch after it's done or even going back to like the original steam os like

proton is sort of a continuation of that project obviously it's a whole different thing but it's still that like same idea of trying to make linux a legitimate gaming platform yeah it's just now they have a much better approach to it and it seems like i i hope that you know nothing happens with valve management where they decide they want to ditch this project because what they've done is turned an os that you could game on if you had a lot of technical knowledge and you knew how to configure wine and do all of this to a platform that you could game on if you had a lot of technical knowledge and you knew how to configure why and do all of this to a platform that you can just for many games just click play and you don't have to think about anything maybe you need to run a different proton version maybe you need like a like a single option to include but a lot of games don't even need that you just run it and it just works and that's that's not something that could have been said you know five six plus years ago yeah

yeah there's like been so much progress done like uh uh yeah it's very uh like yeah it's been wild and if you compare like if you go back even before that, where Wine was very heavily into development, where we didn't have any solution for DX11. So basically any DX11 game, you could forget about it. I mean, the progress made is spectacular. You were talking about proprietary alternatives. I don't know if you

remember, but before I was working on Lutris, I was using something called Cediga. Cediga was this proprietary fork of wine that was the continuation of WineX. WineX was the initial fork of wine. That was the continuation of WineX. So WineX was the initial fork of wine,

which I think triggered a license change on wine's end so that no one else could do the same thing again. They didn't want people to do their closed fork of wine. They didn't want people to do their closed fork of wine. But yeah, WineX was basically wine that was optimized for games. And then you had Zyga, which was basically a graphical interface on top of WineX. And basically, it made playing Left for dead and portal really easy but that was basically it i mean that was yeah 2008 2009 uh 2009 is the last day release it has on the wikipedia yeah uh yeah and that was like the i remember because I was playing Left 4 Dead, which was a 2009 game.

So it must have been around that time. And that was basically around that time that Lutris started. And I remember at the very first, like the start of Lutris, we had Cediga as a runner. So it would kind of replace Proton back then. It was, okay, instead of wine, you can use Cediga if you bought it. Because that was like a paid product. But yeah, since then, yeah. The other problem with it being proprietary is

if you know they abandoned it in what 20 wait 2011 it looks like and then they the company shut down in 2016 so that's just gone if Valve ever decides that they want to move away

from Proton obviously they are like the massive drivers behind it, and they're the reason why it's become so good. But if they abandon it, that doesn't mean it's just gone. Proton is still here. I mean, you have Glorious Aguil, who maintains Wine GE, and Wine GE is basically Proton GE, which is basically Proton. So Wine GE,

the difference between, because a lot of people ask to run proton in Lutris, like the proton proper. And I tell them like, no, that's not necessary because wine GE is proton, except that there's like some steam specific bits that have been removed

and replaced by their wine, like original wine behavior. But there's no difference between Proton and wine GE. So if, for whatever reason, Proton stopped being developed by Valve, it would still be here. I mean, it would still, like CodeWeavers would still exist and YNG would still exist and DXGK would still exist and VKD3D would still exist. And all of those would, in their own rights,

you could still put them together. And just like we did that before Proton was a thing, when it was not called Proton yet, we were just having like Wine plus JVK, where, well, we can do the same thing after. I mean, if Proton stops being a thing, we could do the exact same thing. It's just that Valve put so much effort,

and they are still doing it to this day where they are putting efforts in making HDR work yeah that's a big one I didn't think that was happening anytime soon I mean now I don't know

how much how much work Valve has put into Plasma's kind of things but apparently in next month we're getting HDR on the desktop on Plasma I know

I know what you're talking about I think it's Plasma 6 is supposed to ship with to ship with HDR I don't think it's full desktop support um that's my at least in games at least yeah it's definitely in games yeah which is like i remember reading about i know like five or so years ago red hat was talking about doing some hdr stuff and then other like there's been a lot of meetings and a lot of

discussions about HDR and obviously that work has been important and last year um there was the Red Hat HDR Pack Fest or whatever it was called I don't remember the exact name and that was obviously a big thing as well and then you can just play hdr games in gamescope now like yeah yeah and it works i mean i've um it works on on desktop like uh it's not only limited to the steam deck oled uh of course that worked ish because i've had some experiences where I didn't. But I've also run HDR games here on my desktop computer by just installing the GameScope session in Nobara. And I've played Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk, Horizon Zero Dawn. And I'm not sure if I get the right render.

Like, Doom Eternal looks pretty much awesome on HDR. Cyberpunk and Horizon Zero Dawn have kind of toned-down colors. Yeah, I noticed that with Armored Core 6 as well. And very bright. When you have like fire or explosions and stuff like that, it gets very bright. But the base color seems to be toned down.

And I'm not sure if that's supposed to be the case. Because it does look more realistic in some way. But also it makes the game look pretty gray. But yeah, I would like to have some kind of point of comparison. Like, OK, this is what it's supposed to look like in HDR. And that's what we're getting now. Also, I have a pretty old HDR monitor.

I don't know if it has the latest standards that are needed. I think I old HDR monitor. I don't know if it has like the latest standards that are needed. Like I think I need like HDR 10, but yeah, I don't have that at the moment. My understanding is some games are also fairly lazy with how they do HDR. So it could also just be that those aren't great examples of HDR. Yeah.

Yeah, I would like to make sure that at least we get the render that you would get on a Windows computer. Or a PlayStation 5, for example. Yeah, if it's still bad at the end, that's just a problem with the game itself, and no amount

of work here is going to fix that. So where do you see So, where do you see or where do you hope to see Linux go as a gaming platform? Because right now it's in a pretty good state. And it's hard to imagine how it really gets

better outside of the anti-cheat stuff. But, what would you like to see happen? you like to see happen? Yeah, that's a good question because as you said, there's a lot of stuff that has already been done. I wonder if the next step is related to gaming

or is just improving the Linux desktop in general. Just improving the quality, just perfecting stuff. Now that we have most things working, it's going to be a lot of polishing stuff and making things really easy to use and really user-friendly and really predictable more than having some big breakthrough.

Because yeah, what more can you want? I mean, there's already a bunch of games that will run better on Linux than on Windows. I don't know, like PlayStation 5 emulation? Xbox One S emulation, maybe? I'm just starting to get Xbox 360 games running on Linux.

Yeah, the Xenia emulator is sort of... Wait, they have Linux support now? I thought there was still... No, they don't, but you can run the emulator in Wine and run Xbox 360. Wait, so you're running the

Xbox emulation through the not Windows emulation on Linux? Yes. Which is something we did back then with Dreamcast. I mean, the Dreamcast em simulator at some point in Lutris was Null DC, which didn't have Linux ports.

So we used Wine to run Null DC and now we have like tons of fancy Dreamcast simulators. But yeah, back then we didn't have one. So that's not new as a concept. The thing is we don't have one. So that's not new as a concept. The thing is, we don't have Xenia as a runner. So you can't download Xenia from the Lutris UI unless you use the script on the website.

But yeah, that's a thing. Another recent one was PS Vita. PS Vita, I mean, I tried it like a few months ago and I was like, oh no, that's not playable. And I retried it like recently a few weeks ago and I was like, that's great. That runs great. Is that with Vita 3K or is there another one?

Yeah, Vita 3K. I think it's the only one. And that is Linux native. Or is there another one? Yeah, Vita 3K. That's, I think, is the only one. And that is Linux native. I don't know how much I can work on command line stuff for Vita 3K, so I don't know if it's possible to have a Linux

runner. I don't know if it's possible to type a command line and have a game launch directly, or if you have to fire up Vita 3K and then go through the menu, because it pretty much replicates a PS Vita menu. So is there a way to launch things from the command line? I don't know. That's the requisite to have a Lutris runner. But yeah, I mean, outside of more emulators,

in Lutris, specifically, we need to implement cloud saves. That's a big thing. We need to implement like a game, a full screen game UI, like the Steam Deck UI. And then I think we're going to ship LotWiz 1.0 when that's done. Wait, is it not? Wait, what? Right now we're LootWiz 1.5.14. And yeah, I think we planned 0.6 to be the gtk4 ports and once i mean during the the port of like

two gtk4 we're likely going to to ship also as well like the the cloud saves there's a whole a whole bunch of stuff um that are related to ratings as well. I would like to work with ProtonDB as well. Maybe include like Loot Race games into ProtonDB. Have rating done differently, but that's work that has to be done on the website, on the API and all that stuff um i think on linda yeah on the linux gaming side itself there's not much left to do i think if lutris had a like full screen ui back when the steam deck came out

maybe people would have reacted to it a little bit differently because that's one of the things that emu deck does really well like they have a you know a nice ui that fits in with what like the steam deck is but lutris you know it it's a desktop application and that's not a bad thing but you know it feels kind of out of place i mean yeah for for sure because the the thing is you go to the kitty on your sim deck you install your games on Lutris, and then you create those Steam Deck shortcuts, and then you go back into game mode and run your game through there. And for EmuDeck, I think it was pretty much the same thing,

because you had to go into the desktop mode, fire up an application, and it would create the shortcuts into the... There's probably some more automations compared to Lutris. And that's something I will have to look into. And better integration with the Steam Deck UI would be nice. I'm not sure that people would want to run

two different UIs on the Steam Deck. Having a good integration with the game UI. I mean, that was one of the reasons why I stopped kind of working on that full screen UI for the moment was before, because, okay, there's already a big one UI that works pretty well that has like not only like an ability to launch games,

but also to remap inputs, to have on the Steam Deck, you can limit FPS. You can do a whole bunch of stuff that you couldn't do on the Loot Race side. So it's better to just integrate with that. Yeah, better to just create Steam shortcuts and use a build on top of like a build on top of that uh not only it's a lot faster it's a lot quicker to to ship like that that integration than

just to have to rebuild basically loot race from the ground up um Yeah, and that pushed the Godot UI on the back burner a little bit. So if we did build one, like a full screen UI, I think it would mostly be for TVs, for people who want to have a Lutris console. OK, that's a good one. I say Lutris console, but not this is a concept that I want to help push is, so OK, we have this team text.

So it's a Linux console that's a handheld. But do you have a gaming console that's on your TV that's hooked on your TV and use that as a gaming system. I'm still not sure how to proceed with that, because there's playing games on the TV, but also there's a lot of playing games that are not really like FPS games, for example.

You'll always be more comfortable playing on a keyboard and mouse rather than playing on TV. So I've experimented with different setups some like hybrid where you can play on the TV for part of the game and switch to keyboard and mouse

like yeah, it's kind of like it's not something that's commonly done before. Like having the TV merged with the people gaming together. Right now, you have either people playing on PC or people playing on a console. Well, that's what Steam Big Picture Mode was originally supposed to be.

Yeah, it was supposed to be that. But then you are left with all those games that... I mean, sure, the Steam Hunter was supposed to fix all of this, but you'll never see a keyboard and mouse for a lot of games still. So, yeah. I think if there's one thing we could see actually improve with Linux gaming like over the next coming years it's having these launchers offer native versions of themselves not just having to

run the launcher through wine to then run the games through wine actually having like you know a native version of EA stuff and ubisoft stuff and blizzard stuff and obviously there is with epic the heroic stuff so you don't necessarily need that but either open versions or native versions of those proprietary clients and open versions that's kind of like it's trickier and that one thing that's kind of like, it's trickier. I mean, that one thing that's, because I noticed that most of the time is that Epic Games doesn't ship a DRM on top of the,

like in addition to the DRM that's already present in the game. Like you don't have a requirement for the Epic Games launcher to be open for you to launch a game from the Epic Games Store. So that's why Eric Launcher is able to exist. I wasn't aware of that. Basically, yeah, you don't need...

Sometimes you'll need Epic Games services or Epic Online services, but you don't have a requirement for Epic Game Store to be open. Whereas, like, good luck launching Overwatch without Battle.net, you know? That's fair. Or same thing for, like, Battlefield. If you want to run Battlefield, you'll need to open EA app. And it's the same thing for, like, Steam.

Even for Steam games, If you have an Ubisoft game on Steam, then when Steam does it, it installs Ubisoft Connect, launches Ubisoft Connect, and then... I mean, it gets kind of crazy, so I'm not sure what you... I do get what you want.

Well, I would like... If that's not possible... It would be really nice to have. I would like to see a native version of those clients. That would be nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

it's not, it's not like impossible because most of those characters, they use either QT or web kits. Yeah. Yeah. A browser. I mean, it's all stuff that's here on Linux.

Um, and it's not that hard to do. And then you have to build up some kind of portal integration into it. But that's basically it. But I don't know if that would be, I mean, without the publisher, like without EA or Ubisoft or Blizzard going in and doing the work,

I don't think that's something that's possible. It's like you don't have like an open source implementation on Steam. So you can't really do the same thing for Steam. You have Valve that makes like the Steam for Linux and then brings the port on integration. And you can valve that makes like the steam for linux and then brings the portal integration and you can't have it like any other way because you need steam to run the steam games and it can't be like some kind of open source re-implementation well as as tim sweeney said when the platform has tens of millions of users, I guess then he'll consider it.

I mean, at that point, I'm wondering how many millions of users are there right now. Because, I mean, we must be getting pretty close. That means that they're going to reconsider. How many users does Steam have? Steam users. How many users are on Steam? 132 million monthly active users, so about 2% of that are Linux users. So what is that? Like two and a half million something like that all right so yeah maybe not enough millions for

team sweeney but i don't know it seems that they have fortnite on so many platforms and seems that they have fortnite on platforms that are much smaller than um than lin. I mean, even who plays Fortnite on the phone? I don't know anyone who plays Fortnite on the phone. Every single child in the entire world. Is it playable? Are they playing some kind of

Razer Kishi? They're playing on a touch... I don't get it. I honestly do not understand how kids play games, but It's a common thing to now play games just on a touchscreen and play a shooter on a touchscreen Yeah, that's kind of wild in my perspective, but okay, okay You weren't talking about playing Heretic 2, so your taste in video games is sort of... it's a little bit distant to what You know, a 12 year old's playing now

Yeah, but you know i've tested like recently i wanted to try out roblox see if it was working great on linux and um it does it does run on you have to use like flatpak and and kind of special launcher for Roblox. But yeah, I mean, OK, I didn't get the game. I didn't get what the game was about, really. So yes, it is kind of strange, but at least it does run. And that's another thing, is all those Android and iPhone games, it's very hard to preserve them. And I've been working and trying to get those bundles from Humble Bundle that used to give you Android games. Well, most of those games don't run on Android at the moment.

So I don't know what solutions we have for them i guess it's the same solution as the linux problem you just need uh to emulate old versions and at least there's a lot of dev tools for doing android stuff so it's not as big of a problem like you can you can run fairly old versions of android i don't know how far back you can reasonably go though um so maybe it's not a complete perfect solution as it currently stands yeah um also you need to be on the same uh architecture so there's um i've tried, like I have a VM of Android x86, and I've had some limited success with it running games. I have had some success.

First thing is like a bunch of stuff won't work if you don't have a touchscreen. But you need a touchscreen to run most stuff. And a lot of stuff won't run with, if you don't have like a norm processor. And there is this translation layer called LibHoudini. I think it's made by Intel or, and it's not maintained anymore. I don't think it is.

I've tried to download it and I couldn't find a way to get it working. So if anyone has knowledge to how to make LibHoudini work for android then yeah tell me about it i want to know i am just discovering this exists right now so uh maybe someone knows about it maybe yeah last running yeah running Libudini in QMU in 2024 that would be interesting

well we are just getting towards the two hour mark now so I guess it's about time that we end off the show if somebody wants to get involved with Lutris where is the best place to go?

There's plenty on the GitHub, there's like a tag called open to community where basically I put everything that I know that I have very low chance working on, so if you're interested in one of those

things, it's a pretty good way to get started. Or any open issue, really. Or even if there's no open issue, then maybe... Yesterday, we have a Lutris release that's just out the door. It's going to be released tomorrow or the day after. So I went on GitHub and made sure all the issues were correctly labeled and nothing that's still open that should be closed.

So right now, we should only have issues that are valid that should be worked on. So anything that's still open is game for anyone. If there's anything more involved, like, oh, I want to do this thing that's really kind of big, big development, don't start anything big without talking to me before. Because if you put weeks of development into something

and you say, OK, I've done this, and I'm like, yeah, I mean, that doesn't fit the project at all. You've done all of this for nothing. Sorry. Then, yeah, I would prefer not have to say that. So just tell me, OK, I'm going to do this awesome thing that's going to take a few weeks of development, and it's going to be like this and like this and like this.

And I will be, okay, then I can bring some advice on how to proceed for the development. I currently have this PR that is about registering multiple accounts for a service, like multiple accounts for GOG or multiple accounts for EA app. And basically the work has been done, but it broke so much stuff outside of that feature. And I was like, no, we can't merge that. I mean, and I don't have a good way to make it fit, like make that code fit into whatever,

like where we should be, like what direction the project should be going. So I think like the only solution is to just like redo the whole work from scratch and to take a different approach. So I want to avoid this kind of stuff. Other than that, you need to have some knowledge with Python.

If you have some knowledge with Godot and want to get started on full-screen UI, I mean, that would be cool because I have very little knowledge

of Godot and we need people with good experience with Godot. Yeah, if you have good experience with Wine,. Yeah, if you have a good experience with Wine, you can help Glorious Eggroll work on making patches with Wine GE.

That's always useful. Yeah, there's also a lot of work to do on the website. The website gets less visibility than the full projects, but it is open source as well. It is Python as well. In my opinion, it is pretty easy to work on, but I've had a lot of experience with Django in the past. So maybe it's not as high.

Oh, it's Django, is it? Yeah, it's Django. So it's pretty standard. Yeah, so that's about it. I mean, of course, if you want to write a bash script, one thing we appreciate is when we receive builds for open source projects, open source games. So we have this repo on GitHub called luthris slash buildbots.

And if you look into it, we have all the build scripts for Wine, for all the runners, for Dustbox, for MAME, and also for all the game engines. So we'll have like Serious Sam, or we'll have Quake, or we'll have Doom, or everything that's open source, we'd like to have a build script. Now, Flatpak has replaced a lot. If you want an open source game, the best way to get it

is through Flatpak, Flathub. So it's really nice to have a Flathub integration in Notorious because that will bring you a whole lot of open source games just available with one click. We don't have to maintain builds that's maintained by Flathub. I mean, that's a pretty neat stuff. But still, we still appreciate having those scripts around. And those can still be useful. So yeah, basically, I want people

to push them to build their own preservation consoles. So that means they try to install every game they have played during the course of their lives since they were a little kid to now. And they have all those games accessible. It's like you keep a book library, or you keep a music library. Usually, you keep your music for a bunch of years.

You keep your movies. You don't get rid of them unless you have a shift from, I don't know, DVD to Blu-ray, for example, or VHS to DVD or something like this. But in the case of video games, since consoles keep evolving all the time, then people can't have this collection of video games alive that stays the same over the years, that's consistent.

And if you want to show your kids, like, oh, I used to play that when I was young, then you can just go on your library and click the game, and there it is. You don't have to go buy something on eBay and buy an old system or hunt down, configure your emulator and all of this. It's already pre-configured and it's already

running. So yeah, I have currently over well, I used to have 1,500 games installed on Nutris. But now, I think it's because

I've switched machines and I removed the hard drive and it removed a bunch of Steam games. So now it's... I think it's because I've switched machines and I removed the hard drive. Right. And it removed a bunch of Steam games, so now it's like 13... ...hundred and fifteen something. Oh, only 1300. Oh, not that many. Yeah. But yeah, I try to... I mean, at that point I have everything...

I spent a consequent amount of time playing in my life. I have it right here, playable. And if I think about a game that I used to play and it's not here, I'll just go and install it. I can't be thankful enough for the archive for that, the Internet Archive. That is a very valuable resource for preservation. Absolutely.

Is there anything else you want to mention, or is that pretty much it? I think we covered a lot of things, yeah. We did definitely cover a lot of things. If people want to go and monetarily support Lutris, you do have a couple of things for that as well. That should be, yes. The easiest way is to go on the

luteus website and go on to the donate webpage uh which i recently added like a new sponsor section so if you are like a big company and you want to sponsor luteus in some way that's also a possibility just reach out to me personally and we'll we'll see like we'll arrange the details but if you are just like an individual and you want to support ludris that's also great and we have patreon we have paypal we have liberapay uh just keep in mind that for really small donations uh paypal's has a tendency to keep like a large amount of that money so if you want to give

a small donation it's maybe better to use Patreon than PayPal directly so the cuts that I receive personally is much bigger than what I would with PayPal

Awesome If there's nothing else to mention I'll do my outro personally is much bigger than what I would with PayPal. Awesome. If there's nothing else to mention, I'll do my outro. Alright. Awesome. So, if you want to see the audio version of this, you can see that over on pretty much any

audio platform. If you listen to the audio, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. My main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. I don't know what I'll be out when this comes out, so go check it out. And I've got my gaming channel,

Brody on Games. Right now, I'm probably playing through Neo The World Ends With You, and probably still Neptunia Sisters Versus Sisters so hang around for that one I ramble a lot so if you want to hear me ramble and yell about

nonsense on the stream feel free to pop around for that one I'll give you the final word, what do you want to say? Oh yeah there's something important to mention if you are in California in March, like you personally and like everyone in the audience,

is welcome to come at Scale, the Scale Expo. So this is like the biggest events for the biggest Linux Expo. There will be like a lot of open source projects. There will be Lutris. There will be Glorious Igroll will be here. Buck from ProtonDB will be hopefully here as well. And yeah, it's always like an awesome event. I encourage people to come there and come talk to us.

I really enjoy like having like receiving people and we talk about Lutris, like demo stuff. It's always a great time to meet the community. So yeah, if you're in California, in Pasadena, beginning of March, I think it's the 9th or 10th of March, then come see us. It will be very cool.

I would definitely like to do that at some point but it's getting anywhere from australia is expensive it's 1400 to get there for me oh yeah if you're in australia yeah i was wondering like which time zone where you were in the benefits australia yeah that's a bit complicated uh we've had people flying from the uk to scale uh but aust but Australia not yet we've almost added at some point someone from Australia but it never happened so yeah maybe

try to get some sponsorship for your travel to scale that would be cool that would be really cool so unless you have anything else to say I guess we'll end it there yep very good

see you guys later sweet