this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
28 points (86.8% liked)

Linux Gaming

24788 readers
248 users here now

Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.

This page can be subscribed to via RSS.

Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.

No memes/shitposts/low-effort posts, please.

Resources

WWW:

Discord:

IRC:

Matrix:

Telegram:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
monolalia@lemmy.world
28
Sell me on Faugus Launcher (lemmy.zip)
submitted 3 months ago by NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

So I've increasingly been seeing people glaze the hell out of the Faugus launcher (https://github.com/Faugus/faugus-launcher). In large part because Bottles is in the "But it might work for us" stage of a full rewrite and Lutris lost a lot of the core development team in the past year or two.

It is very much a question as to whether Bottles even needs to be meaningfully maintained at this point as it is more a way to streamline prefix management. But Lutris could definitely use some love.

I have been unable to find a good description of what Faugus actually IS. Mostly just people regurgitating/Reacting to the Faugus team's PR videos and some REALLY annoying youtubers who clearly are emulating pewdiepie as it were.

At some point I'll probably just sit around and test it (I have a new laptop to provision after all...). But would love to hear some feedback or see some coverage (and maybe find an influencer I don't actively want to push into traffic in the process...) to sell me on it. Because, near as I can tell, it doesn't seem to support the wide range of user scripts that Lutris has to make most games a double click to install? It really seems closer to a Bottles replacement? Which... if there are enough features then sure but... yeah.

Thanks

top 11 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] naticus@lemmy.world 23 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Haven't even heard of Faugus until this post, so I won't be able to sell you on it.

I used Lutris for quite a while but had to drop it because there's some really bad network coding in there that causes it to essentially DDoS my DNS server if it can't give what it expects. For example, when I had installed Dead Space Remake, it was looking for OG assets, which has been moved to a new location, and Remake took that original location. It was sending well over 1000 DNS requests a second for several seconds before my DNS server would 10 min blacklist my PC. If took me 2 weeks to figure out exactly what was happening because I wasn't noticing it was Lutris specifically and was thinking my NIC drivers were killing my connection.

I moved to Heroic and tbh, I don't see anything in Faugus that Heroic isn't already doing. I have GOG, Epic, and Amazon games in there, cloud saves with GOG, achievements with GOG (but no pop-ups), and they've been using umu for a long time. Also automatically adds my games to Steam with assets. They also have a Wine manager and will actively check for game updates.

Does anyone know what Faugus does better? I'm interested, but like OP, I'd have to be sold on it too.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah. Fiddled with Heroic a bit to see if it could do generic installs. Not gonna lie... it took me WAY too long to realize "App Image" meant "icon" not "Appimage". Shout out to A1RM4X for having a video that actually demonstrated how to use that. Will set up Guild Wars 2 on my laptop with that and see if I notice any meaningful difference from Lutris

I would still prefer something that is built around scripted installs since a lot of games not in the major stores tend to be... kind of a cluster to get working. And it's always struck me as kind of stupid to find the same gist everyone else used when that gist could just be a script the Launcher pulls. Although your experience very much highlights the dangers of that...

[–] naticus@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

Yeah definitely fair enough. Lol thanks for the laugh about the icon though, sounds like something I'd do too.

I do think that Heroic is the perfect level of automatic vs manual for me. The only confusing bit for me is that if you specify an alternative executable, there's no way of launching anything else except that executable until you delete it out, even if you use the launch drop-down to pick something else. Every once in a while I have to juggle those because of a config utility or something, or even a mod installer that I want to run in the same prefix. It's little quirks that are annoying, but once I get things setup it's all moot anyhow.

[–] Durandal@lemmy.today 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

LinuxNext has a nice long video about it.

https://youtu.be/poeATq07XbQ

My understanding is that lutris is actually in maintenance mode (still around but not being updated) so this is meant to be a replacement for that... and bottle is a more general purpose tool without the gaming enhancements, hence this is being promoted these days.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 0 points 3 months ago

Yeah... that may be the video I was mentioning as being very clearly inspired by pewdiepie... That approach where it is clear they are emulating children's shows because they want an audience with the attention span of a goldfish.

But it also isn't even really a good one for showing off what Faugus actually brings to the table? Installing ubi and ea is definitely nice. But he spends more time telling people he pirated games than actually showing off anything Faugus provides on the individual game front. And the reason why Lutris took off so much is that those community scripts actually were REALLY nice for not having to care what settings to use in wine or what TPLs are needed and so forth.

Which gets back to it feeling like more of a replacement for Bottles than Lutris.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin@piefed.world 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

From what I've seen there has been some confusion over the state Lutris as the last version was seemingly 0.5.18 in Dec 2024 and "nothing since". However version 0.5.19 is available as a tag within the github repository from Feb 2025, and they're working on 0.5.20. It sounds like there is some issue with the 0.5.19 git, and development overall has slowed down as the lead dev is working full time.

I think a lot of this shows how open source software is so dependent on a small number of active people keeping projects going and there isn't money flowing into otherwise very important and popular projects.

I like Lutris but I think Heroic is probably more fully featured than Faugus at present.

Faugus is an UMU-Launcher. UMU Launcher is essentially a open implementation of the Steam Runtime Tools and Steam Linux Runtime, which can run independently of Steam itself - it essentially aims to be Proton as you get in steam, without needing steam running. It aims to be a single shared implementation to simplify Proton fixes and implementations which are otherwise fragmented and duplicated - each game gets fixes applied individually by each of the existing games launchers in their own projects. It's a laudable aim, but it's not clear whether it can achieve it's aims as Lutris, Heroic, Bottles etc are still doing their own things. So at the moment it's another launcher?

[–] Durandal@lemmy.today 2 points 3 months ago

Just to interject a little bit of context for those that don't know... UMU is Glorious Eggroll's project, so it has some clout to it.

[–] BurgerBaron@piefed.social 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

From what I understand which isn't much: Faugus gave me the impression it's using that Debian based Steam runtime and makes it sound like Lutris, Bottles, etc don't even if you're using Proton. Does it matter? You tell me.

In practice I've not noticed any difference when I tested it out on a couple games to experiment. I don't use Faugus because Gamescope doesn't work yet according (last read a couple months ago) to their github page. If the old projects are dying then whatever. I'll use Faugus Launcher when it's actually ready.

I liked the GUI so far anyways so I won't be upset if I have to switch.

[–] Grass@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago

I just use heroic for everything now. seemingly umu is just built in and I can get hdr working without too much fuckery if any depending on how much I remember of setting up the previous game that has that feature

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 months ago

Just to answer myself a bit:

It is a bit jank and is not a true Lutris replacement as it is still just a prefix manager, but installing standalone games in Heroic seems pretty painless. It can generate a steam entry if I want to launch it that way and their logic for fetching icons seems pretty seamless. Just reinstalled Guild Wars 2 in it and grabbed Guild Wars 1 in prep for Reforged tomorrow.

It DOES raise the problem of also being where I install my GoG games and my tendency to use GoG for some adult playtime games (will never understand why anyone plays those on Steam. We know why you went offline for 15 minutes...) but that feels like more of a me problem.

I dunno. If Faugus can find a way to take advantage of user scripts for the more janky/modded installs, that would be awesome. But if all it does is set up a prefix and let me pick a few options? I already got that?

[–] ISOmorph@feddit.org 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Lutris feels dated, bottles never felt like a gaming related launcher, heroic isn't an option for me because of electron, which pretty much just leaves Faugus.