Anything to make gaming easier, especially non-Steam. I’ll list what I know of so far:
Bottles.
Faugus Launcher. UMU-Launcher GUI, which is kinda like Bottles but for proton specifically instead of WINE. It’s early dev and lacks functional GameScope for now, but Bottles I noticed really doesn’t like me using proton so this was an alternative I found.
This is a unified launcher for Windows games on Linux. It is essentially a copy of the Steam Runtime Tools and Steam Linux Runtime that Valve uses for Proton, with some modifications made so that it can be used outside of Steam.
MangoHUD of course.
Heroic Games Launcher.
Lutris.
I have Itch.io’s launcher too.
ProtonUp Qt - grab various versions of WINE or proton for all these applications.
Winboat - Trying some experimental fuckery to use Vortex but I’ve not got that far yet, just got Winboat itself set up so far. edit: It worked surprisingly, modded Skyrim Special Edition, see my other comments here.
butt plug when I play chess
I wrote a vod renamer app that also automatically logs me into SC2 after closing the blizzard app’s ad.
Steam and Protontricks and that’s it.
Perhaps I should explore some alternatives, just to make sure my bases are covered, but I can play all I want to play with those tools.
Sorry if that’s not the response you were seeking. Do you not use Steam?
I use ProtonPlus to download updated and manage Proton/Wine variants
Discord
I avoid discord like the plague, but how does it help with gaming?
Just a voice chat for me and my friends. Can’t from Dolby Axon before it shut down, and before that trying to use teamspeak, ventrillo and a few others was painful.
And let’s you share some kinks in the chat. So useful for us. Pretty much just a straight replacement for what we used to use.
I have no interest in using it as anything other than just a way to talk to my friends when playing games because in game voice was always so bloody janky.
Not sure why they trying to make it a social media platform but so far it does exactly what I need it to. It’s getting kind of bloated for my uses, I don’t need bots and a thousand different channels, not am I trying to build anything like a social media following. It’s literally just a tool that works for me and the crew
Batocera has been pretty great for organizing and playing retro emulators on cheap consumer hardware like a raspberry pi, works with my preferred controllers like leverless for fighting and something like this for everything else
AntiMicroX for converting gamepad inputs to keyboard inputs. I pretty much only use it for Super Smash Flash 2.
I made extensive use of reWASD for a few games in the past. I’ll miss that program occasionally haha. AntiMicroX is probably the best sort of alternative yeah?
Steam Input can do all of that plus a nearly infinite amount of other things, and it’s built right into Steam. Even if it’s a non Steam game, you can still launch it through Steam and use Proton and Steam Input.
what’s the point in having bottles, lutris, faugus, unu gui, and heroic all at the same time? i just use heroic and steam for every game other than minecraft
IMO, the best and quickest way to determine what I actually want to use and to learn rapidly is by using everything I can find and then tossing the redundants.
Faugus is just a GUI front end of umu launcher which is only CLI.
I pirate games and also own a lot of old games on disc so I can’t only use Heroic/Steam.
You can launch most games through Steam if you “add non steam game to library”
Depends on the situation, but I’ve had a game work on bottles where it didn’t quite on steam. It’s slightly closer to running a full vm than proton alone is, and can help with dependencies in rare cases.
rofi-games for launching games since I made it!
Most other things have been suggested already, but I will mention Prism Launcher as my preferred modded Minecraft instance manager. Oh, and vkbasalt was essential for making Kenshi look good but I haven’t used it for any other games.
Oh, nice! And there’s even a nixpg!
Edit:
Thanks to the community 🙏
and vkbasalt was essential for making Kenshi look good
Do you have a preset there?
If that’s the
vkBasalt.conffile, sure, here it is, though I probably stole this from somewhere else online and most of it seems to be commented out:vkBasalt.conf
#effects is a colon separated list of effect to use #e.g.: effects = fxaa:cas #effects will be run in order from left to right #one effect can be run multiple times e.g. smaa:smaa:cas #cas - Contrast Adaptive Sharpening #dls - Denoised Luma Sharpening #fxaa - Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing #smaa - Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing #lut - Color LookUp Table effects = cas:clarity:curves:multilut:dls:smaa:fxaa clarity = "/opt/reshade/shaders/Clarity.fx" curves = "/opt/reshade/shaders/Curves.fx" multilut = "/opt/reshade/shaders/MultiLUT.fx" bloom = "/opt/reshade/shaders/Bloom.fx" reshadeTexturePath = "/opt/reshade/textures" reshadeIncludePath = "/opt/reshade/shaders/" depthCapture = off #toggleKey toggles the effects on/off toggleKey = Home #Clarity.fx ClarityBlendIfDark=50 ClarityBlendIfLight=205 ClarityBlendMode=2 ClarityDarkIntensity=0.400000 ClarityLightIntensity=0.000000 ClarityOffset=2.000000 ClarityRadius=3 ClarityStrength=0.600000 ClarityViewBlendIfMask=0 ClarityViewMask=0 #Curves.fx Contrast=0.100000 Formula=4 Mode=0 #MultiLUT fLUT_AmountChroma=0.750000 fLUT_AmountLuma=0.750000 fLUT_LutSelector=1 #casSharpness specifies the amount of sharpning in the CAS shader. #0.0 less sharp, less artefacts, but not off #1.0 maximum sharp more artefacts #Everything in between is possible #negative values sharpen even less, up to -1.0 make a visible difference casSharpness = 0.8 #dlsSharpness specifies the amount of sharpening in the Denoised Luma Sharpening shader. #Increase to sharpen details within the image. #0.0 less sharp, less artefacts, but not off #1.0 maximum sharp more artefacts dlsSharpness = 1.0 #dlsDenoise specifies the amount of denoising in the Denoised Luma Sharpening shader. #Increase to limit how intensely film grain within the image gets sharpened. #0.0 min #1.0 max dlsDenoise = 0.17 #fxaaQualitySubpix can effect sharpness. #1.00 - upper limit (softer) #0.75 - default amount of filtering #0.50 - lower limit (sharper, less sub-pixel aliasing removal) #0.25 - almost off #0.00 - completely off fxaaQualitySubpix = 0.75 #fxaaQualityEdgeThreshold is the minimum amount of local contrast required to apply algorithm. #0.333 - too little (faster) #0.250 - low quality #0.166 - default #0.125 - high quality #0.063 - overkill (slower) #fxaaQualityEdgeThreshold = 0.125 #fxaaQualityEdgeThresholdMin trims the algorithm from processing darks. #0.0833 - upper limit (default, the start of visible unfiltered edges) #0.0625 - high quality (faster) #0.0312 - visible limit (slower) #Special notes: due to the current implementation you #Likely want to set this to zero. #As colors that are mostly not-green #will appear very dark in the green channel! #Tune by looking at mostly non-green content, #then start at zero and increase until aliasing is a problem. #fxaaQualityEdgeThresholdMin = 0.0312 #smaaEdgeDetection changes the edge detection shader #luma - default #color - might catch more edges, but is more expensive #smaaEdgeDetection = luma #smaaThreshold specifies the threshold or sensitivity to edges #Lowering this value you will be able to detect more edges at the expense of performance. #Range: [0, 0.5] #0.1 is a reasonable value, and allows to catch most visible edges. #0.05 is a rather overkill value, that allows to catch 'em all. #smaaThreshold = 0.1 #smaaMaxSearchSteps specifies the maximum steps performed in the horizontal/vertical pattern searches #Range: [0, 112] #4 - low #8 - medium #16 - high #32 - ultra #smaaMaxSearchSteps = 32 #smaaMaxSearchStepsDiag specifies the maximum steps performed in the diagonal pattern searches #Range: [0, 20] #0 - low, medium #8 - high #16 - ultra #smaaMaxSearchStepsDiag = 16 #smaaCornerRounding specifies how much sharp corners will be rounded #Range: [0, 100] #25 is a reasonable value #smaaCornerRounding = 25Thanks!
Is there a good alternative to CheatEngine? Game Conqueror fails to find the correct addresses most of the time and its speedhack almost never works
I looked into it and apparently if you run chat engineer in the same proton instance (?) As the game it’ll work fine. So far game conquerer has worked for me but I miss the speedhacks
I believe there’s something called Pince, that you could use.
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LACT for undervolting/overclocking etc
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lsfg-vk for frame interpolation (requires paid Lossless Scaling) windows app
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syncthing for “cloud” saving usually by creating symlinks to the actual game save dir
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Using unix signals to pause processes so you get a suspend/resume like setup without suspending the whole system
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Sunshine + Moonlight for streaming to my steam deck and also from a Linux VM to host sometimes. I can also use this setup over my headscale/tailscale VPN setup for remote usage, although I haven’t tested it yet.
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hid-fanatecff is for Fanatec sim racing gear, although I haven’t tested this one yet.
I sometimes also create nix packages to automate download and installation of mods and prefix setup etc, but that’s getting into advanced territory.
Nyrna helps with the suspend/resume stuff. At least on xWayland apps
Awesome list, lsfg-vk caught my eye. I didn’t consider finding a way to use Lossless on Linux and I already own it.
Do the VR tools work well with a Meta Quest 3? That’s in my living room while my desktop still has a Valve Index set up which I know works better with Linux.
Do the VR tools work well with a Meta Quest 3?
Yep. It’s arguably the best supported headset on Linux, perhaps even more than the Index due to some bugs with the FOSS stack. Shame it’s Meta though, so hopefully the Deckard actually happens.
so hopefully the Deckard actually happens.
indeed.
beginning to wonder if the world economies tanking is going to make it infeasible.
I do think that the world state has delayed it, I do believe it’s coming.
Bradley is the best source of news/copium. xcancel. Promising news is coming relatively consistently now. Cope launch date is Q4 this year.
I see his youtube videos occasionally. xcancel isn’t working and i really don’t want to see twitter anyway, tis a shithole. but tyvm for the notes!
Fuck lact with a cactus. It underclocked my GPU without any doing on my part and would only leave it to work properly after i completely wiped and reinstalled my system without lact.
Unless you are some really obsessive tinkerer i feel fucking around with the clock speeds (especially when underclocking) really isnt worth it.
Probably a bug with power saving. All you had to do is to select manual tuning power option and then unroll the greyed out submenu which is not immediately apparent. There you would check max speed instead of the base speed.
I have to do this for VRAM but for core clock I don’t have this issue
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Mumble is great for group voice chat.
OBS Studio is handy for recording. I sometimes leave its replay buffer running so I can tap a key to save the last N minutes of whatever just happened, sometimes to demonstrate a bug, but usually just to save funny/surprising/heroic moments from my games.
for proton specifically instead of WINE
To be clear, Wine is a large part of Proton. You’re not using it instead of Wine; you’re using both.
I mostly use SuperTuxKart
- Lutris
- winetricks/protontricks
- Scripts
Most of my games are on GoG.
- MangoHUD
- Heroic Game Launcher
- Ludusavi
- rdmodman
- Bottles
- Proton Plus and ProtonUp Qt
- GPU Screen Recorder
