General
Does Lutris sell games?
No, we don't sell commercial games on the platform, Lutris allows you to install and play games purchased on a variety of different game stores such as Steam, Itch.io, Humble Bundle, GOG, Battle.net, EA, Ubisoft, etc.
How do I get in touch with the Lutris community?
If you want to ask questions about Lutris or just hang out with other Lutris users, you can join the Lutris Discord server. You can also use the forums to ask questions. Please do not privately contact Lutris developers for tech support, do not report issues by email or by private message. Bug reports have to stay visible to the community.
Why not put Lutris on Steam?
Lutris expects a quite substancial set of dependencies to be present in
order to function properly. For the UI itself, Gtk must be installed along
with multiple Python packages. In order for the runners to function, an even
greater set of dependencies is needed. Steam games run in a sandboxed environment
which makes it impossible for Lutris to find all the required components.
If Valve were to add the ability to install Flatpak packages from their interface
then Lutris would be available from Steam as a side effect.
We have plans for a Godot based full screen UI and it may become available on Steam
but in order to work, it will need Lutris installed natively or via Flatpak.
Is the Gnome desktop a dependency of Lutris?
No, not at all. The confusion comes from a library we ship
unfortunately named gnome-desktop, which is not the whole Gnome desktop
but a collection of utilities that are frequently used within the Gnome
desktop. This library is used by the Lutris client to support
resolution switching on Wayland. This library itself is small and has
few dependencies.
You can install and use Lutris on any desktop environment. Installing
the client won't install other Gnome components.
Runners and other lutris provided files fail to download
There seems to be some issues with CloudFlare and some ISPs (notably in
Turkey) when using older versions of libssl.
A quick workaround so is to run lutris with env LC_ALL=C
lutris
but a more reliable solution is to update your version of libssl.
The following repositories provide libssl 1.1.1.
On Ubuntu 18.04 based systems:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mgrocock/openssl
On Ubuntu 16.04 based systems:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:carsten-uppenbrink-net/openssl
I'm a game developer, can I publish my game on Lutris?
You can create a page for your game and submit an installer for it but as of now there aren't any special features for game developers. We do have some plans to add a game developer role to the website, you can follow its development on Github.
What is the Lutris runtime?
The Lutris runtime is a collection of libraries we automatically provide to ensure compatibility with all games and runners over all Linux distributions. The runtime itself is composed of parts of the Steam runtime, some Ubuntu 18.04 libraries and a few extra libraries from various places.
Of course, ensuring binary compatibility over all existing Linux distributions is not an easy task and sometimes issues will arise. If such a thing happens, try disabling the runtime in the system options of your game. For more details on the runtime, see the wiki.
Game [x] crashes, what should I do?
First run Lutris from a command line to see potential errors from the game. If you see errors related to Linux libraries, try running the game with the runtime disabled. If disabling the runtime fixes the issue, please, notify the developers, we don't want to ship a broken runtime and your input can help in fixing it.
If your game still doesn't launch try collecting as much info about your setup (name of the game, your graphics drivers, Linux distribution, hardware setup, desktop environment, etc.) and explain your issue to the community.
If you want to troubleshoot the issue yourself, there are some good resources you can look into. Start by looking up the game on PCGamingWiki. You might run into a known problem and they might have a workaround.
If you are trying to run a Windows game, also check out WineHQ's AppDB or look for issues other Windows users are running into, in the Steam forums for example.