Frequently asked questions

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.

Runners

What is a Runner?

A runner is the term we use to refer to programs that can run games, it can be Linux itself, Wine, DOSBox, MAME, gzdoom, … Not all game engines become runners, for example Darkplaces, the open source engine for Quake, is not a runner but gzdoom is. Usually programs become runners if they can run a variety of games, not just one or two.
A requirement for runners is that we must have a redistributable build for Linux and some integration with the Lutris client written in Python or JSON.
If the upstream project for a runner doesn't provide a Linux build then we likely have a script to compile it from source in our buildbot repository.

Wine games

Wine is broken / I have dependency issues.

While Lutris can use a wide selection of Wine builds that we provide ourselves, it is strongly encouraged to have Wine installed from your operating system's package manager. This ensures that all required Wine dependencies are present on the system and will produce better results when using Lutris builds.

Some game requires a custom patch to work properly.

Lutris provides custom builds of wine to increase the number of playable games. If there are patches out there that makes some game playable and we do not distribute them, you can ask us to build it.

In order to build a patched version of Wine, we currently need a git repository containing the fully patched source tree of Wine. If your patches rely on Wine Staging, make sure to apply those as well. Once you have patched Wine you can push it to a git repository of your choice and notify the moderation team so we can publish the build.

How do I change the Wine version used in a game?

If you already have a version of Wine installed, you should see a Wine entry on the sidebar, you can right click on it then select "Manage versions". From there you can install or remove any Wine build we provide. The wine versions are downloaded to ~/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/

The resolution is messed up how can I fix that?

Resolution switching for Wine games heavily depends on your hardware and your desktop environment as well as the game itself.

If you are experiencing issues, try using a virtual desktop in the Wine runner options then start the game and set it to use your monitor's native resolution. Once the game is using your native resolution, you should be able to turn off the virtual desktop.

I get winemenubuilder.exe errors in the console output

You shouldn't worry about those. We explicitly disable winemenubuilder at runtime so it doesn't mess with your Linux desktop's file type associations. Any error related to winemenubuilder can be safely ignored.

I'm just here for Overwatch, don't care about anything else

Please refer to the following article in the documentation on GitHub.