Frequently asked questions

General

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While it may seem tempting at first glance to think git is a good tool to manage lutris install scripts, anyone who spends enough time learning about the internals of the project will realize git isn't a good fit.

The integration of git with our current infrastructure would require an enormous amount of work with little to no benefits. We would only use a very small subset of git's features and we would still need to build tools on the website to transparently interact with git because we don't want the knowledge of git to be a requirement for our users to contribute scripts.

We already have a versionning system in our current database, it is simply not exposed to end users. Creating an UI to make those available to all users would require way less work than an integration with git.
On top of that, the current system of scripts is not here to stay forever. Over time, we will progressively migrate to installers dynamically generated through metadata.
We already have a lot of automation to fix some aspects of user submitted scripts, which would only be more difficult with a git backend.

We understand that some people are more confortable with git than they are with API design. But just because all you have is a hammer, it doesn't mean everything is a nail. The "installers in git" request mostly shows a refusal to follow the goals of our core team. We could use some help improving our installer submission process and the tools for moderation. With some minimal amount of work, way less than what is required to integrate with git, we could make our current system faster and more reliable.

Runners

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

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.

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/