It’s kinda sad. I felt the maintainers feeling of being overwhelmed and underappreciated, but that whole discussion in the issue and the later statement to just hide AI use was such a phenomenal PR debacle he’ll probably never get rid of.
Essentially, Windows 3.1 Program Manager for the 21st century. Lutris did that quite well. Heroic doesn’t let you add custom stuff, it just integrates with store fronts. RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”.
Lutris scripts were great - just having the required winetricks commands to get something obscure working was awesome, but packaged up in a useful way along with art and metadata was handy. The front-end being “only what you need” was good as well. Shame it’s gone off the rails a bit…
The ability to apply community patches easily was super handy as well. It made installing games like Dungeon Keeper and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines extremely simple.
It’s now been months since I’ve successfully got Lutris to even install a game. It practically turned to slop overnight.
RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”
This definitely does happen sometimes, especially these days, but this is explicitly opposite to old-school Linux design principles. A program should do one thing, it should do it well, and it should be able to be plugged in to other processes in order to accomplish whatever this single-purpose program accomplishes. If you want it to do something else, go get/write a different package to do something different. This is actually explicitly stated in the “Unix Philosophy” papers by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, et al.
The concept suffers a little bit with graphical applications. They don’t exactly have equivalents to stdin, stdout and stderr which you could pipe or read/write willy-nilly.
RetroArch isn’t far off from the philosophy I think, those emulation cores are pretty much independent projects plugged into a frontend. Unfortunately that default frontend is pretty clunky and doesn’t come with sane defaults for known ROMs. Or even sane menu navigation tbh, main menu and game menu looked way too similar last time I used it…
Heroic lets you add plenty of custom stuff. The only thing I’m missing from lutris is tagging/grouping of games, everything else I ever used in lutris is available in heroic.
It lets you “add game”, but then gives you the choice of Linux / Windows with a Wine version / browser, and you have to put in the path.
So for example, in Lutris I could have “every Zelda game” or “every Castlevania game” as a filter. Castlevania needs MSX, NES, Gameboy, SNES, N64, DS, PSX, PS2, and Wii emulation; and one of (Steam, or PS3 or X360 emulation) to be reasonably complete.
I suppose I could create a Linux shell script that daisy-chains into the correct emulator, but that would be quite clunky compared to Lutris, which is still pretty clunky. And I wouldn’t be able to filter to that, nor sort them by release date.
Another commenter just made me aware that the maintainer moved back on his hiding of Claude (because it “apparently is a big deal”… yeah, what tipped you off Sherlock?), which is good. But it’s still being used, so… still bad.
AFAIK the dev reversed his stance on ai after the blowback. Do you have newer information that contradicts that? Because otherwise you are both just hating on lutris for no reason.
AFAIK the dev had committed a bunch of AI nonsense intentionally not labeling it at such or keeping track of what was slop in any way. Do you have newer information that contradicts that? Because otherwise you don’t know what you’re talking about for no reason.
Thanks for the update, so at least he doesn’t hide it anymore. I wouldn’t call that “reversing his stance on AI” though, he didn’t say he’d stop using the slop cannon. Just that he doesn’t hide it anymore, which quite frankly is the absolute bare minimum.
Yeah thats fair. Personally i’d prefer he didnt use them at all either but i can also sort of understand a (afaik?) hobby coder wanting to reduce their workload, iirc there were even some mental health issues involved that got alleviated by the ai help. And as long as the ai code is identifiable i can mostly live with it.
It’s kinda sad. I felt the maintainers feeling of being overwhelmed and underappreciated, but that whole discussion in the issue and the later statement to just hide AI use was such a phenomenal PR debacle he’ll probably never get rid of.
Lutris was pretty good…
Undoubtedly, the lutris scripts really made it a great community driven project.
Just for gaming purposes, having a unified front end that:
lets you start an application with the arguments it needs, whether to use a specific Wine folder, or start an emulator with the right arguments
lets you tag up each application with some custom arguments - genre, date, and so on - and lets you filter and sort by them
lets you configure each app with their own box art or whatever as an icon
keeps some gaming-related metadata; hours played, whether you’ve finished it, …
Essentially, Windows 3.1 Program Manager for the 21st century. Lutris did that quite well. Heroic doesn’t let you add custom stuff, it just integrates with store fronts. RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”.
Lutris scripts were great - just having the required winetricks commands to get something obscure working was awesome, but packaged up in a useful way along with art and metadata was handy. The front-end being “only what you need” was good as well. Shame it’s gone off the rails a bit…
The ability to apply community patches easily was super handy as well. It made installing games like Dungeon Keeper and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines extremely simple.
It’s now been months since I’ve successfully got Lutris to even install a game. It practically turned to slop overnight.
This definitely does happen sometimes, especially these days, but this is explicitly opposite to old-school Linux design principles. A program should do one thing, it should do it well, and it should be able to be plugged in to other processes in order to accomplish whatever this single-purpose program accomplishes. If you want it to do something else, go get/write a different package to do something different. This is actually explicitly stated in the “Unix Philosophy” papers by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, et al.
The concept suffers a little bit with graphical applications. They don’t exactly have equivalents to stdin, stdout and stderr which you could pipe or read/write willy-nilly.
RetroArch isn’t far off from the philosophy I think, those emulation cores are pretty much independent projects plugged into a frontend. Unfortunately that default frontend is pretty clunky and doesn’t come with sane defaults for known ROMs. Or even sane menu navigation tbh, main menu and game menu looked way too similar last time I used it…
Heroic lets you add plenty of custom stuff. The only thing I’m missing from lutris is tagging/grouping of games, everything else I ever used in lutris is available in heroic.
It lets you “add game”, but then gives you the choice of Linux / Windows with a Wine version / browser, and you have to put in the path.
So for example, in Lutris I could have “every Zelda game” or “every Castlevania game” as a filter. Castlevania needs MSX, NES, Gameboy, SNES, N64, DS, PSX, PS2, and Wii emulation; and one of (Steam, or PS3 or X360 emulation) to be reasonably complete.
I suppose I could create a Linux shell script that daisy-chains into the correct emulator, but that would be quite clunky compared to Lutris, which is still pretty clunky. And I wouldn’t be able to filter to that, nor sort them by release date.
Well fuck
Another commenter just made me aware that the maintainer moved back on his hiding of Claude (because it “apparently is a big deal”… yeah, what tipped you off Sherlock?), which is good. But it’s still being used, so… still bad.
I missed this! What’s the tool folks are using instead of lutris?
I personally switched to heroic
Faugus is gaining popularity, but they recently switched from Qt to GTK, so personally I’m now using Vermouth
I’m having a (good) moment with qt atm (excluding kirigami), so that’s a relevant thing to point out!
AFAIK the dev reversed his stance on ai after the blowback. Do you have newer information that contradicts that? Because otherwise you are both just hating on lutris for no reason.
AFAIK the dev had committed a bunch of AI nonsense intentionally not labeling it at such or keeping track of what was slop in any way. Do you have newer information that contradicts that? Because otherwise you don’t know what you’re talking about for no reason.
Certainly:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/03/lutris-now-being-built-with-claude-ai-developer-decides-to-hide-it-after-backlash/
See the update to the article.
Thats what i am going off of, if you have newer info than that i’m sure happy to listen.
Thanks for the update, so at least he doesn’t hide it anymore. I wouldn’t call that “reversing his stance on AI” though, he didn’t say he’d stop using the slop cannon. Just that he doesn’t hide it anymore, which quite frankly is the absolute bare minimum.
Yeah thats fair. Personally i’d prefer he didnt use them at all either but i can also sort of understand a (afaik?) hobby coder wanting to reduce their workload, iirc there were even some mental health issues involved that got alleviated by the ai help. And as long as the ai code is identifiable i can mostly live with it.
I’ve got a nice bridge in New York, I’ll sell it to you cheap.
Is that a “no, i dont have any”?
That’s an “if you believe that you’ll believe anything”. You’ve got no credibility in this conversation anymore.
Says the guy who comes on needlessly strong and then has nothing.
👍