hey, I’m planning to turn a PC into a dedicated gaming device
I already chose my distro and DE, but I’m not sure about the game launcher, help me choose
I’m used to Bottles + RetroArch/Ludo, tried Lutris but didn’t feel that comfortable for me, didn’t try Heroic nor Meteorite
while both Bottles and RetroArch/Ludo have a grid/game UI, I’m planning on getting a joystick eventually, so a unified frontend with joystick support would be handy
Steam Game Mode seems okay but I would prefer something else if I can
Pegasus looks amazing, mature, customisable and supports multiple sources
OpenGamePadUI really caught my attention, minimal, relatively stable despite its age, multiple sources
but Im still not sure, help me choose
also, have you tried UMU? I’m still trying to get used to the UMU way instead of plain Wine
Im trying to understand how UMU uses prefixes
plain Wine prefixes work just like a Windows drive, I just execute WineCFG or regedit or install more software in the same prefix if I need to
but UMU seems even more focused to the one program per prefix approach
I know it uses a read only runtime, but how does it use prefixes? Bottles doesn’t treat them like they do with Wine ones (allowing you to add shortcuts for different programs in the prefix for example, but Bottles offers you to use Game Files outside of the prefix too)
Basically it creates a new prefix for every game you have. They’re extremely similar to wine prefixes. You generally don’t have to worry about them, but if you need to mess with them or install a program you can use Protontricks, which is also included in Heroic’s menus.
Heroic has an option in game settings “run exe on prefix” and also winetricks gui. UMU has its own proton version, you can use it if you need to