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
Pegasus is my go-to but it takes a bit of tweaking and learning. It’s kinda like the arch of frontends; very versatile, lightweight and customizable, but also a bit of a learning curve. Steam games get added automatically, but with other emulaed or wine games you’ll need a scraper like Skyscraper or you can edit the metadata files yourself. You can also point to bash scripts to do essentially anything you want on the OS side. Launch anything, any emulator, any game, any bash script, wine, whatever your heart desires.
There are also tons of themes in every style, my top pics are Retro Mega Next for browsing and Library for a grid layout. It is also natively built for use with controller so it is easy to use. It’s also cross platform, I currently use it on Fedora, used to use it on Windows and have also used it on Android and Steam Deck. And if you want to go even deeper than that, it runs on QML, and you can customize any and every sigle part of the launcher and frontend with the QML files or even make your own theme. The rabbit hole is deep and very fun to explore and it’s such a flexible frontend