So I’ve increasingly been seeing people glaze the hell out of the Faugus launcher (https://github.com/Faugus/faugus-launcher). In large part because Bottles is in the “But it might work for us” stage of a full rewrite and Lutris lost a lot of the core development team in the past year or two.
It is very much a question as to whether Bottles even needs to be meaningfully maintained at this point as it is more a way to streamline prefix management. But Lutris could definitely use some love.
I have been unable to find a good description of what Faugus actually IS. Mostly just people regurgitating/Reacting to the Faugus team’s PR videos and some REALLY annoying youtubers who clearly are emulating pewdiepie as it were.
At some point I’ll probably just sit around and test it (I have a new laptop to provision after all…). But would love to hear some feedback or see some coverage (and maybe find an influencer I don’t actively want to push into traffic in the process…) to sell me on it. Because, near as I can tell, it doesn’t seem to support the wide range of user scripts that Lutris has to make most games a double click to install? It really seems closer to a Bottles replacement? Which… if there are enough features then sure but… yeah.
Thanks
From what I’ve seen there has been some confusion over the state Lutris as the last version was seemingly 0.5.18 in Dec 2024 and “nothing since”. However version 0.5.19 is available as a tag within the github repository from Feb 2025, and they’re working on 0.5.20. It sounds like there is some issue with the 0.5.19 git, and development overall has slowed down as the lead dev is working full time.
I think a lot of this shows how open source software is so dependent on a small number of active people keeping projects going and there isn’t money flowing into otherwise very important and popular projects.
I like Lutris but I think Heroic is probably more fully featured than Faugus at present.
Faugus is an UMU-Launcher. UMU Launcher is essentially a open implementation of the Steam Runtime Tools and Steam Linux Runtime, which can run independently of Steam itself - it essentially aims to be Proton as you get in steam, without needing steam running. It aims to be a single shared implementation to simplify Proton fixes and implementations which are otherwise fragmented and duplicated - each game gets fixes applied individually by each of the existing games launchers in their own projects. It’s a laudable aim, but it’s not clear whether it can achieve it’s aims as Lutris, Heroic, Bottles etc are still doing their own things. So at the moment it’s another launcher?
Just to interject a little bit of context for those that don’t know… UMU is Glorious Eggroll’s project, so it has some clout to it.