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, Humble Bundle, GOG, Battle.net etc.

If you want to ask questions about Lutris or just hang out with other Lutris users, you can join the Lutris Discord server or our IRC channel #lutris on libera.chat. 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.

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.

There seems to be some issues with CloudFlare and some ISPs (notably in Turkey) when using older versions of libssl.

A quick workaround so is to run lutris with env LC_ALL=C lutris but a more reliable solution is to update your version of libssl. The following repositories provide libssl 1.1.1.
On Ubuntu 18.04 based systems:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mgrocock/openssl
On Ubuntu 16.04 based systems:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:carsten-uppenbrink-net/openssl

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 16.04 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.

Some distributions do not configure URL handlers correctly, this is not an issue with Lutris, the same thing will happen with, for example, the Steam client.

To fix this issue, you can set network.protocol-handler.expose-all to False in Firefox's about:config. With that flag disabled, you will now see a pop-up when clicking "Install", prompting you to choose a program to open the URL with. It is recommended you use /usr/bin/xdg-open to handle winegame:
(or steam:) urls.

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, … Runners are recognized as such in Lutris itself, not all programs that run games are considered 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.

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.

Lutris provides custom builds of wine to increase the number of playable games. If there are patches out there that makes some game playable and we do not distribute them, you can ask us to build it.

In order to build a patched version of Wine, we currently need a git repository containing the fully patched source tree of Wine. If your patches rely on Wine Staging, make sure to apply those as well. Once you have patched Wine you can push it to a git repository of your choice and notify the moderation team so we can publish the build.

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/

Resolution switching for Wine games heavily depends on your hardware and your desktop environment as well as the game itself.

If you are experiencing issues, try using a virtual desktop in the Wine runner options then start the game and set it to use your monitor's native resolution. Once the game is using your native resolution, you should be able to turn off the virtual desktop.

You shouldn't worry about those. We explicitly disable winemenubuilder at runtime so it doesn't mess with your Linux desktop's file type associations. Any error related to winemenubuilder can be safely ignored.

Please refer to the following article on the Github wiki.