Honestly, my Linuxified brain would just setup a background service to do that instead.
And I would set it up to not keep on running once I have started the game.
I think Lutris does that too, not sure about it though. Maybe I’ll check it next time.
I haven’t used Heroic, so can’t say much about whether I’d prefer it.
But from what I remember of my experience with Epic Games Store back when I was on a Windows 7 PC, it took quite a bit out of my 4GB RAM and made it very difficult to play my game for a long time.
Honestly, I am fine with a launcher as long as it gets out of the memory when the game starts.
But also, I don’t want the restrictions that come with it, so not really a launcher, but a download/update manager at most, would be fine in this case.
The reason I don’t like the word “launcher” in this case, is because it is implying that it will be required to start the game, which might be fine for games that need to be up to date, just to function but for all the others, it’s just an unnecessary extra 30+ seconds after I click the game icon.
I mean, look how fast and light, the update checking scripts are on Linux [1]
You don’t need to start up a whole web-browser (full, with a JS engine) and connect to 10 other things before checking for updates. Just get something lightweight like RSS on the server, that tells the current version by query and let the client check that against the version no. file on the system, with 0 GUI until it actually requires a download and even then, it can simply use the system’s “Notifications” system to tell you that there is an update available.
The blocking checker is only required for games that won’t work unless updated.
except Ubuntu. Well, I only properly remember the EndeavourOS one and that the Ubuntu one was a massive slowdown. There may be others that are not as good. ↩︎
Ah, OK. I have like 200, so having a launcher to keep track of and install them is quite useful.
Honestly, my Linuxified brain would just setup a background service to do that instead.
And I would set it up to not keep on running once I have started the game.
I think Lutris does that too, not sure about it though. Maybe I’ll check it next time.
That sounds like a lot of work that a launcher just handles for you. I use Heroic, and it does exactly that for GOG, EGS, and Prime.
I haven’t used Heroic, so can’t say much about whether I’d prefer it.
But from what I remember of my experience with Epic Games Store back when I was on a Windows 7 PC, it took quite a bit out of my 4GB RAM and made it very difficult to play my game for a long time.
Honestly, I am fine with a launcher as long as it gets out of the memory when the game starts.
But also, I don’t want the restrictions that come with it, so not really a launcher, but a download/update manager at most, would be fine in this case.
The reason I don’t like the word “launcher” in this case, is because it is implying that it will be required to start the game, which might be fine for games that need to be up to date, just to function but for all the others, it’s just an unnecessary extra 30+ seconds after I click the game icon.
I mean, look how fast and light, the update checking scripts are on Linux [1]
You don’t need to start up a whole web-browser (full, with a JS engine) and connect to 10 other things before checking for updates. Just get something lightweight like RSS on the server, that tells the current version by query and let the client check that against the version no. file on the system, with 0 GUI until it actually requires a download and even then, it can simply use the system’s “Notifications” system to tell you that there is an update available.
The blocking checker is only required for games that won’t work unless updated.
except Ubuntu. Well, I only properly remember the EndeavourOS one and that the Ubuntu one was a massive slowdown. There may be others that are not as good. ↩︎