Anything to make gaming easier, especially non-Steam. I’ll list what I know of so far:
Bottles.
Faugus Launcher. UMU-Launcher GUI, which is kinda like Bottles but for proton specifically instead of WINE. It’s early dev and lacks functional GameScope for now, but Bottles I noticed really doesn’t like me using proton so this was an alternative I found.
This is a unified launcher for Windows games on Linux. It is essentially a copy of the Steam Runtime Tools and Steam Linux Runtime that Valve uses for Proton, with some modifications made so that it can be used outside of Steam.
MangoHUD of course.
Heroic Games Launcher.
Lutris.
I have Itch.io’s launcher too.
ProtonUp Qt - grab various versions of WINE or proton for all these applications.
Winboat - Trying some experimental fuckery to use Vortex but I’ve not got that far yet, just got Winboat itself set up so far. edit: It worked surprisingly, modded Skyrim Special Edition, see my other comments here.
what’s the point in having bottles, lutris, faugus, unu gui, and heroic all at the same time? i just use heroic and steam for every game other than minecraft
IMO, the best and quickest way to determine what I actually want to use and to learn rapidly is by using everything I can find and then tossing the redundants.
Faugus is just a GUI front end of umu launcher which is only CLI.
I pirate games and also own a lot of old games on disc so I can’t only use Heroic/Steam.
You can launch most games through Steam if you “add non steam game to library”
Depends on the situation, but I’ve had a game work on bottles where it didn’t quite on steam. It’s slightly closer to running a full vm than proton alone is, and can help with dependencies in rare cases.