the heroic launcher was recently updated to support gamescope (installed it through flatpak by installing org.freedesktop.Platform.VulkanLayer.gamescope 23.08 through the terminal using >flatpak install).
it can be configured with a simple GUI (as seen above) and gives you all the options you could reasonably need. One of the big improvements is that on wayland, unlike when used through steam, it will actually close the game when told to, without requiring you to maunally kill the gamescope process.
valve still requires you to edit text launch options to enable and configure gamescope.
Valve needs to do better with gamescope, this 3rd party FOSS app is embarrasing them.
Gamescope is a microcompositor from Valve that is used on the Steam Deck. Its goal is to provide an isolated compositor that is tailored towards gaming and supports many gaming-centric features such as:
-Spoofing resolutions -turning off VSync on Wayland desktops -using HDR -Upscaling using AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution or NVIDIA Image Scaling -Limiting framerates
In particular, gamescope is rendered seperately to your entire desktop, meaning that certain problem games that may have issues when rendered by your normal compositor (wayland or X11) may work fine under gamescope. For instance: certain games may have jerky mouse input or frequent crashes when running under wayland, but those issue may disappear when running within gamescope.
(this is also why we call gamescope a micro-compositor, as it runs seperately to your main compositor that handles your desktop e.g. Wayland or X11)
Finally, I really don’t want to use that steam garbage
What’s Gamescope?
Valve’s custom wayland compositor used on steam os
What’s a “Wayland compositor”?
The program that draws pixels on your screen. (Not exactly but close enough)
But Heroic doesn’t launch Steam games, right? Or did they change that recently?
better than lutris?
it’s certainly more streamlined. I think ‘better’ is a more reletive term here. Certainly for non-problem games that will simply work under proton GE, it’s better.
I have more problems with proton GE than just proton. I use ProtonUp-QT to download GE.
Heroic launcher installs Wine-GE by default, so you don’t need protonup-qt
I mean…you’re mostly right, but I don’t know how setting a few flags like -H,-W,-h,-w is that big of an issue. I agree lutris and maybe heroic (I don’t use) have frontends for these,but I would hardly that “way better”.
Edit: grammar,typos
it’s incredible how out of touch this community is with the average end user. I’d wager that MOST people don’t know how, much less want to set custom flags for every one of their games. Believe it or not people actually like using nice GUIs and rely on simple intuitive frontends, and it’s a massive failure on Valve’s part considering they’re the largest, most mainstream PC gaming platform.
Nobody running a FOSS third party launcher is an average end user. Also, people routinely add flags to typical games even on Windows (e.g. -skiplauncher)… It’s really not that big a deal.
Just wait until you find out about moonlight
