Killed by Google VS lutris

My company issued a warning to developers to stay away from Gemini Code, mostly because the subscription model is such an impenetrable mess. Google AI Pro apparently does not give you any access to Gemini Code, nor do various Google Workspace subscriptions.

Google as a company seems to have become an incoherent set of exec fiefdoms and their personal campaigns. I wouldn't be surprised if Gemini Code will join https://killedbygoogle.com , and re-surface as something else in due time. Anthropic and OpenAI are much better focused on the developer experience.

Most of the time when I hear about a new and interesting Google thing like in a Google I/O keynote, its only available in a limited preview for some secret or randomly selected group of people. Then by the time its generally available I've forgotten about it, there is a better competitor, or just as likely the project has been canceled (see https://killedbygoogle.com/).

Whenever some enthusiastic developer suggests a new google service at work they are quickly dissuaded by senior developers that have been through their churn before.

Google had really great products, that almost everyone I knew used, then they scrapped them for new shiny thing that competed. The one that angers me most is Google Talk, it used to work with any XMPP client, until it did not, and now its long since dead. They made their own version of tinychat (hangouts) and then mostly killed that too.

Obligatory overview of things Google has killed, because its easy to forget some of the gems:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

You can’t give hardware away for free.

You also have hundreds of failures

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Including Google Fiber.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...

Google Stadia was disaster.

In the phone market. The Motorola acquisition was a major failure and Pixels aren’t taking the world by storm.

The entire “Other bets” haven’t led to any major successes.

Unfortunately with the number of users Google has, any deprecation will be met with cries of pain / I-rely-on-the-spacebar-to-heat-up-my-computer. See https://killedbygoogle.com/.

They could consider open source everything you have killed ( https://killedbygoogle.com ) over the years.

May be the whole design and development process from the start should be everything they do could one day be open sourced. So be aware what you do and what you comment.

I've been working on integrating RomM into Lutris (https://lutris.net/) for a while, but it's not ready yet since I haven't had time to finish it. Not as a plugin but directly in the main Lutris repo: https://github.com/gantoine/lutris/tree/romm-game-service

It would allow you to store your games on the server, sync the list in Lutris, and install them when you want to play them. I'd like to get a working POC to demo to the Lutris team soon-ish. Oh and if anyone sees this and would like to help get us there, contributions are always welcome!

You can get Lutris: It's an open source launcher that you login into with GOG account and it will download the games and wrap them with Wine, similar to Steam.

https://lutris.net/

For "normal" games you could look yourself using ProtonDB regarding every game released on Steam and AreWeAntiCheatYet for most multiplayer games. If a game isn't available on Steam you have three possibilities. First if it's available on GOG, Epic Games or Amazon Gaming, you could use the Heroic Games Launcher. Second you could try to run the launchers through Steam itself using once again Proton. Third you could try installing it with a script or tutorial in Lutris or Bottles.

Can I suggest you head over to the lutris.net site and follow the link the lutris discord - with what you are describing, it would take me 20 minutes to get the base battle.net working so you can see what is causing your issue or 3 days back and forwards here. As a hint, your wine version has known issues, and unless you manually installed the lutris 0.5.14 from the git page in Mint, or are running flatpak, you have other issues related to that

Hmmm I remember there was some confusion in Lutris around this, like https://github.com/lutris/lutris/issues/4237 , and I had to do some workaround. But I can't check what exactly right now...

As a data point, you can run a fair number of Windows games under Proton by using Lutris instead of Steam:

* https://lutris.net

* https://github.com/lutris/lutris

It's an OSS game launcher that takes the place of Steam, and you can set things up to run locally so you don't even need an account on their system (lutris.net).

Lutris

[Resources] * Ventoy (for EZ bootable USB sticks) ==> https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html * How to use Ventoy ==> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K64sT0pQc-0 * Rufus (alternative bootable USB stick creator in Windows) ==> https://rufus.ie/en/ * MD5 & SHA Checksum Utility (for validating your ISO downloads) ==> https://download.cnet.com/md5-sha-checksum-utility/3000-2092_4-10911445.html * Steam will be in the repositories (repos) and Proton is apart of Steam * www.protondb.com (lookup Steam game info... see how well it works or if it is in a FUBAR state on Linux) * WINE will be in the repos and can be acquired via WINE HQ. I recommend using the repos, but WINE HQ if you need it ( https://www.winehq.org/ ) * Lutris is a front-end to WINE which makes installing and running non-Steam games easy. It can be found in the repos ( https://lutris.net/ ) * How-To videos for setting up various distros for gaming ( https://www.youtube.com/@IntelligentGaming2020/videos ). I have no affiliation with this channel. He is a Linux user/gamer sharing info. Search his channel for your distro to find the specific how-to videos. * r/linux4noobs (a newbie focused Linux subreddit) * most if not all of the distros will have their own subreddits (ex: r/pop_OS, r/linuxmint, r/fedora, r/manjaro, r/EndeavourOS)