I have been a sponsor on Patreon almost since the account was opened (maybe 4 months in). It’s my longest-running Patreon sponsorship.
I’ve gone ahead and cancelled. Many thanks to the developers, sorry it had to end like this.
Oh great the campaign of harassment is continuing. Keep going guys, hopefully you can get another dev to quit a project, and I know none of the people commenting here have what it takes to fork and maintain it.
You wouldn’t be doing anything different if you were getting paid by corporate interests to hurt the open source movement. Great job you can be proud of yourselves.
Edit: To preface this, I concede that targeted harassment against individuals isn’t a good solution to the problems I have with the way the technology is being used.
Others mention that some recent versions appear to have been unusable. If this is due to LLM-generated code and the dev doubles down on using it, I’m not sure there’s too much value in them carrying on development and burying more artificially generated foot guns in there than human coding tends to have already.
That aside, the climate, economic and social problems of the GenAI boom are hardly unknown. For the dev to ignore that is… distasteful. If they won’t quit using LLMs without also quitting the project, Lutris might end up another regrettable victim of the AI-Slopalypse.
Opposing GenAI isn’t trying to hurt the Open Source movement, it’s trying to call out the false messiah that has deluded some people into believing it’s the future of software development.
Never had an issue with Lutris. Using AI doesn’t necessarily mean vibecoding
Opposing GenAI is free. Do it. It just consists of not using the software you don’t agree with. It’s great I do it all the time.
Coordinating attacks on social media to harass a developer is not great. It’s 4chan-like but at least the 4chan goblins know that they are the bad guys. This is just as slimy but with none of the self awareness.
Opposing GenAI is free. Do it. It just consists of not using the software you don’t agree with.
That doesn’t mitigate the environmental damage caused by others using it. I’m not opposed to the technology, nor strictly to its application, but to the irresponsible wau it’s being handled currently.
Coordinating attacks on social media to harass a developer is not great
You’re right, I agree on that. Efforts should target the companies that offer it, rather than individuals.
It’s 4chan-like but at least the 4chan goblins know that they are the bad guys. This is just as slimy but with none of the self awareness.
I’m not sure the 4chan goblins actually believe they are bad guys so much as ironically embrace that image
That doesn’t mitigate the environmental damage caused by others using it. I’m not opposed to the technology, nor strictly to its application, but to the irresponsible wau it’s being handled currently.
Well i guess that’s a great reason to harass individuals who never wished harm on anybody then 🤷
Read the rest of the comment. It’s not.
Yeah i get it. It’s just that the whole situation pisses me off to no end. There are exponentially more people destructively contributing to this campaign, than people constructively contributing code to projects. Cause it’s easy and lazy and takes literally zero effort.
The only effect is to punish developers for having successful projects. They’d be fine if they were just dicking around on toy projects, but they chose to do something that matters, and to do it for free, and now they have haters. A lot more haters than helpers too !
We are collectively sending the message that it’s better not to stick your head out and publish open source code, and this will wreak havoc on the already overtaxed FOSS ecosystem. Corporate tech must be rubbing its hand in glee now that we’re doing what they never achieved in 30 years.
that it’s better not to stick your head out and publish open source code
I like the implication that open source code must include AI, and so the only recourse is to reject… all open source projects?
You know, we had a FOSS without AI like ten years ago. I’d prefer to keep that one.
Y’all are just prejudice. Making up what ifs and whatanoutism. If you think you can do better then fork it. But you can’t, and won’t.
whatanoutism
I don’t think pointing out problematic aspects of LLM use is whataboutism, given that the maintainer’s LLM use is the topic of conversation. A whataboutism would be “But what about Microsoft? They use GenAI too!” because that has nothing to do with this specific developer using it.
This is simply about the reasons I disapprove of using GenAI in general and relying on LLMs for coding in particular.
If you think you can do better then fork it. But you can’t, and won’t.
There are a lot of things I can’t do myself. I don’t see how that should mean I can’t criticise the way they are done.
It also doesn’t mean people have to stop using it entirely. Approval is not a binary. This isn’t a company we’re paying money to, it’s not an atrocity, and it’s not particularly large in scale (which is why making a witch-hunt out of it is dumb too).
Well either does the maintainer it seems. And I don’t believe we look at all code. It is hard to understand someone else’s code hell its hard to understand your own after awhike.
Been chewing this since yesterday. Okay, here is my two cents:
- yes, what LLM companies are doing is a problem. So dropping anything that has anything to do with their products is a sane way to make a statement
- yes, LLMs can be used effectively in development. Whether Lutris author has been using them well - I don’t know. Guess won’t bother to check either, have other things to do
- yes, doing the stunt with “good luck guessing what is what” is bullshit
Net total, given I’ve already dropped GNOME because of their culture: guess now I am dropping Lutris. Not because of AI per se, but because of “fuck you” move
Net total, given I’ve already dropped GNOME because of their culture
what was wrong with gnome’s culture?
I use KDE BTW, I don’t want a fischer price/mac lookalike ui
- You want customisation? Use extensions
- We broke extensions, because
- Also, no API for extensions. Patch our code manually
No integrity in that see I, so drop them I do (Yoda voice)
Also refusing to make literally any compromise on cross-desktop protocols that everyone else wants, stalling progress for years
Gnome: Pissing off its userbase since 2011
but because of “fuck you” move
The guy removed the attribution because he is being harassed.
The ‘fuck you’ move is the people harassing an open source dev. Those people are the source of the bad behavior, not the guy who volunteers his time maintaining an open source project for everyone to use.
The anti-AI crowd is toxic and need to fuck off. It’s one thing to have an opinion, it’s another thing to harass volunteers because they’re using tools that the crowd has a hateboner for.
The guy removed the attribution because he is being harassed
That may be, and he never mentions this in the now famous comment. Or was the message about Lutris being slop a harrasment? (question is genuine, I am somewhere in autistic spectrum)
The ‘fuck you’ move is the people harassing an open source dev
That is not a decent behaviour, no questions. His doing something preemptively in regards to something that he says he doesn’t see as an issue - that’s some bullshit. I am not against him using llm tools, but I am not ok with someone who can’t just say “this is how I am doing things, these are my reasons and they are enough for me, so fuck off (and/or be banned, if GitHub has such a thing)” and instead goes on with some ill-reasoned tyrade. Before anyone brings this up: yes, he also mentions depression, which is no small thing, so demanding crystal-cut reasoning is also bullshit, but that is not my point, the latter being that the guy needs some care, and doesn’t look like he understands that. Which means things are heading towards a disaster, sadly
That may be, and he never mentions this in the now famous comment. Or was the message about Lutris being slop a harrasment? (question is genuine, I am somewhere in autistic spectrum)
There was a lot of toxic conversations in Discord and on the forums for a while prior to his blowing up.
The dev hasn’t made a secret of his mental health struggles and he probably could have handled the situation a bit better. But, in the end, he’s a guy making a tool that helps the entire community and even if you think AI tools run on the blood of sacrificed puppies, it isn’t okay to harass someone personally.
Argue about water usage or power usage, copyright issues, etc… but as soon as they start attacking the person directly it has gone way too far. His response could have been better, but the blame should be completely on the anti-ai harassment squad and not the lack of PR skills of a volunteer developer.
Blame for different things:
Running around and cursing anyone using llm - that’s an idiotic thing to do, and he is not the one doing it, of course
not the lack of PR skills of a volunteer developer
That’s not what bothers me
But, in the end, he’s a guy making a tool that helps the entire community
While sacrificing his own life (time, energy, emotions, all it takes to keep doing it). That’s not worth it, damn it. Doing something just to say “good luck figuring this out on your own, if it bothers you that much, you stupid fucks” is a priority shift from “what is good for me/project/community” to “what to do with project to stop this toxic shit”. My answer is “Do nothing with the project. Get them to fuck off or get yourself out of their reach”. And my requirement of anyone in charge of anything is clarity
Edit: word “sacrificing” is important. Not sharing out of abundance, not serving out of devotion, but cutting from what he has and needs for the benefit of others
Oh I agree he’s handled it badly, I just don’t fault him much.
He’s just one guy who’s suddenly the target of tens or hundreds of people who’re directly harassing him everywhere that it is possible. He shouldn’t be put in that position and, as bad as his response is, he’s doing it in the context of a pressure and harassment campaign… not because he’s suddenly developed animosity for the community.
His response is bad, but the people creating the situation are the ones that shoulder the blame… imo.
On that we agree completely. Screaming “N is bad because llm was used to build it” is utter idiocy
Last point is enough for me to drop them for good
What’s the replacement for lutris?
I’ve already replaced lutris with Heroic launcher + proton and wine-ge a year ago.
Lutris install script already didn’t work >50% of the time for me and battle.net always completely corrupts and messes up after a time on lutris and I have to reinstall it every few months, but has been going a year strong on heroic.
You can also always look at the lutris install scripts and install those components in heroic via winetricks. They were made by the community anyway.
For games. I have replaced it with steam as you can load none steam games and run them under proton. I have had great success. Outside of games I’m not sure.
I’m pretty sure neither is pure? I mean, you don’t have to necessarily limit steam to games. May as well try non games and see what happens.
Build one yourself
Didn’t look for one yet. As I understand, there is a thing called bottles that is worth a try
Sincerely… if you can give a single shit about ai in code, you should be able to tell it was used. If you cannot differentiate human from ai authored code, you do not have a seat at the table. jeer from the soap boxes. code is not art. code is code. get over it. does it compile or run and do the thing, cool, fuck cares who or what wrote it. clutching pearls yall cant even define.
How to drive off users and contributors in one easy step!
Is Step 1 - Be the target of a harassment campaign?
He removed the attribution because people are harassing him, it’s one thing to not want to use the tool but harassing an open source dev is way over the line. I don’t care about your opinion on AI, it doesn’t justify harassment.
The anti-AI crowd have, once again, gone way over the line. Nobody should be supporting this harassment.
Tell me to not use your software without telling me to not use your software.
It’s completely a coincidence that all games are no longer working in Lutris here, on multiple machines, after upgrading from 0.5.19 to 0.5.20. Weird.
I downgraded and everything works again. I did not try 0.5.22 or the quickly removed 0.5.21.
I guess we know where to fork from.
I guess we know where to fork from.
Honestly: Why? Lutris Gnome headerbar UI sucks anyway. Looks and behaves like crap especially under Gamescope but in non-Gnome desktops it’s not too great as well. GloriousEggroll and team created umu launcher to make creation of that sort of graphical front ends much easier and a bunch of those popped up already. Might just as well migrate to one of those than to maintain yet another software fork.
After reading your comment, I tried it for myself, running “Age Of Wonders 4” through Lutris 0.5.22. Nothing happened. As in, literally nothing, game didn’t launch, and no error. Then downgraded Lutris to 0.5.19, and first I got a message saying that wine needed to install something, and then I got an error message saying “A java script error occurred in the main process”.
So the results of my experiment are inconclusive. I consider an error message a better than result than nothing visibly happening, because an error message at least tells me nothing its not working, instead of letting me wait and wait.
So, yes, it appears that the quality of Lutris has declined after the developer started using Claude Code. However, my experiment was just a quick and dirty experiment, and ultimately further research is necessary.
I propose the following experiment, keep in mind that this is basically a rough sketch of the procedure:
- Set up two virtual machines running linux, a and b. (TODO: Decide on distro)
- Install Lutris 0.5.22 on a, and 0.5.19 on b.
- Try out several games on both a and b, both installed and launched through lutris, and record how well they run.
lutris -dwill run it and print debug messages to the terminal.I think the root of the problem is that updating changes what WINE and Proton versions are being used, even for games that are already installed. That pretty much negates what most people are using Lutris for. (WINE prefix management)
I just wanted to try and figure out whether the quality of Lutris had indeed declined as you said in your earlier comment. I’m not trying to get the game running, “Age of Wonders 4” is just the first title in my library.
Edit: But thanks anyway.
Oh man, you are right. I went fron 5.18 to 5.20 and nothing worked anymore. I spent hours troubleshooting before I reinstalled the current game I was playing. It worked but it runs noticeably slower. For a newbie, how does one downgrade? Assuming there is a command or do I have to uninstall first?
Someone suggested the program Warehouse to me, but I haven’t tried it. On Arch, I still had the version I wanted in my package manager’s cache so it was a single command.
sudo pacman -U file:///var/cache/pacman/pkg/lutris-0.5.19-9-any.pkg.tar.zstIf you are using the flatpak (Bazzite, Steam Deck, etc.) unfortunately, it’s more complicated.
- Exit to desktop mode.
- Open Konsole (it’s in System in the main menu).
- If you haven’t set a root password yet, run
passwd, make it reasonably secure and don’t forget it. I believe setting a root password enables the Deck to be controlled remotely over ssh with said password. Be safe. - Run
flatpak remote-info --log flathub net.lutris.Lutris. Lutris was installed as system for me. I think that is the default, so probably choose 1 for system if it asks. - You will see a commit with the subject “Update Lutris to 0.5.20”. The previous version is in the list right after that. Note that hash of 64 hexadecimals.
- Run
sudo flatpak update --commit=19ee79d455b8e50f057911a2bba279efcb960ee6d565f794e9c9d41c290dcd14 net.lutris.Lutris, supply the root password, and accept the changes. (Use the hash from step 5.) - Run
sudo flatpak mask net.lutris.Lutrisand supply root password to prevent Lutris from being updated. We will probably have problems in the future when the flatpak environment gets deprecated,sudo flatpak mask --remove net.lutris.Lutriswould allow it to update again.
Wow, thank you for this! I really appreciate the detailed instructions!
The Lutris team is small, not corporate, not speed obsessed, etc. I’m inclined to trust them to be among those developers who can use generated code without slopping nonsense all over a code base they know they will probably be stuck maintaining.
People use LLMs to code now, this is not news. Why is claude taking credit in the first place?
Anything generated by an LLM cannot claim copyright, per supreme court rulings. So it is critical to attribute the portions of code that cannot be licensed.
This… is incorrect. Generated code can and has been copyrighted, but not by the model generating it. Humans can get copyrights, digital entities cannot (nor can your pet monkey.) Now, can a human copyright code they did not author? Yes, absolutely. Courts only care that a human had a hand in as little as refining the output or making selections for the agent. Copyright claims look for exercised creative judgement and infringement on existing copyrights.
I would never use the product, just for that very line…
I don’t think this is going to go the way they thing it will.
It’s not my decision wether lutris has ai code in it or not. The maintainers and contributors can decide what works for them, that’s how open source works. I never found a use for lutris and maybe that’s why I don’t care.
I already stopped using Lutris for a while. Most of the things I try to install with it straight up don’t work anymore.
Edit:
Anyway, is there an alternative to Lutris, besides installing games and programs with Steam?
Bottles or Heoric Game Launcher
My number one tip with Bottles for anyone trying it for the first time, is to move anything you’re trying to run into the prefix it creates. It doesn’t behave well trying to run anything outside of it, even if you set the working directory.
Heroic is great. Bottles has the potential to be great but it needs umu, and I’m skeptical about them rewriting the project (rewrites are seldom a good sign of a FOSS project in my experience).
Yeah I really enjoy Heroic. I moved to it when Lutris had a bug a couple years ago (hell, might be still in there) where it would flood my DNS server with over 1000 queries in under a second. It took me 2 weeks to really notice what was happening because as soon as it happened, suddenly I had no internet. At the time I was on Pihole which has a default flood control built in.
I kept going down a rabbit hole of researching Linux network problems, tried a dozen fixes, kept happening. Had to be very thorough and pay attention to what I was actively doing/using when it happened.
“Downside” of Heroic is I no longer have Ubisoftsupport. Also, fuck Ubisoft anyhow.
They already re-written it, or did they say they’re going to re-write it?
They’re in the process of doing so, and they’re a long way off from being finished. Frankly, I doubt we’ll ever see a release.
wine bottles
I’ve been using Lutris for several years, but after reading about the LLM additions, I’ve removed it from my system and am now solely using Heroic for my non-Steam games.
AI bros try not to be assholes challenge [IMPOSSIBLE]
AI assisted coding is okay as long as you’re transparent about it and don’t do this shit.
AI assisted coding is okay as long as you’re transparent about it and don’t do this shit.
It allows idiots like me who cannot program for real to make some useful tools (I use it to make Basic scripts for my own use in LibreOffice, for example). That said, IMO it’s crucial that these things are self contained, at least for now. So far all LLMs are way too error prone and no way is the Lutris author reviewing all generated code. Nobody does. All productivity gains are lost then.
