I have to admit that i did not try. But at first glance there does not seem to be a way.
Heroic seems to be quite integrated to GoG, for some games it even enables the cloudsaves.

Lutris on the other hand is not so integrated and actually primarily uses the offlineinstallers. You can have Lutris download them, but if you already have them, you can point to them during installation.

Not so for me.

* Alt-tab to Lutris (I pinned the program in the dock and it is launched every time I boot the system if I didn't exit the program before shutdown)
* Right-click the game.
* Click play.

Take the same number of steps and roughly the same amount of time. The keyboard doesn't even launch the game faster in this case because if you right-click the game, the "Play" menu is right beside the cursor. But I agree that on a laptop, a keyboard's still more convenient to use than a mouse.

I think you're correct, there's no such option in Heroic. Thanks, dtgreene, for the question and thanks to all for your answers. I'm still looking for the best solution for myself, so I find this thread really useful.

My current choice is: Linux Mint + Cinnamon + Playonlinux + Steam

For the distro - I had a lot of fun with distro hopping, but at some point I've become lazy (or just not enough time to experiment) and I decided to take something polished, well-supported and working out-of-the-box. I don't understand Wine and its prefixes, so I'm using Playonlinux as a convenient wrapper - it allows me to create separate/sandboxed Wine environments, choose Wine version, add dlls/libraries, use some additional options etc.

I've tried Heroic launcher recently and:
* it magically made all my Epic freebies playable out of the box :O, so I love it,
* it cannot use offline installers, so I cannot use it with my GOG account, because I don't want to log in here (because I don't want time tracking etc.), so it will never be my first choice,
* it's super simple and gives some crucial options, including multiple Wine and Proton versions, which is great.

After reading all the opinions I think I'll try Lutris. It looks it may replace POL for me.

I believe the new Heroic beta version allows you to import offline versions of GOG games. So said the dev on some forum, but I haven't tried this personally.

So you could use lgogdownloader to download the game, then install it with Heroic in its custom made prefix, is my understanding. Currently you could just use Wine to install from offline installers and then import it to Heroic, so if that's what you want, then you could use this combination of lgogdownloader (or whatever to get offline installers) with Heroics prefixes and fancy stuff like new custom wine versions etc. Still more convenient than doing your own wine prefixes manually.

Then there's Lutris, that uses the offline installers already, and has a lot of other benefits.

I think it depends on the games you play. If they are all older and they run fine, then the no-longer-maintained PlayonLinux might be fine for you. Why fix it if it ain't broke? :) and you're used to it.

But I think you will be pleasantly surprised at how far Lutris has come, and its ability to run even the most recent games. I also believe the customisation ability with Lutris far exceeds that of POL. And again, even POL5 (phoenicis) is not actively developed so you're missing out on all kinds of features and improvements. For example, no VKD3D support, so no dice with new DX12 games etc and so on.

Stuff still breaks and doesn't run on Lutris occassionally, so don't expect 100% functional gaming!

You install Linux Mint.

Done.

If I remember correctly you are already playing your games on Linux, and have been for a long time.
So I am curious: what is your current setup?

Thank you!
I've tried Lutris long time ago, when I had problems running Cuphead. It worked out of the box with Lutris.
You're probably right there's no reason to change if something works, but still I'm a bit frustrated I cannot add newer Wine versions from the application. So what you've said probably counts as "try Lutris once again" :)

If I wanted to play Linux native games from GOG (which I don't - see below), I'd likely install Ubuntu, as that's usually the most compatible and easiest on which find out what extra libraries are needed to install.

Anyway, I use Linux extensively for non-gaming related things, but I generally don't find it worth the hassle to get closed-source, binaries from GOG to run on Linux.
Wine is easier, IMHO, and getting used to it gives access to many more games.


When I had the time to maintain it, my distro of choice was Slackware, but that requires too much of my time to be an option these days.
Depending on mood, I'd pick either Debian Stable or EndeavourOS.
Debian generally just works and I know it well, but there's something indefinable about EndeavourOS I like, and the official community is extremely friendly.

I think I'd go with a light weight window manager instead of a full-blown DE. Perhaps old-school Window Maker or i3. I might try Sway, just to see if Wayland worked for me this time.
One of the great thing about all three, and other WMs, is that they don't interfere with each other. You can install and tweak them to your heart's content and switch between them on a whim. Installing multiple desktop environments can cause issues.GNOME is particularly bothersome in this regard.
If a DE was on the cards, it'd be KDE/Plasma with X. KDE isn't too stable on Wayland, and GNOME rubs me all the wrong ways. Xfce depends on GTK and GTK is subject to the GNOME team's whims.

No launchers. Manual installs into suitable Wine prefixes.

Current setup, on my "big" laptop, is that I use lutris for many games (though there are some things I'm dis-satisfied with, like having to use a mouse to start the game, having to select each part of the offline installer individually for offline installers downloaded from a different system (it also doesn't help that lutris, by default, throws away the downloaded installer instead of keeping it, though at least I was able to change that), and not being able to install the Windows version of a game that has a Linux version available (Pathfinder: Kingmaker comes to mind, particularly since I actually did encounter a bug that's fixed in the Windows version but not the Linux one)).

There are a few games I just install directly, using just Wine or the native Linux installers. Wizardry 8 comes to mind as a game that doesn't seem to work in lutris, for some reason. Also, Celeste, since I got it from a store that I don't think lutris supports.

Edit: Also, OS used is debian testing.

I'm going to say something very heretical now: I would set it up as dual boot with Windows.

Even though gaming on Linux did make some big strides forward in the last 10 years it's still nowhere near as good as on Windows. And I wouldn't want to fiddle around with Wine or different launchers like Lutris, PlayOnLinux, etc. and still have to struggle with strange bugs that don't exist on Windows or bad performance that come from the simple fact that Wine isn't implementing the Windows API perfectly. I'd rather spend my limited time actually playing those games.

The majority of games only exist on Windows and instead of playing them on systems that they weren't designed for it's simply better to play them on Windows for compatibility reasons.

How is it heretical when ~99% of PC gaming happens on Windows? :) I think it's more the opposite - how dare you attempt to game on Linux!?

You raise some good points, but it seems a bit outdated due to the rapid pace of development in Linux gaming. Hell, a brief time ago you wouldn't have been able to even play new games, at all or adequately well without a massive performance drop.

Fast forward to today, the most popular AAA games frequently perform better and smoother on Linux than on Windows, like Elden Ring. Which is amazing considering these games "only exist on Windows" and they have to go through both wine and DXVK/VKD3D. Although it is well-known the actual OS is superior in CPU and IO performance - to see it happen for gaming is pretty incredible.

To my knowledge, in my opinion, there are only 3 hurdles for Linux gaming vs Windows: HDR, VR and kernel-level anti-cheat. Though great strides are being made for all, if you want any of those thing right now in 2022, pay up to Microsoft for their otherwise inferior OS, and have at it. Otherwise, I am dubious of the claim that Linux gaming is "still nowhere near as good as on Windows", I simply don't think that's true anymore.

Don't really know what HDR is, but as for the others:
* VR feels like it's still just a niche thing, and it happens to be a niche that I'm not particularly interested in. (Plus, there's some accessibility issues here, I believe.)
* kernel-level anti-cheat is basically DRM, or at least some of the worst parts of the worst DRM schemes, and therefore is something that I would consider an anti-feature. Plus, why should anybody have any issues about cheating in single-player games? (I don't play multiplayer.)

This is just so wrong. If you want to use Windows, that's fine. It's basically Trojan spyware designed to grab all your info which is why they don't even care if you buy a key anymore. So I can't recommend it. But I won't try and convince anyone to get off it if they are happy.

But I'm very fussy about how things run and Linux runs both old and new games great with outstanding compatibility options. In no way does it feel inferior. Uncharted, Elden Ring, God of War, Persona 5 every modern game I've thrown on it plays perfect. And my PS4/PS5 controllers are fully supported by default.

In fact if you count the full Windows catalog of games (like older releases), I would guess Linux is more compatible than a modern version of Windows at getting them all to still run in 2022 and into the future.

For those that it's not yet simple enough to setup the Steam Deck and future iterations will likely be the gateway. I see no compelling reason to use Windows for video games anymore.

Granted I mostly play offline, but I wouldn't use anything as root-kit like as anti cheat games anyway. Those things are dangerous to run. But as I said Windows is spyware already so if you use it maybe you are OK with that. But I question if most people really understand what their system is doing.

Question: How would i check if Heroic did actually submit timetracking info to GoG? Since i logged in, it should be easy to verify if it did. I also logged into GoG via Lutris, by the way.

Now i'm curious if some games i played have tracked time. I never used Galaxy to play games (only two times to download), so my games should be a blank slate :D