Speaker
Description
Last year's summit presented an opportunity for a lot of the major gaming on Linux developers to get together in one place and juggle ideas on how we can make gaming better on Linux. Ultimately we all had a general agreement that having a tool that can run cross-platform like Valve does, as well as a unified place for known game fixes to be used and shared would benefit everyone. From that opportunity spawned "Open Wine Components" -- our group, and we put together UMU.
What is UMU?
UMU is a CLI tool that utilizes Valve's pressure-vessel system and runtime environment alongside proton to run non-steam games outside of steam just like steam does.
What's the difference between this and just using WINE?
When you use a system's native WINE installation, or even an installation inside a flatpak or snap, it relies on whatever libraries that version of WINE was built on. This means all of WINE's dependencies have to be installed whereever WINE is running, which of course can differ across systems, including version mismatches or completely missing dependencies. By using UMU you are not only using Proton (or Proton-GE), but also using Valve's steam runtime inside pressure-vessel. This means the same environment/dependencies/versions are provided and used for every game no matter what platform/distro it is run on. By doing this, it both provides a unified base for gaming on linux and also reduces the amount of guesswork drastically in the event that a game does not work.
Where'd the name come from?
It's partly a play on Valve's naming scheming. They have a "Valve" for a "Pressure Vessel". How does pressure build up? One way is to heat the contents of the vessel. What better way to heat a vessel than an oven? Hence the name UMU. A Samoan umu is an above-ground oven of hot volcanic stones.
There's more!
In addition to UMU launcher, we have put together UMU-protonfixes. This is a collective database of various winetricks fixes for various games gathered over the past several years from winehq, lutris, heroic, valve's proton github tracker, and so on. Originally used as part of proton-ge, we have expanded it to be used as a backbone for any applications using UMU-launcher as their wine gaming backend. Rather than having different applications apply their own custom script fixes, they can use UMU-launcher as a backend, and specify STORE= and GAMEID= and pull fixes from the database. This allows different game management software such as lutris and heroic to both use and contribute to the same "fixes" database and prevents segregation or differences between the two for the same game.
We've also make umu-protonfixes' database searchable online, so if users choose to use the standalone CLI tool (umu-launcher) by itself, they can look up the game and its STORE, GAMEID, and check if any fixes exist, or even better, submit fixes that they may know of!
The short gist of it is that umu-launcher is to gaming outside of steam what proton + pressure-vessel is to gaming inside steam.
Session author's bio
Hello! I my name is Tom! Most know me as 'Eggy' or GloriousEggroll. I am a Software Maintenance Engineer for Red Hat. I created Proton-GE (a fork of Valve's Proton) and Nobara Linux (a fork of Fedora), and am a member of the Wine-Staging maintainers.
| Level of Difficulty | Beginner |
|---|---|
| Social Media | https://twitter.com/GloriousEggroll |