I was saying I don't want the everything app, you seemed to take it in a completely different direction.
Firstly, you could have just not wasted my time in the first place and said, "I don't like the fact that Steam requires me to log in and dislike the always-on DRM." Which is absolutely fine. Vague criticisms about the UI and it not following the Unix philosophy just sound ridiculous (especially with a game launcher like Lutris).
Secondly, Lutris has a bunch of features out of the box. It is a big monolith.
If you wanted to do things the "Unix way", you would install the games to
/opt and then have a bash script to launch Wine with the required options.
Lutris has no baked in browser, its webkit is for syncing with storefronts such as GOG or its own, completely optional.
To compare this to steam which 1. forces you to login to even use it and 2, comes with expansive internet features baked in as well as a fully functional web-browser is just being asinine.
Steam is basically a wrapper around their website (kind of). The reason for this is that building cross-platform UIs in anything other than web tooling is a major PITA. It literally triples development costs. That's why Discord, Slack, Element (Matrix client) and 100 other applications use it.
Steam has a DRM requirement (and there have been forms of DRM in games since 8-bit micros) because of piracy. Steam the least shitty implementation of DRM I've seen and TBH I don't think we would have much in the way of PC gaming if it weren't for Steam.
As for the complaint about "expansive internet features", there is an eponymous law of software named "Zawinski's Law", which states the following:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
He further clarified this later:
My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS.
Almost every application I have ever worked on or ever used has morphed to include more features. There are a few exceptions, but generally this is the pattern.
The Unix philosophy is a revolt against reality. Neckbeards, bold-headed schizos on YouTube, fedora-wearing faggots, and suckless nerds can scoff at this all they want. But that is reality.
So I don't take anyone citing "The Unix Philosophy" very seriously, especially when it comes to a game launcher (Lutris), which is one large application that literally does a lot more than one thing.
None of what you're saying makes much sense other than "I don't want to log into Steam". I agree the online DRM nature of it sucks, but it offers quite a lot else, and it has the network effect.
You can like it, feel you don't want to pick your battles etc and that's fine. But I don't like it, I want an app that is offline, minimalist (relative to what a gui frontend for wine/linux/emulators can be) and lets me close out all the noise (strip out all the clutter from the main UI)
I would rather not have to log into shit all the time; however, almost everyone I know uses Steam if they are playing games on a PC. So either I can never play any games with people I know or just use Steam. That is what I mean by picking my battles.
Also, Lutris kinda sucks. The UI is not minimalist; it has stuff missing, and I don't understand why you keep on stating it is, as if I've never used it.
My point relating to GOG is that I imagine the people who run GOG over steam probably have a similar mindset as I do when it comes to preferring standalone installers and if you are running GOG over steam on Loonix you are up for that fight anyway. I really don't know what else to say to you lol we CLEARLY are different users.
Why do you think I am not one of those people? You think I've not tried this before? I guess not.
