Heronite: a fast, native game launcher for Linux inspired by Heroic, now with stats, a Year in Review and a controller mode

[u/RafaelGoulart]

Hi everyone! I've been working on Heronite, a native game launcher for Linux inspired by Heroic.

It covers the Heroic workflow:

• Epic Games through legendary: log in, install, update, repair, move, uninstall, DLC and cloud savesWine/
• Proton with per-game settings (prefix, DXVK, DXVK-NVAPI, Esync/Fsync, gamescope, launch options)
• Wine Manager to download GE-Proton and Proton-CachyOS

And then adds a lot on top:

• A beautiful game library: game art backgrounds, frosted glass and smooth animations
• One library for everything: Steam games are added automatically, plus Epic, emulated, native Linux and Windows
• Emulators: detects installed emulators, scans your ROM folders, and continues from save states
• Organize your way: your own statuses (Playing, Plan to Play, Completed...), ratings and favourites
• Rich game pages: metadata and art from IGDB, Steam and Lutris, HowLongToBeat times, ProtonDB tier and anti-cheat status
• Play-time tracking for every game: Steam included, with a timeline of your sessions and the screenshots you took in each one
• Statistics: for the week, month or year, plus a beautiful Year in Review in the style of Spotify Wrapped
• Console mode: a polished, controller-first layout for the couch or a TV
• Ctrl+K command palette to reach any game, page or action
• Save backups with Ludusavi after every session, and an in-game screenshot shortcut with lossless compression

It's written in Rust with a GPU-rendered UI, so it stays light: about 195 MB of RAM in a single process, 0% CPU while idle, and the library appears in about 0.3s.

Install: AppImage (recommended for in-app updates), plus .deb, .rpm and Arch packages. Free and open source.

Windows support is coming soon.

It's still early (v0.2.1), so bug reports, ideas and feedback are very welcome!

GitHub: https://github.com/RafaelGoulartB/Heronite

Download: https://github.com/RafaelGoulartB/Heronite/releases/latest

Update: Support for GOG and Amazon has been added in the latest versions.

[u/Eduardo1502]

seems like a cool project but very early if you keep developing i might use it in the future

[u/0utoft1meman]

Consider to add this features (if not already)

• Multiple Proton sources (DW-Proton for example)
  
• Ability to lock FPS in gui through mangohud
  
• Fast launching and switching prefixes (Bottles, Faugus and Vermouth are pretty fast)
  
• Ability to Run file alongside the game, for trainers or mods apps

The UI is great.

[u/RafaelGoulart → u/0utoft1meman]

Thank you for the feedback and suggestions

I implemented:

• Multiple Proton sources (DW-Proton, for example)
• Ability to lock FPS in the GUI through MangoHud

It's available in the new version, v0.3.2.

Right now you can already launch games quickly with a different prefix for each game, but you can't switch between prefixes yet. I'll add that in upcoming releases.

You can also run scripts before and after the game launches.

These settings only work for manually added games and Epic Games Store games for now. I'll add support for Steam games in the next release.

[u/0utoft1meman → u/RafaelGoulart]

Thanks, it seems you take this work seriously, i wish you will succeed in your project.

[u/GegenAbschaum]

Can I disable the visual noise? (background picture)?

[u/RafaelGoulart → u/GegenAbschaum]

yes, you can disable in Settings -> Appearance

[u/oh_im_too_tired]

So after 116 years of waiting we've got Heroic with Steam games included.

[u/LoneArcher96]

that's the closest to what I have been looking for lately, keep up the good work, man, I must try it asap

[u/RafaelGoulart → u/LoneArcher96]

thank you! If you try it out, feel free to leave any suggestions.

[u/Alarming_Rush_1048]

This looks cool, was AI utilized

[u/RafaelGoulart → u/Alarming_Rush_1048]

yes, especially for porting heroic’s code to rust. new features and the UI was ia assistance

[u/BerosCerberus → u/RafaelGoulart]

Simple question. Because that's more important for me. If it's created with AI do you simply let it do it's thing or are you able to read it? Simply because of the longevity of the app and bug's

[u/RafaelGoulart → u/BerosCerberus]

Yeah I get it, i’m not a fan of vibe coded slop either. As for my development workflow: I review all the code that goes into the app, not line by line, since that is impossible with the amount of code AI can generate, but I make sure that i understand how everything works and review it to keep the code quality high

I’ve been working as developer for almost 7 years and I use AI professionally at my job. In my experience, AI doesn’t make the code worse or harder to mantain as long as it’s reviewed and supervised by someone.

[u/BerosCerberus → u/RafaelGoulart]

Thanks. That's all I needed to hear. I try it, looks promising.