Any plans to a Linux version of Launchbox?

[tallpr24]

would love to see this running on my steam deck.

[Megadriver64]

Second this. I am switching to linux cause of the horrible spy from microsoft.

[DragoonDemon4]

Me too, my plan is to convert my main PC into a PC game console, get a laptop to work a Nas tower for my personal cloud and a steam deck or something similar to play outside and it will be very helpful for my emulators to be on Linux so when my main PC will be only for games I like to have on an os that won't bother with using keyboard all the time and be more os focus on the task that is gaming and something like nobara or bazzite will work perfectly but I don't want to loose my launchbox license passing everything to emudeck or something like that I like more the way launchbox organize my emulator games

[xxxtrashcion]

On 7/2/2024 at 6:35 PM, DragoonDemon4 said:

Me too, my plan is to convert my main PC into a PC game console, get a laptop to work a Nas tower for my personal cloud and a steam deck or something similar to play outside and it will be very helpful for my emulators to be on Linux so when my main PC will be only for games I like to have on an os that won't bother with using keyboard all the time and be more os focus on the task that is gaming and something like nobara or bazzite will work perfectly but I don't want to loose my launchbox license passing everything to emudeck or something like that I like more the way launchbox organize my emulator games

This question has been asked more than once in the forums. The short answer is devs claim they are working on it, but say it could take years, if ever.

 

The honest truth however, (Stated by a developer.) is that they aren't willing dedicate the manpower to it because they have a larger user base on Windows. Linux users are being treated like second class citizens, even though many made the switch from Windows and already own a license.

 

Try emulation station until these guys otherwise get their head out of their ass.

[DragoonDemon4]

Yes, Is very bad that web have a android versión that doesn't work well with newer emulators, and still we don't have a Linux versión that will be in my opinion more easy to make than the android one. I'll stick with windows in the meantime because I don't like how emulation station handles multi game support and multiregion platforms. Also you have to subscribe to their scrapper to add videos to their games. Now with the introduction of emulator plugins we'll be able to have this function on Android and when the Linux version is available someday this feature will be carried over to Linux and have a great competitor to emudeck.

[Deira]

I haven’t seen any news about a Linux version of LaunchBox, which is a bummer because I’d love to use it on my Linux setup. In the meantime, I’ve tried SteamROM Manager, and it’s a decent alternative. It doesn’t have all the features of LaunchBox, but it gets the job done for organizing my games.

 

[Retro808]

You can see the most updated response on a Linux version here:

 

[DnK]

I have launchbox in Windows without license, because I use ES-DE has visual interface, and I use the same media for both and it works fine, in github you can find a project to convert launchbox databases to ES-DE format and work fine.

With this I have...

In windows

Launchbox to organize, multimedia and launch games if I want to

ES-DE with multimedia and launchbox info and free visual frontend

And for Linux

ES-DE with multimedia and launchbox info and free visual frontend, with emulator and Linux system.

I think that for now is the best combination, the only bad thing is that you have to adapt the ES-DE code so that the media folders are the same as Launchbox and compile it.

 

Edited January 4 by DnK

[Fursphere]

2.29% of the overall gamer user base is linux users, per Steam.    You can see it here:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

Then they've got 6 unique flavors of Linux that have enough users to show up.  Who knows how many didn't even make the list because the user base is so small.

Launchbox users is a small fraction of overall Steam users, and I'm willing to bet the "linux vs windows" ratios are about the same. 

Its a solid catch-22 problem.   Dev's aren't making stuff for Linux because there isn't a big enough user base to justify the effort.   User's aren't moving to linux because dev's aren't making enough stuff for it.  

Then add in the linux community itself is fragmented all to hell, because every time someone gets pissed off at a distro, instead of working to fix that feature, they hard fork it and start their own.  "Everyone else is wrong, and I'm right" type of thinking.  Look at how many distros are out there:  https://distrowatch.com/

If Steam ever releases SteamOS for PCs, there might be hope.   But I'm not sure how many 'gamers' want to essentially turn their PCs into single purpose devices (consoles!) and not do all the other PC stuff that requires Windows. 

[Starfox]

Wait for Windows 10 support End in October 2025, most Users didn´t want Windows 11 and with Windows 11 25h2 we get TPM 2.0 mandatory.

So all computers that are older than around 10 years are no longer supported by Windows. Many of my friends will switch to Linux because they are simply fed up with Microsoft's politics. With Wine and Proton you can play very comfortably on Linux (without a lot of command line)

I play Games for about a Year on Linux and i don´t need Windows back

[Fursphere]

They said that with Win98.  Windows2k. Windows XP.  Windows 7.  Windows 8. 

Yet, here we are.

[Fursphere]

If you look at that Steam survey, 0.15% is still using Windows 7.  Assuming Steam has 100,000,000 users (pretty sure its actually more than that, but we'll use 100m for this example) that's 150,000 installs still using Win7.

I'd be really surprised if Launchbox had 150,000 users.