I don’t think this is going to go the way they thing it will.
Oh great the campaign of harassment is continuing. Keep going guys, hopefully you can get another dev to quit a project, and I know none of the people commenting here have what it takes to fork and maintain it.
You wouldn’t be doing anything different if you were getting paid by corporate interests to hurt the open source movement. Great job you can be proud of yourselves.
Edit: To preface this, I concede that targeted harassment against individuals isn’t a good solution to the problems I have with the way the technology is being used.
Others mention that some recent versions appear to have been unusable. If this is due to LLM-generated code and the dev doubles down on using it, I’m not sure there’s too much value in them carrying on development and burying more artificially generated foot guns in there than human coding tends to have already.
That aside, the climate, economic and social problems of the GenAI boom are hardly unknown. For the dev to ignore that is… distasteful. If they won’t quit using LLMs without also quitting the project, Lutris might end up another regrettable victim of the AI-Slopalypse.
Opposing GenAI isn’t trying to hurt the Open Source movement, it’s trying to call out the false messiah that has deluded some people into believing it’s the future of software development.
Never had an issue with Lutris. Using AI doesn’t necessarily mean vibecoding
Opposing GenAI is free. Do it. It just consists of not using the software you don’t agree with. It’s great I do it all the time.
Coordinating attacks on social media to harass a developer is not great. It’s 4chan-like but at least the 4chan goblins know that they are the bad guys. This is just as slimy but with none of the self awareness.
Opposing GenAI is free. Do it. It just consists of not using the software you don’t agree with.
That doesn’t mitigate the environmental damage caused by others using it. I’m not opposed to the technology, nor strictly to its application, but to the irresponsible wau it’s being handled currently.
Coordinating attacks on social media to harass a developer is not great
You’re right, I agree on that. Efforts should target the companies that offer it, rather than individuals.
It’s 4chan-like but at least the 4chan goblins know that they are the bad guys. This is just as slimy but with none of the self awareness.
I’m not sure the 4chan goblins actually believe they are bad guys so much as ironically embrace that image
That doesn’t mitigate the environmental damage caused by others using it. I’m not opposed to the technology, nor strictly to its application, but to the irresponsible wau it’s being handled currently.
Well i guess that’s a great reason to harass individuals who never wished harm on anybody then 🤷
Read the rest of the comment. It’s not.
Yeah i get it. It’s just that the whole situation pisses me off to no end. There are exponentially more people destructively contributing to this campaign, than people constructively contributing code to projects. Cause it’s easy and lazy and takes literally zero effort.
The only effect is to punish developers for having successful projects. They’d be fine if they were just dicking around on toy projects, but they chose to do something that matters, and to do it for free, and now they have haters. A lot more haters than helpers too !
We are collectively sending the message that it’s better not to stick your head out and publish open source code, and this will wreak havoc on the already overtaxed FOSS ecosystem. Corporate tech must be rubbing its hand in glee now that we’re doing what they never achieved in 30 years.
that it’s better not to stick your head out and publish open source code
I like the implication that open source code must include AI, and so the only recourse is to reject… all open source projects?
You know, we had a FOSS without AI like ten years ago. I’d prefer to keep that one.
Y’all are just prejudice. Making up what ifs and whatanoutism. If you think you can do better then fork it. But you can’t, and won’t.
whatanoutism
I don’t think pointing out problematic aspects of LLM use is whataboutism, given that the maintainer’s LLM use is the topic of conversation. A whataboutism would be “But what about Microsoft? They use GenAI too!” because that has nothing to do with this specific developer using it.
This is simply about the reasons I disapprove of using GenAI in general and relying on LLMs for coding in particular.
If you think you can do better then fork it. But you can’t, and won’t.
There are a lot of things I can’t do myself. I don’t see how that should mean I can’t criticise the way they are done.
It also doesn’t mean people have to stop using it entirely. Approval is not a binary. This isn’t a company we’re paying money to, it’s not an atrocity, and it’s not particularly large in scale (which is why making a witch-hunt out of it is dumb too).
Well either does the maintainer it seems. And I don’t believe we look at all code. It is hard to understand someone else’s code hell its hard to understand your own after awhike.
People use LLMs to code now, this is not news. Why is claude taking credit in the first place?
Anything generated by an LLM cannot claim copyright, per supreme court rulings. So it is critical to attribute the portions of code that cannot be licensed.
The Lutris team is small, not corporate, not speed obsessed, etc. I’m inclined to trust them to be among those developers who can use generated code without slopping nonsense all over a code base they know they will probably be stuck maintaining.
It’s not my decision wether lutris has ai code in it or not. The maintainers and contributors can decide what works for them, that’s how open source works. I never found a use for lutris and maybe that’s why I don’t care.
I would never use the product, just for that very line…
Been chewing this since yesterday. Okay, here is my two cents:
- yes, what LLM companies are doing is a problem. So dropping anything that has anything to do with their products is a sane way to make a statement
- yes, LLMs can be used effectively in development. Whether Lutris author has been using them well - I don’t know. Guess won’t bother to check either, have other things to do
- yes, doing the stunt with “good luck guessing what is what” is bullshit
Net total, given I’ve already dropped GNOME because of their culture: guess now I am dropping Lutris. Not because of AI per se, but because of “fuck you” move
but because of “fuck you” move
The guy removed the attribution because he is being harassed.
The ‘fuck you’ move is the people harassing an open source dev. Those people are the source of the bad behavior, not the guy who volunteers his time maintaining an open source project for everyone to use.
The anti-AI crowd is toxic and need to fuck off. It’s one thing to have an opinion, it’s another thing to harass volunteers because they’re using tools that the crowd has a hateboner for.
The guy removed the attribution because he is being harassed
That may be, and he never mentions this in the now famous comment. Or was the message about Lutris being slop a harrasment? (question is genuine, I am somewhere in autistic spectrum)
The ‘fuck you’ move is the people harassing an open source dev
That is not a decent behaviour, no questions. His doing something preemptively in regards to something that he says he doesn’t see as an issue - that’s some bullshit. I am not against him using llm tools, but I am not ok with someone who can’t just say “this is how I am doing things, these are my reasons and they are enough for me, so fuck off (and/or be banned, if GitHub has such a thing)” and instead goes on with some ill-reasoned tyrade. Before anyone brings this up: yes, he also mentions depression, which is no small thing, so demanding crystal-cut reasoning is also bullshit, but that is not my point, the latter being that the guy needs some care, and doesn’t look like he understands that. Which means things are heading towards a disaster, sadly
That may be, and he never mentions this in the now famous comment. Or was the message about Lutris being slop a harrasment? (question is genuine, I am somewhere in autistic spectrum)
There was a lot of toxic conversations in Discord and on the forums for a while prior to his blowing up.
The dev hasn’t made a secret of his mental health struggles and he probably could have handled the situation a bit better. But, in the end, he’s a guy making a tool that helps the entire community and even if you think AI tools run on the blood of sacrificed puppies, it isn’t okay to harass someone personally.
Argue about water usage or power usage, copyright issues, etc… but as soon as they start attacking the person directly it has gone way too far. His response could have been better, but the blame should be completely on the anti-ai harassment squad and not the lack of PR skills of a volunteer developer.
Blame for different things:
Running around and cursing anyone using llm - that’s an idiotic thing to do, and he is not the one doing it, of course
not the lack of PR skills of a volunteer developer
That’s not what bothers me
But, in the end, he’s a guy making a tool that helps the entire community
While sacrificing his own life (time, energy, emotions, all it takes to keep doing it). That’s not worth it, damn it. Doing something just to say “good luck figuring this out on your own, if it bothers you that much, you stupid fucks” is a priority shift from “what is good for me/project/community” to “what to do with project to stop this toxic shit”. My answer is “Do nothing with the project. Get them to fuck off or get yourself out of their reach”. And my requirement of anyone in charge of anything is clarity
Edit: word “sacrificing” is important. Not sharing out of abundance, not serving out of devotion, but cutting from what he has and needs for the benefit of others
Oh I agree he’s handled it badly, I just don’t fault him much.
He’s just one guy who’s suddenly the target of tens or hundreds of people who’re directly harassing him everywhere that it is possible. He shouldn’t be put in that position and, as bad as his response is, he’s doing it in the context of a pressure and harassment campaign… not because he’s suddenly developed animosity for the community.
His response is bad, but the people creating the situation are the ones that shoulder the blame… imo.
On that we agree completely. Screaming “N is bad because llm was used to build it” is utter idiocy
Net total, given I’ve already dropped GNOME because of their culture
what was wrong with gnome’s culture?
I use KDE BTW, I don’t want a fischer price/mac lookalike ui
- You want customisation? Use extensions
- We broke extensions, because
- Also, no API for extensions. Patch our code manually
No integrity in that see I, so drop them I do (Yoda voice)
Also refusing to make literally any compromise on cross-desktop protocols that everyone else wants, stalling progress for years
Gnome: Pissing off its userbase since 2011
Last point is enough for me to drop them for good
What’s the replacement for lutris?
I’ve already replaced lutris with Heroic launcher + proton and wine-ge a year ago.
Lutris install script already didn’t work >50% of the time for me and battle.net always completely corrupts and messes up after a time on lutris and I have to reinstall it every few months, but has been going a year strong on heroic.
You can also always look at the lutris install scripts and install those components in heroic via winetricks. They were made by the community anyway.
For games. I have replaced it with steam as you can load none steam games and run them under proton. I have had great success. Outside of games I’m not sure.
I’m pretty sure neither is pure? I mean, you don’t have to necessarily limit steam to games. May as well try non games and see what happens.
Build one yourself
Didn’t look for one yet. As I understand, there is a thing called bottles that is worth a try
Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society
This gives me shopping cart theory vibes. I don’t usually base my moral compass based on whether my action will have some kind of measurable impact, but whether I believe it’s the right thing to do. After the intense doubling down in that discussion thread I’m definitely steering clear of lutris. It costs me very little effort to avoid projects that do icky things I don’t want to encourage (even though it may not have a measurable impact~)
I can’t fix the problem, therefore I’ll be part of the problem.
At my job we have been told how we have to start using AI more. I can’t really see any point. The only tasks AI can help me for are pointless tasks from HR that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Monthly forms with questions like “how are you feeling emotionally”, used to take me ages to come up with corpo bullshit friendly answers but locally hosted deepseek does it in seconds.
When my work enabled Gemini, I asked it how to disable it. It said it couldn’t help me and asked if I had another question. I didn’t.
That’s the only interaction I’ve willingly had with it.
The HR department will see that it’s not quality human HR-slop and the thought police will be with you shortly
Oh LLMs are great at writing HR slop
But then there’s no suffering
In my experience, AI models are fairly good at contextual search. That’s the only thing I use them for.
Yes, if we had documentation then I suspect AI tools could be good for finding information in that.
Lutris has always been a bit hit-or-miss for me, I avoided it unless it was the only option, as it only worked half the time. I don’t want it to come off like it shouldn’t exist, as stuff making Linux easier to use is great, but I don’t use it at all in my current workflows.
I guess I’ve just been behind the times, but I’ve never had an incentive to switch. I just installed faugus and transferred everything over and it seems very slick. It seems to be missing 1 or 2 things, like environment variables per-game, but all the other important stuff seems to be here. I know what I’m doing with prefixes so having all the knobs to turn is great, but honestly linux gaming does not need most of those knobs nowadays.
How does transferring work?
I only have 2 or 3 things in lutris.
I just did it manually, pointing faugus at the old prefixes and setting the launch options the same
Sick. Thanks. I’ll do the same.
Also, it is one thing to decide that something is not an ethical issue of concern, it is another thing to act with disrespect to everyone with a different opinion.
it is another thing to act with disrespect to everyone with a different opinion.
Unless that opinion is ‘I like using AI’, then they deserved the disrespect.
virtue ethics > utilitarianism
Utilitarianism really falls at the first hurdle of any kind of evaluation of a moral system.
It has no real prescriptive power because it demands you be able to correctly foresee the outcome of your actions, something literally addressed by “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”, an adage of at least 400 years ago, and yet people will still gravitate towards it as if society did not explicitly caution us about that mindset forever now.
At this point I can’t help but look down on those who genuinely identify as utilitarian as either too young, too stupid, or actively malevolent and trying to find a way to justify their bad behaviours as errors rather than malice or negligence.
I’d offer you a counterpoint (ignoring the issue with Lutris and AI for a minute):
If you choose not to judge your own actions by the expected consequences of those actions for everyone involved, then how exactly are you supposed to judge them? If you’re following some rule that disagrees with the utilitarian view, then by definition it’s a rule that in your own opinion leads to a worse outcome for everyone.
It’s of course completely fine to not be utilitarian, but trying to claim that all utilitarians are either stupid or evil is just incorrect.
ignoring the issue with Lutris and AI for a minute
Please by all means, I ignored it in the first place, I find this way more interesting.
If you choose not to judge your own actions by the expected consequences of those actions for everyone involved, then how exactly are you supposed to judge them?
Well, this is only half the problem. It’s a bad system because it demands the impossible of you (i.e. accurately predict the future) but it also has a really narrow interest in the dimensions of human morality.
To directly answer the question however: you judge them by a set of principles, whichever you deem right, that you apply consistently across choices.
When it comes to inter-personal choices, the vast majority of all questions can easily be answered by asking yourself “am i betraying some explicit or implicit bond of trust with someone (who has not done so themselves) by doing/saying this?” and if you are, you just stop.
And to be clear, I don’t claim to follow this principle 100% of the time, I am not a saint, but that to me is the guiding principle when there are stakes to my behaviour, and it has not failed me yet.
If you’re following some rule that disagrees with the utilitarian view, then by definition it’s a rule that in your own opinion leads to a worse outcome for everyone.
(Emphasis added)
At its core, the idea of utilitarian morality is to “maximise utility”, that is to do whatever does the most “good” to the highest number of people.
This is, IMO, a terrible metric, and as a deontologist I am perfectly happy reaching a “worse” outcome by it.
It is not particularly hard to see how, by applying this metric, you can justify any kind of scapegoating, abuse, and/or undue leniency on people that would deserve harsh punishment in any deontological or virtue based system, as soon as enough “good” is produced through it.
There is a very dark, but apt, joke about this kind of approach to morality: that 9/10 people involved in it endorse gang rape.
To me, morality is a qualitative assessment, not a quantitative one.
It does not matter how many perpetrator lives will be ruined if they have earned their punishment, and it does not matter how much happier they would be to get away with the crime than the victim would suffer, comparatively.
To do anything else would be to relinquish morality to the whims of the masses, because it implies that there is a threshold past which the abuse of the few becomes negligible due to the benefits it brings to the many.
trying to claim that all utilitarians are either stupid or evil is just incorrect.
To be fair I also stated they can be naïve; I was one too in my youth, until I learned and understood better.
It’s completely a coincidence that all games are no longer working in Lutris here, on multiple machines, after upgrading from 0.5.19 to 0.5.20. Weird.
I downgraded and everything works again. I did not try 0.5.22 or the quickly removed 0.5.21.
After reading your comment, I tried it for myself, running “Age Of Wonders 4” through Lutris 0.5.22. Nothing happened. As in, literally nothing, game didn’t launch, and no error. Then downgraded Lutris to 0.5.19, and first I got a message saying that wine needed to install something, and then I got an error message saying “A java script error occurred in the main process”.
So the results of my experiment are inconclusive. I consider an error message a better than result than nothing visibly happening, because an error message at least tells me nothing its not working, instead of letting me wait and wait.
So, yes, it appears that the quality of Lutris has declined after the developer started using Claude Code. However, my experiment was just a quick and dirty experiment, and ultimately further research is necessary.
I propose the following experiment, keep in mind that this is basically a rough sketch of the procedure:
- Set up two virtual machines running linux, a and b. (TODO: Decide on distro)
- Install Lutris 0.5.22 on a, and 0.5.19 on b.
- Try out several games on both a and b, both installed and launched through lutris, and record how well they run.
lutris -dwill run it and print debug messages to the terminal.I think the root of the problem is that updating changes what WINE and Proton versions are being used, even for games that are already installed. That pretty much negates what most people are using Lutris for. (WINE prefix management)
I just wanted to try and figure out whether the quality of Lutris had indeed declined as you said in your earlier comment. I’m not trying to get the game running, “Age of Wonders 4” is just the first title in my library.
Edit: But thanks anyway.
I guess we know where to fork from.
I guess we know where to fork from.
Honestly: Why? Lutris Gnome headerbar UI sucks anyway. Looks and behaves like crap especially under Gamescope but in non-Gnome desktops it’s not too great as well. GloriousEggroll and team created umu launcher to make creation of that sort of graphical front ends much easier and a bunch of those popped up already. Might just as well migrate to one of those than to maintain yet another software fork.
Oh man, you are right. I went fron 5.18 to 5.20 and nothing worked anymore. I spent hours troubleshooting before I reinstalled the current game I was playing. It worked but it runs noticeably slower. For a newbie, how does one downgrade? Assuming there is a command or do I have to uninstall first?
Someone suggested the program Warehouse to me, but I haven’t tried it. On Arch, I still had the version I wanted in my package manager’s cache so it was a single command.
sudo pacman -U file:///var/cache/pacman/pkg/lutris-0.5.19-9-any.pkg.tar.zstIf you are using the flatpak (Bazzite, Steam Deck, etc.) unfortunately, it’s more complicated.
- Exit to desktop mode.
- Open Konsole (it’s in System in the main menu).
- If you haven’t set a root password yet, run
passwd, make it reasonably secure and don’t forget it. I believe setting a root password enables the Deck to be controlled remotely over ssh with said password. Be safe. - Run
flatpak remote-info --log flathub net.lutris.Lutris. Lutris was installed as system for me. I think that is the default, so probably choose 1 for system if it asks. - You will see a commit with the subject “Update Lutris to 0.5.20”. The previous version is in the list right after that. Note that hash of 64 hexadecimals.
- Run
sudo flatpak update --commit=19ee79d455b8e50f057911a2bba279efcb960ee6d565f794e9c9d41c290dcd14 net.lutris.Lutris, supply the root password, and accept the changes. (Use the hash from step 5.) - Run
sudo flatpak mask net.lutris.Lutrisand supply root password to prevent Lutris from being updated. We will probably have problems in the future when the flatpak environment gets deprecated,sudo flatpak mask --remove net.lutris.Lutriswould allow it to update again.
Wow, thank you for this! I really appreciate the detailed instructions!
Tell me to not use your software without telling me to not use your software.
How to drive off users and contributors in one easy step!
Is Step 1 - Be the target of a harassment campaign?
He removed the attribution because people are harassing him, it’s one thing to not want to use the tool but harassing an open source dev is way over the line. I don’t care about your opinion on AI, it doesn’t justify harassment.
The anti-AI crowd have, once again, gone way over the line. Nobody should be supporting this harassment.
If it’s good I don’t care. Those people know what they’re doing
I’m now assuming it all is and deleting Lutris.
What a moron.
Oh yeah. Here’s another nugget:
Sometimes, I generate some code with Claude and commit by hand
Sometimes, I write code manually and ask Claude to commit
Sometimes, I ask OpenClaw to generate some code, which doesn’t put the Co-Authorship
Sometimes, the whole thing is AI generated from end to end
This is also a somewhat recent addition to Claude Code. I was kinda surprised when I first noticed it but didn’t think much of it, I was like “meh, I guess we’re doing that now, whatever, some people might take issue with it, whatever”. Also, do keep in mind that I love trolling people coming in my projects to complain about my methods.
For those who are anti-AI, it’s a safe assumption that any addition to the project has had some kind of AI interaction during the development process.
https://github.com/lutris/lutris/discussions/6530#discussioncomment-16088355
Sometimes, I ask OpenClaw to…
This person should not be trusted with anything.
That is the real shame in all this. I’m certainly not updating lutris any more, because there is no way of knowing what you will install on your system.
You can trust humans (as in “trusting is an option”). You can never trust an LLM. And admitting that there might be unsupervised commits, being installed on possibly thousands of PCs is terrifying.
Glad I use Heroic instead. Time to check what their AI policy is.
Based on some PRs, they’re using github copilot to help with reviews but are generally against vibe coding
💯 this. I don’t mind using an LLM for certain tasks. We all do at the end of the day. However, OpenClaw is a different topic. This is just dangerous.
So Trumps gonna give him the nuclear launch codes any minute now is what you are saying?
“This works perfectly, which is why I’m removing all ways to audit what it has contributed.”
They are free to do what they want to on their repo.
We are free to fork if need arises.
Personally I don’t like projects not showing what AI has made. And most of Claude was made on stolen code. Its against the open source license they themselves use https://github.com/lutris/lutris/blob/master/LICENSE
But almost no one actually enforces the license until the big companies show up. I hope they change their minds, but until then, im going to stop using/contributing for a while.
Does anyone know which was the last version before the dev started shoveling slop in to the repo? The utter dipshit invalidated even the ability to license after that point, those releases are wholly worthless.
in 5 years from now there’s going to be totally coevolved but unique seed-lines for software. the once with AI, and the once without. how can you distinguish them? did the human that said it wrote them really write them? these problems aside, i suspect it will be forced to happen just from a security viewpoint, big companies won’t be able to get any kind of insurance anymore running AI-infested code.
It’s like non-radioactive steel that has to be recovered from sunken warships
That last bit needs to hit sooner.
Fork it and call it Ludique, meaning fun in French.
it’s more nuanced than that. Claude is made from stolen code, but it generally isn’t going to copy its training data verbatim (unless specifically told to). so copyright wise it’s more grey than strictly wrong. and though claude is made from stolen code, lutris developers are writing something they give off freely to the world, they are not profiting from the stolen code.
does this make it ok? i don’t know. what if they use an open weights model rather than a closed one? would that be more acceptable?
No, open weights changes nothing. Using stolen material is. Especially for a GPL project, a licence normally used to scare off corporate vultures. Why should anyone respect lutris’ licence, when they gave up on the authorship of their own product?
