The Heroic Launcher Gets A New Update With Proton GE Priority, Anonymous Analytics, And More

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The Heroic Launcher is by far the best community-made 3rd party launcher on Linux. It allows us to easily access and play games from our Epic Games, GOG, and Amazon Prime libraries, and it works like a charm on the Steam Deck. Earlier today, the launcher got a new update (2.18.0) that includes some nice improvements, including a downgrade that actually helps those using the launcher on the Steam Deck.

The downgrade is probably the biggest part of this update that will affect the Steam Deck. The runtime for the Flatpak has been reverted since the newest version currently causes gamepad input issues when using the Deck's gaming mode. This should make using it through Steam Deck's game mode much easier and work with fewer issues. If you still want to use the newest version of the runtime, which has better HDR and Wayland support, you can access it via the beta branch on Flathub.

We also have virtual keyboard support for all inputs in the launcher, so there should be less problems if you need to bring it up on the Deck.

The team has also added a new anonymous analytics feature that will help give the team ideas on what areas to focus on next that users may need. They are using Plausible Analytics for this, which is a 100% anonymous, open-source service that prioritizes privacy first. I respect that the team wants some ideas on what to work on next, and if they had to use a service, this sounds like the best alternative. We also have some improvements to Joystick navigation, the ability to launch games with or without logs from the game page, and the launcher will now prioritize Proton GE layers for launch instead of others.

You can view the full changelog for the update on their GitHub page.

The Heroic Launcher can be downloaded and updated directly through the Discovery Store in Desktop Mode. If you are constantly getting the free games from Epic and Amazon Prime, or just have a large library on these libraries and GOG, I highly recommend getting it.

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