Ubuntu Gaming Gets A Boost With Completely Rewritten 'Gamebuntu' App

Late last year, young developer Rudra Saraswat gifted Ubuntu gamers with a great GUI tool. The cleverly-named “Gamebuntu” utility was effectively a bash script that automatically installed a veritable kitchen sink of gaming tools and then used a convenient overlay for finding and launching things like Steam, VLC, OBS, Twitch, Lutris, Discord, and others. But this week, Rudra announced a completely new version that takes Gamebuntu in a different, and more elegant, direction.

I’ve completely rewritten Gamebuntu so that people have the freedom to choose what they want to install,” Rudra says. “You can choose from 4 launchers, 2 kernels, 7 tools and 1 streaming app.”

The new approach for Gamebuntu is refreshingly reminiscent of what Ubuntu Budgie is adding to its welcome app for version 22.04. Instead of a large install routine that sets up a predetermined gaming environment, Gamebuntu 1.0 lets you choose which software to install.

Here’s what Gamebuntu 1.0 offers up via its current AppImage on GitLab, broken down by menu:

Launchers:

• Steam
• Heroic/Epic
• Minigalaxy (GOG)
• Lutris

Kernels:

• Lowlatency kernel
• Xanmod kernel

Social:

• Discord

Tools:

• Gamemode
• GOverlay
• MangoHud
• NoiseTorch
• OpenRGB
• Piper
• Polychromatic (Razer)
• VLC
• Wine (with wine-binfmt to run Windows executables directly)

Streaming Apps:

• OBS Studio

It’s a solid selection of important gaming tools and clients! I’ve also suggested adding the excellent Protonup-QT, a GUI tool letting you update and manage custom Steam Proton variants like Proton-GE.

Rudra encourages you to add your own suggestions to this Ubuntu Discourse thread.