# Heronite

> A fast native launcher for every game you own, on Linux and Windows

- Page: https://www.whatwemade.app/p/heronite
- What it is: Desktop app, for just for fun
- Made by: [Rafael Goulart](https://www.whatwemade.app/u/rafael-goulart)
- Run it yourself: get the code and run your own copy
- Website: https://heronite.app
- Code: https://github.com/RafaelGoulartB/Heronite (GPL-3.0, 136 stars)
- Languages: German, English, Spanish, Portuguese
- Tags: game-launcher, linux, proton, steam, emulators
- Upvotes: 6, comments: 3

## About

Heronite puts your games from Steam, Epic Games, GOG, Amazon Games, Xbox and PC Game Pass, Battle.net, EA app, Ubisoft Connect and Rockstar Games, plus emulated, native Linux and Windows games, into one Collection. It installs and updates Epic, GOG and Amazon games from a single download queue, launches games natively, through Wine/Proton on Linux or through an emulator, and records every play session. It can also import your games from Heroic, Lutris, Bottles, Faugus and Playnite.

I made it because my games were spread across many launchers, and the ones that brought them together were usually Electron apps that use a lot of memory while sitting in the background. Heronite is a single native Rust process drawn on the GPU with GPUI. On Linux it uses about 190 MB of memory while idle, and you can check that number on your own PC with a script in the repo.

The hard parts were making the same app work well on two systems: per-game Wine and Proton settings, prefixes and a Wine Manager on Linux, store integrations on Windows, an in-game overlay for volume, screenshots and notes, and a controller-first console mode with eight layouts. Along the way it got statistics, a year in review, save backups with Ludusavi and sync between PCs through a shared folder or rclone.

## How it was made

- Claude Code, 70% of the work
- Stack: Rust, SQLite

## What you need to run it

- Tools: Rust stable, only to build from source (optional)
- Platform: Linux (x86_64), Windows 10 or 11
- Accounts and keys: Epic Games, GOG or Amazon account (optional)

Shared on WhatWeMade: https://www.whatwemade.app/p/heronite