I wonder how it deals with gapps and how it compares to waydroid
I think right now the main focus is actually running Oculus/Meta Quest native games on the Steam Frame - the Quest headsets run Android and the games are actually APKs. No GAPPs involved
I’m sure I everything will be working about as soon as the community gets ahold of it though
the Quest headsets run Android and the games are actually APKs
Yes but how will you get those APKs installed on the device and make them run properly?
I think devs will have to ship a build that does not have the extra DRM and whatnot that is required to run on Oculus devices. The beauty of Lepton is just that developers won’t have to rewrite their game for a new architecture or anything. All they have to do (hypothetically) is export a new build of their project without the “include Oculus DRM” button checked. From what I understand, it’s not the exact same situation as Proton, just similar in many regards.
So you think Valve is counting on Oculus devs uploading their games to Steam directly?
Don’t all the games have to be uploaded to Steam by their rightful developer?
If someone wants to publish on Steam, yeah, probably. But if Lepton works like Proton, the game doesn’t actually need to be distributed through Steam. For Proton, you can run basically any Windows executable file through Proton, even if you downloaded the file from somewhere other than Steam. I assume the plan is for Lepton to be able run basically any APK you throw at it regardless of where the APK came from. I just doubt that Lepton will bypass the Oculus DRM.
No? Only Steam games.
Ok to clarify, I mean if Occulus devs want to publish their games to Steam, they can. But Valve won’t add anybody’s games for them to Steam.
Thats how SteamVR works.
If you mean the Quest you can, once developer mode is enabled, run
adb install whatever.apkand it will show up in the UI of the OS.If you mean the Frame I tried them but didn’t install anything. My bet though is that it is the ONE thing Valve actually use to make money, Steam, that will wrap Lepton just like it does with Proton now.
Yeah I was obviously not asking how to run Quest apps on the Quest, I was asking how to run Quest apps on the Frame.
I doubt Steam will provide an official way to piggyback on the Meta store, mostly for legal reasons. I imagine one will, like today, add external games to Steam and instead of using Proton will use Lepton.
It’s possible to get all apks of Meta store by sailing the high seas.
The problem with running quest games outside of quest is actually that meta has a specialized vr version of android, that even people haven’t figured out how to get their apps running on the pico (bytedance) android headsets. This is pretty crazy considering how easy it is to pirate on quest
Lepton is a fork of Waydroid.
That Valve has worked on in their own after forking it.Lepton is not designed for general Android use, instead opting to keep the bare minimum functionality required to launch into games.
So it’s nothing more then a layer for games to get shipped via steam sans Gapps integration.
I’m drooling over this. I hope the community picks this up, this could be extended to better support Android apps on Linux phones for example.
Cool, is it better than waydroid?
I think it’s based on waydroid.
Dear God I hope so
I actually just discovered Waydroid this past weekend and it’s been a godsend. I don’t play any android games though, just use it for utility stuff that refuses to run on my physical phone.
I’m super curious to what tools you would use? Other than games off course, I wanted to find a reason to finally get around and install Waydroid. But I just don’t find a reason to, please help. :D
I used it once to install Pandora, so I could have a bigger selection of latin jazz when I was playing Tropico. It worked pretty well!
Other uses would be banking apps and store apps (discounts).
Also it is a way to play games that have issues in Wine and have mobile version.
I would assume something like Fortnite, PUBG and Call of Duty games as an example. I’m curious to use cases outside of (obvious) games. Is there any situation that is not possible to do on a Linux desktop, that requires to use Android or iOS app? Like banking, is there any bank that only offers a mobile app and nothing else? That’s the issue I have right now, finding a real use case where I have to use it (obviously there is none for me personally, so finding it wouldn’t make it a requirement for me).
In my case it would be Reverse:1999, because Proton has issues with some components.
What components do you mean in example? Game got a “Playable” rating on Steam and the user reports sits at “Gold” on https://www.protondb.com/app/3092660 , with lot of them using Proton GE or its even flawless (according to them). Did you try Proton GE as an alternative to Steam Proton?
Some banks will either refuse to run on a desktop browser or need 2FA auth on their app
I can tell you that at least for the Trade Republic bank you need the app to authenticate a browser session (what a shitshow)
Proprietary OTP / RFA auth apps that won’t run on my phone’s Android version (Work stuff).
Hue smart lighting bullshit that won’t run on my phone’s Android version.That’s it so far. But it’s been a lot nicer than Android Studio’s emulator breaking every time my Arch install falls more than a week out of date.
What is the issue with Waydroid? Thought its a good solution, as it got lot of praise.
For me;
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the download is absurdly massive. Although it makes sense that you’d need an Android OS image to run Android, it’s bigger than the copy of Arch I used to run it
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integration with the host OS is poor - be nice if copy-paste worked, and file transfer was easier
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super-sluggish, even on quite powerful computers
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never idle, makes my laptop run hot
Okay, it’s emulating ARM64, and emulators need a lot of CPU, but since Android apps are compiled to “Google’s own version of Java” and are JIT compiled to suit the phone CPU, should be possible just to compile them to AMD64 instead and run native.
If there’s an app that only exists on Android and has no desktop / web equivalent, it’s a workable solution, but it does entail compromises.
be nice if copy-paste worked
I copy and paste between waydroid and the host os all the time, so this one seems to have been fixed at least.
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This will be so cool if it allows me access to the required directories to make it possible to play PvZ2 Reflourished. It would be super cool to play Reflourished on pc without a full-blown waydroid install. It’s given me issues installing the required PvZ2 apk, so I kinda gave up.
It’s based on waydroid in the same way that proton is based on wine, so seems unlikely.
Proton is packed with more functionality than wine (by nature of being a superset fork), and is wrapped in a much simpler box to open than Wine for the most part, so it gets a lot more praise and user adoption. I love wine and have used it for decades, but prefer Proton heavily at this point for games. I’ll still use wine for desktop apps though.
I imagine Lepton will eventually be super easy to install and get running compared to Waydroid, which I can also attest was a massive headache.
I wonder if lepton will solve the Minecraft problem. Waydroid was broken by some recent drm changes which are unlikely to be reverted although mcplauncher still seems to work although it’s been awhile since I tested on my SteamDeck.
Have you tried io.mrarm.mcpelauncher?
Yes, I misspelt it in my comment. It’s currently working well but I worry that the main developer will burn out. They usually have to add new thunks every new Minecraft release.
What benefits does Minecraft Bedrock have over Java? Cross-play? My kid plays modded Java. Mainly Cobblemon.
Pretty much cross play with tablets and the PlayStation.
Recently (thanks to the XODUS project) the pc version of bedrock is now playable on linux, this launcher works super well.
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I love it, but I’m personally more interested in FEX. I just prefer playing actually good games on my phone than playing bad games on my pc :P
Can Linux phones run normal apps from Android with this?
Games are great and all about having cross-platform abilities to run stuff makes a massive difference.
From the gitlab front page:
Lepton disables various Android services that are not required to run games possibly breaking compatibility with some applications.
It is probably possible, but just as using Proton to run MS Office is a real bear to configure, this tool is also pretty specific in application and environment.
Note my reply is not an answer, just more questions.
I would assume it mainly talks about the Google services, that are also disabled by alternative Android versions like e/OS (fork of LineageOS). But they come with an Open Source service implementation microG, to be somewhat compatible, but it doesn’t guarantee 100% compatibility. Sooo, does Leptop disable those Google services without a replacement? Can it use microG?
