r/LinuxRicing

A little preview of my WIP KDE Plasma setup. Still a work in progress, but getting there!

Hello everyone!

I've been building and using this for about a year and it's finally at the point where I'm comfortable showing it. It's a very personal project, built little by little to solve my own problems and add the features I wanted. But if it's good for me it may be good for someone else too, so here it goes.

First, the thing you should know going in: Cafe Neurotico is built with heavy AI assistance (Claude). The design is mine — every feature, every screen, every decision about how the thing should behave. I spec it, I direct it, I debug it, and I test every build on my own machine before it ships. But the code itself is written by AI, and you should know that before you download anything.

Now, what it actually is.

One AppImage, three faces, one database:

- The Manager — your library on the desktop

- GRINDER — the GOG/Epic download and install engine, running in-process

- CREMA — fullscreen, gamepad-driven, made for a TV

Favourite a game on the couch and it's favourited on the desktop. Same library, same saves, same everything.

What it does:

- Steam, GOG, Epic, Flatpak, itch.io, PICO-8, emulators, source ports, mods, custom engines and vintage CD games, all on one shelf. Anything that launches from a command line can live in it.

- GOG and Epic sign-in happens inside the app — download, install, update. No browser, no second launcher.

- It fixes games that don't otherwise work: GOG's DOS games, a growing list of individual titles with their own quirks, and Proton found wherever ProtonUp-Qt actually put it rather than only in the folder names umu-run expects.

- Covers, artwork, descriptions, HowLongToBeat, Metacritic and ProtonDB tiers, scraped once and stored locally, so nothing rots when a storefront changes its API.

- Source ports, fan games and mods installed from your own downloads, with the data files linked automatically from the copy already in your library.

- Save-game backup and restore, as portable ZIPs.

- 93 themes, including twenty retro-OS palettes each with the typeface of its era. I wanted it to look good, and that turned into a hobby of its own.

- On KDE, you can pick which monitor a game opens on.

- No account, no telemetry, no cloud. Everything lives in a folder next to the AppImage.

"Why not Heroic or Lutris?" Fair question, and honestly — use them, they're great. I've used both, a lot! Heroic in particular is excellent, and Cafe Neurotico ships the same underlying downloaders it does, gogdl and legendary, which I owe its authors a great deal for. I built this because I wanted one place for everything: the store games, the emulators, the source ports and the weird CD-ROM stuff from 1997, plus a gamepad mode for the TV — and I kept bouncing between three applications to get it. Not to mention the Steam app to launch and organize Steam games. If your library is mostly store games you're already well served. If your library is a mess like mine, this might suit you.

Practical things:

- It's Electron. Yes, really — the AppImage is about 274 MB. That's the trade I made to ship one binary that just runs.

- Tested on Nobara 44, KDE Plasma, Wayland, on exactly one machine with one GPU. That is the entire test lab.

- GPL-3.0.

About me: I'm 47, married, two children, and a full-time job that has nothing to do with software development. I'm also a musician and producer. This is what I do in the evenings (and beyond).

Downloads and source: https://github.com/shampoo-is-a-lie/CafeNeurotico

Happy to answer anything. Bug reports very welcome — I'm one person and I only have my own hardware to test on.

Cheers,

JRA

I have 0 Ideas. I'd like some simple, nice ASCII art, maybe a cat or something.. and some sort of "quote" like I currently have. I think the current one looks kinda.. horrible. Do you guys have any ideas? :D
(CachyOS, Qtile)