Faugus 2.4.1 ships as a patch that changes nothing, for one very specific reason
A day after 2.4.0 landed with a full backup system and UI overhauls, the Faugus maintainer pushed 2.4.1 just to get that build approved by Flathub. Same features. Compliant packaging.
Linux gaming used to be a puzzle you either solved or walked away from. A shrinking library, a pile of workarounds, and the constant game-by-game gamble over whether a Windows title would even launch. The picture has shifted a lot in the past few years. Valve's Proton compatibility layer and the Steam Linux Runtime quietly made Linux a real place to play, and a community of tools like GE-Proton pushed it further still. Hundreds of thousands of Windows games now run out of the box, most of them tucked behind Steam's door.
Into that gap steps Faugus, a small and lightweight app built on the open-source UMU-Launcher (part of the Open-Wine-Components family). It wraps that engine in a clean GTK4/LibAdwaita interface so you can run Epic, GOG, standalone executables, and other non-Steam titles without ever opening a terminal. It targets people who game outside Steam on purpose, some of whom don't own a Steam library at all, yet still want Proton-based compatibility, prefix management, and conveniences like MangoHud, Feral GameMode, Winetricks, and full Wine config. All of it from one coherent launcher.
A backup system that finally makes sense
The headline of this cycle is a from-scratch rewrite of how Faugus backs things up. The old all-or-nothing approach is gone. Now you can target individual games, their prefixes, their shortcuts, and even Proton builds on their own.
That last piece matters. Prefixes hold your save data and config, and Proton builds are the compatibility layers that make Windows games run under the hood. Being able to back those up individually means you can lift a single working game (setup and all) onto another machine. That's a genuine quality-of-life win for a crowd that reinstalls its OS more often than it probably should.
There's a new overview panel for Grid, Covers, and Carousel views now. It shows the game name, total playtime, and last-played time at a glance.
Faugus is also handing you more layout control. You can reposition the Grid, Covers, and Carousel, rotate the Grid and Covers between horizontal and vertical, pick the panel color, and cap the maximum rows and columns. The launcher finally records when you last played a title, which feeds the whole overview feature.
The options piled up so fast the developer added tabs to Settings, splitting one endless menu into sections. Global logging got cut in the process. The reasoning is blunt: people ignored the warnings, left it on, and wrecked performance. Logging still works, just per-game now, so only the debug-hungry pay the cost.
An installer now pulls the icon straight from the resulting executable, so freshly added games get real artwork instead of blank tiles. The patch also kills a batch of smaller bugs: hidden games reporting the wrong library size, paths not being remembered between sessions, banners duplicating or refusing to update, and the app ignoring its own "start minimized to tray" setting.
Head here to the GitHub release page.
