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Installing Lightforge

There's a package for Debian/Ubuntu, one for Fedora, and a PKGBUILD for Arch. Failing that, Lightforge is a Rust program with almost no dependencies, so building it is three commands and a couple of minutes of your CPU fan.

Everything below installs the same two binaries, the menu entry and the icons.

Debian, Ubuntu, Mint

Download lightforge_<version>_amd64.deb from the releases page. The filename says 1.0.0.beta.4 because GitHub will not serve a ~ in an asset name; the version inside the package, which is the one apt reads and orders by, is 1.0.0~beta.4:

sudo apt install ./lightforge_1.0.0.beta.4-1_amd64.deb

It asks for glibc 2.36 or newer — Debian 12, Ubuntu 22.10 and anything after them. apt pulls in nothing else; see what you need below.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is glibc 2.35 and apt will refuse the package. The binaries themselves only import 2.34 and 2.35, so the tarball below runs there — the .deb states the container's own 2.36 because that is the version it can actually promise for every future build.

Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE

Download lightforge-<version>.x86_64.rpm from the same place:

sudo dnf install ./lightforge-1.0.0.beta.4-1.x86_64.rpm   # or zypper install

Arch, CachyOS, EndeavourOS

Not on the AUR yet — registrations there are closed and there's no account to upload from. The PKGBUILDs are finished and in the repository, so until that changes:

git clone https://git.tuxcore.pro/kenny/lightforge.git
cd lightforge/packaging/aur/lightforge-bin   # prebuilt binaries
makepkg -si

Use packaging/aur/lightforge instead to build it from source. Both were built and installed in a clean Arch container before they were committed, and both land on the AUR as lightforge and lightforge-bin the day an account is possible.

Steam Deck, and everything else

A Flatpak is the answer there and isn't done yet. In the meantime the portable tarball runs anywhere with glibc 2.36 or newer, SteamOS included:

tar xzf lightforge-1.0.0-beta.4-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
cd lightforge-1.0.0-beta.4
install -Dm755 lightforge-gui ~/.local/bin/lightforge-gui
install -Dm755 lightforge     ~/.local/bin/lightforge
install -Dm644 pro.tuxcore.Lightforge.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
cp -r icons/hicolor ~/.local/share/icons/

Build it yourself

git clone https://git.tuxcore.pro/kenny/lightforge.git
cd lightforge
cargo build --release --locked

That gives you two binaries in target/release/:

  • lightforge-gui — the launcher. This is the one you want.
  • lightforge — the command line, if you like that sort of thing. See docs/CLI.md.

Run it straight out of the tree:

./target/release/lightforge-gui

Or install it properly, which also gives you the menu entry and the icons a package would:

make install PREFIX=~/.local          # no root needed
sudo make install                     # or system-wide, into /usr/local

make uninstall takes the same PREFIX and removes exactly what it put there. The binaries are self-contained — every icon and the chrome are compiled in — so there's no data directory either way.

--locked matters more than it looks: it builds against the exact dependency versions the project was tested with, rather than whatever resolved today.

What you need

To build

A Rust toolchain, 1.90 or newer — from rustup if your distro's is older, which it often is. That's genuinely it. No GTK, no Qt, no Vulkan headers, no -dev packages to hunt down: the launcher links libc, libm and libgcc_s and nothing else, because everything a desktop app normally links against is opened at runtime instead.

To run

Fonts. Text is drawn with whatever fontconfig gives us; nothing is embedded. Any normal desktop has this. A bare container doesn't, and renders blank labels.

A GPU driver. The launcher prefers Vulkan and falls back to software rendering on its own if it can't get it, so it will start on almost anything. If you've got a GPU that makes it unhappy, force the fallback:

ICED_BACKEND=tiny-skia lightforge-gui

That's all WoW needs. Proton-GE is downloaded and checked by Lightforge itself, so you don't need Steam, Lutris, or a system Wine for any of it.

To use Battle.net

One extra thing, and it catches people out: a 32-bit userspace.

Everything Lightforge does to build the prefix is 64-bit and works fine without it. Then Battle.net-Setup.exe turns out to be the single 32-bit binary in the whole sequence, so a machine without one sails happily through Proton and prefix creation and dies in under a second on the last step. The launcher checks for this before it starts and tells you the command for your distro, but here they are:
Fedora sudo dnf install wine.i686 ✅ verified on Fedora 44
Debian / Ubuntu sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 && sudo apt update && sudo apt install wine32:i386
Arch sudo pacman -S wine (multilib must be enabled)
openSUSE sudo zypper install wine-32bit

Being honest about that table: only the Fedora line has been run on a real machine. The others are right as far as I can tell from how those distributions are put together, but I haven't proved them, and I'd rather say so than let you find out. If one of them is wrong, tell me in Discord and I'll fix it the same day.

Two things worth knowing if you go digging:

  • It's named as the Wine package on purpose, even though Lightforge uses Proton's own Wine. What's actually needed is the 32-bit graphics stack underneath it, and the distro's wine package is maintained by people who package that for a living. On Fedora, glibc.i686 and freetype.i686 alone pass every check and the installer still fails.
  • Installing Steam also fixes it, on Debian at least — but only by accident, because the Steam package enables i386 and drags the 32-bit chain in with it. Nobody should need Steam to run this.

Don't want Battle.net at all? Decline it during setup. WoW works without it; you lose the shop, the Token and the other games.

A binary that runs on other machines

If you want to hand the result to someone, don't hand them a build from your own machine — it demands whatever glibc you happen to have, which on a rolling distro is a version nobody else has yet. Measured here: a local build wanted glibc 2.44, which SteamOS and Bazzite are both older than, so it started on neither.

make release

builds inside a Debian 12 container (glibc 2.36) and refuses to finish if the result asks for anything newer, which is the bit that makes it trustworthy rather than hopeful. The binaries land in target/container/release/, stripped, and run on Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu, Bazzite and the Steam Deck alike.

Needs podman (or make release CONTAINER=docker).

First run

The launcher walks you through a short setup the first time:

  1. Where games should live — by default ~/Games/Blizzard, and you can add other drives later or right now.
  2. Region and language, so you're not downloading English from Europe when you wanted neither.
  3. A scan for Blizzard games already on this machine. If you've played through Lutris, Bottles, Heroic or a hand-made prefix, your installs are found and adopted where they already are — nothing is moved and nothing is re-downloaded. This reads Battle.net's own registry rather than crawling your disks.
  4. Battle.net, if you want it — the prefix, a verified Proton-GE build and the client itself, in three steps you can watch.

Then you're on the Play page and it's one button.

Updating

With a package, however your system updates everything else — install the new .deb or .rpm over the old one, or makepkg -si again on Arch. From a source tree:

git pull
cargo build --release --locked

Nothing migrates behind your back; your config, games and addons are outside the build directory and stay where they are. There's no self-updater, which is most of the argument for installing a package rather than a binary.

Uninstalling

sudo apt remove lightforge, sudo dnf remove lightforge, sudo pacman -R lightforge-bin, or make uninstall PREFIX=~/.local — then as much of this as you want gone:

~/.config/lightforge/        settings
~/.local/share/lightforge/   Proton builds, addon ledger
~/.cache/lightforge/         artwork, news, catalogues — safe to delete any time

The games are somewhere else on purpose:

~/Games/Blizzard/prefix/     the Wine prefix — disposable, rebuild any time
~/Games/Blizzard/games/      your actual games. Possibly 120 GB of them.

Removing the prefix costs you nothing but a rebuild. Removing games/ costs you the downloads, so check what's in there first — and if you added other drives as libraries, each of those has its own Lightforge/games/ folder too.

Stuck?

Come and say so in Discord — install problems are the most useful bug reports I get, because they're the ones I can't reproduce on my own machine.