Do you feel the LAKKA community base is growing?

Libretro Lakka
#1

Hey all,

After spending lots of time with countless Retropie, emulations station, and Attract Mode images, on the Raspberry Pi 3, I always find myself coming back to Lakka.

The clean, yet powerful interface is such a nice change from the messes that the other front ends give turn into.

My only fear is that the support and community for Lakka will dwindle off, and Lakka will no longer be actively developed and/or supported.

I hope that’s not the case - ever.

What do you all think about this?

I’m judging this solely off of the amount of active threads On This Lakka forum as well as the lack of community pages on facebook like you see for Retropie, EmulationStation and Attract Mode.

1 Like
#2

To be honest, I don’t think Lakka is going to grow at the rate that Retropie is, mainly because Retropie is that popular and has had that much more media exposure. Solely based off of that, Lakka will never catch up to them in this regard, and frankly speaking, I don’t want it to. Retroarch is a beast unto itself and nowadays, needs no introduction. :slight_smile: But still, it is growing, albeit at a slower clip than Retropie. I know I’m here for the long run. Although I’m finally getting the hang of Retropie after an initial “getting my teeth kicked in” period with Retropie and Linux in general (I had so much frustration with Retropie and frankly speaking, still hate it more so than anything else). Recalbox and Lakka have saved my retro-gaming urges with single-board computers many times over and are by far my favorite Linux-based distros for retro-gaming.

1 Like
#3

Makes perfect sense. Thanks for the response!

#4

I suspect that Libreto has more active developers than the other mentioned distributions… maybe they are too busy developing to participate more in the forums (which is good for us :slight_smile:

I beleive also than Lakka and Retroarch required less support to make them work (and this is one of the better things of it, thanks devs!), so maybe this is one of the reason that this forums have less activity than others.

#5

I don’t know if it is just me, but with the NES Classic Edition shortages, there has been a demand for making your own NES Classic Edition. I think that could cause the community to grow, especially if they can get into the spotlight with journalists.

I know this will never happen, but it would be so nice if Retropie, Recalbox, etc would come together and work as one Lakka/Retroach team. Could you imagine the possibilities if every one of these talented developers worked together? I’d say if they could agree on decisions, a lot of progress could be made.

1 Like
#6

New Lakka user here. I’ve had such a frustrating time with RetroPie because it seemed like everything needed a config tweak or some other kind of customization that I wound up having to fix in the RetroArch interface anyway. And then of course I’d have to do that for every system I emulate because of all the core overrides and system overrides in RetroPie. I figured it was easier to just go to the source, use the smaller download, and oh, by the way, have great compatibility alongside. Also I found scraping to be less of a hassle because of the built-in databases and easy box art downloads right in the UI. That was a pain in RetroPie because I either had to babysit for hours on end or else I would let it skip user input and then have to fix a bunch of stupid mistakes.

I do wish I had a little more customization about which cores I used (Particularly I feel like SNES9x-next is fine, and SNES9x 2010 has some graphics glitches in Final Fantasy III, but whatever) but I’ll gladly trade that in for an easy-to-use interface that gives me control over just what I want. I also wish I could have synced my SNES30 controller in the UI rather than have to set up SSH, but whatever. Things I do more frequently, like copy ROMs, are easy over Samba shares and the performance on my Pi3 is great for the stuff I run. I wish more people knew about Lakka because it’s dead simple to set up and run. Wish I’d heard about it before I heard about anything else.

I’m now considering a NUC build to retire the Pi3 and emulate even more systems with one box.

#7

The beautiful part is that all three distros are growing in the realm of not only membership, but media exposure and market share as well. From one of the sites that exposed me to Lakka, Lifehacker:

I personally prefer Recalbox by a wide country mile over Retropie, specifically because of its simplicity and setup ease.

Of course, can’t mention Lifehacker here without mentioning this: http://lifehacker.com/how-to-turn-your-pc-or-other-device-into-a-retro-arca-1703576831

Also, I notice that the communities in both Recalbox and Lakka/Retroarch are far friendlier to newbies and people just getting into this than the folks over @ Retropie. Something goes wrong on your platform, no matter what platform it is, they go out of their way to help you. With Retropie, yeah, good luck with that if you’re not using a Raspberry Pi board. And don’t get me wrong, love the Raspberry Pi 3 board, but since I discovered Lakka, it’s also caused me to branch out and try other single-board computers and even some x86-based PCs to turn into Lakka units.

#8

[QUOTE=derFunkenstein;53036] I’m now considering a NUC build to retire the Pi3 and emulate even more systems with one box.[/QUOTE]

I’ve moved my Pi 3 over to Recalbox, but I use my HP Chromebox with Lakka and I love it!

#9

One thing that would help Lakka is better documentation and guides, I often find myself wondering how stuff work and then the info on the wiki is old or incomplete. For new users, it can be difficult to get into Lakka for that reason. Even if Retropie has more options and is somewhat more complicated, there are much more guides and “help” to get out there for newbies. I’m a newbie myself so I should know :slight_smile:

#10

Those other platforms are heavily dependent on RetroArch, which handles the bulk of the emulation. That is, they naturally get to focus more on documentation and community-building because they’re not doing the main development. Aside from the already small RetroArch team, which is only marginally involved with Lakka, the actual Lakka team is mostly just 2 guys.

#11

Please if you see something that is old or incomplete, try to inform people on the lakka irc channel so that we can update it.

Thank you.

#12

hunterk: That’s an interesting perspective, and very true for sure - and trust me, I prefer Lakka myself, I have a raspberry pi 3B but when I started building a Lakka pc for my brother I fell in love with Lakka. I prefer the user interface and the fact that it can run on pc hardware and can run Nintendo 64 etc (witch raspberry pi 3 can’t handle very well). I’m sure Lakka will grow even bigger in the future! :slight_smile:

#13

I can help with documentation if needed. I focus more on the System Admin/Networking vs Coding, so I am more than happy to help in other ways.

#14

I found out about Lakka through a friend, and was suggested to use it. So far I am just turning to want to use Retropie instead due to the points made by Shockwave.

#15

@KillerQ very good question.

I’ll try to get a graph of the downloads, but as somebody said all the retrogaming distro are growing fast these days.

My opinion on this is that each distro is offering something different, and has it’s own audience (with a large overlap of course). I have good relationships with the devs of RetroPie and RecalBox (even had a beer with digitaLumberjack two days ago). And Lakka would have never exists without RetroPie teaching me how to build and assemble all the parts.

The design goals of Lakka is to be purely libretro based. We believe that having an additional frontend like EmulationStation is not needed because there is already a frontend, which is RetroArch itself. Other distros tend to have a few more emulators, but all of them can be ported to libretro with time.

On the OS side, having cross compilation support like Lakka and RecalBox have is the best way to maintain all the code in a single repo and to produce OS images in an industrial way. And our OpenELEC/LibreELEC base has proven to be the best for portability, this is why we support a lot of ARM boards.

All this makes Lakka a distro of choice for any group who wants to produce a handheld console or a TV box on a very large scale. This and the fact that Lakka and RA/libretro are the same dev team puts us in a good position for the future. Honestly, I don’t see how we would be put out of the retrogaming scene for at least a few years.

So Lakka development is not going to stop or slow down. In fact, if I was hit by a truck tomorrow, @gouchi and @Demetris could continue the work without problem. And I really don’t plan to be hit by a truck :grin:

Now concerning the community and the documentation. That’s our weakest point. It’s all because of my decision to keep Lakka confidential before it becomes usable enough during the first year. I think that if we create an intuitive product, the need for documentation vanishes. A good example is the Wi-Fi interface: before we had one, documenting connmanctl was of a tremendous importance, now that we have one, this doc page has lost its importance.

So our plans for the future is to make the team grow, slowly but surely, by incorporating new developers and helping them to understand the guts of the system. I want to have an official maintainer for every platform supported by Lakka. @gouchi is taking care of the PC ports a lot. @Demetris is taking care of the H3 and Amlogic builds. I take care of the Allwinner, Odroid and IMX6 builds.

We’re slowly switching to a LibreELEC base, and we want to contribute to LibreELEC as we have been contributing to RetroArch: by becoming a part of their team.

On the communication, documentation, and community management side, we need somebody who is damn good about this. I don’t suck at it but I really don’t have time for this. Writting a blogpost per month and cross posting it on social media is my limit.

I think it’s time to delegate more tasks, and find the right people to take care of these parts. By right people I mean people that are dedicated, skilled, and aware of what is happening in the code. People that are staying on our forums and IRC chans everyday.

1 Like