What is Reddit's opinion of Ludo?

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Retroarch is the frontend, Libretro is the backend.

There's some alternative frontends, Ludo for example, among others.

You should try LUDO it's a minimalist frontend for emulators, brought to you by LibRetro team behind RetroArch.

>How is Ludo different from RetroArch?

>Ludo will stay smaller than RetroArch by only implementing the core features and by targeting less platforms. By not adding advanced functionalities, we aim to deliver a stable frontend for beginner users on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Some design choices are different. For example we support less cores, and choose cores for the user. The cores are packaged in the frontend so no additional step is required to launch a game.

I highly recommend Ludo, it's like Retroarch but much easier to use and automatically chooses the best emulator for each system. Just put in your roms folder and it'll automatically split them by console, then just choose and play.

You might like Ludo, it's based on libretro but with a cleaner UI and as they put it: "We chose the best emulators for the job, configured with sane defaults guaranteeing a balance of speed and accuracy."

I initially had this issue, and to a certain extent, I agree that the UI needs improvement. There are things about Retroarch that make me crazy. For instance, it's kind of a pain to add hacked roms to a playlist. Also, the Android version uses it's own bloody touch keyboard, and that makes no sense whatsoever to me. And not being able to copy something from outside of Retroarch and paste it in (like, say, my over-long RetroAchievements password) is annoying.

All that having been said, there is a certain logic to the setup that makes it actually very intuitive once you get past the learning curve. RetroArch is a very powerful tool, and it provides a wealth of options and features. I'm not sure there's a way to create a program like RetroArch in a way that doesn't have a steep learning curve.

That having been said, if you don't need the power features, there are alternatives that take advantage of the libretro cores that are much simpler.

On Windows, Linux, and OSX, there's Ludo, and for Android we have Lemuroid. I can personally attest that both of these options are far simpler, and have a more intuitive interface. If all you want out of your mutli-system emulator is to play games, these might be a better option for you.

For me, though, RetroArch has been worth learning. It's not perfect, but it continues to be the best and most powerful GUI tool for emulation out there, and it keeps improving over time. And honestly, after getting used to it, I find myself preferring the UI over other options. Sure, it's a little weird, but it's easy to navigate with a controller and it can do so much.

> This entire argument falls apart when you learn that Ludo exists. One person from the RetroArch team (Kivutar) has put together a front end (nearly solo) for LibRetro that knocks it out of the park.

https://ludo.libretro.com/#about

> Why not implement Ludo as a menu driver in RetroArch? To keep software stable on a number of different platforms, it is important to keep a small codebase with a good test coverage. It is also important to not introduce changes at a high rate. RetroArch is an extremely active project and has a growing codebase that makes it harder to reach stability. Also, RetroArch is a very powerful and sophisticated frontend, and one of the common criticisms is that it exposes too many configuration options for the average retro gamer. Implementing Ludo as a menu driver of RetroArch would solve none of these core issues. For now, Ludo distinguishes itself from RetroArch by offering less features and focusing on a more easy to use interface.

ludo is not suitable for all form factors, and doesn't have the flexibility that retroarch has. it's very good and for all i know it may be the better front end for the cores and systems it supports. a success story for the libretro api...

> And you absolutely can have a UI has is suitable for all form factors. Adaptive design has been around for decades now. Gnome GAMES and Lemuroid both have excellent adaptive designs in fact without sacrificing features or options.

PRs welcome :P i suppose you have to wonder why these other ones you've mentioned aren't as popular?

In Lubuntu and Xubuntu all you need to do to install RetroArch is run the command sudo apt install retroarch.

If all you intend to do is emulate retro games I recommend Lakka. It boots straight into RetroArch and basically provides all of the OS functions through RetroArch menus. LudOS is the same as Lakka but using Ludo as a lightweight replacement for RetroArch.

Other lightweight OSes to try are antiX and Raspberry Pi Desktop, though the latter is more targeted at programming.

It sounds like you've got a ton of game sources up and running, which is awesome. One area you haven't mentioned is emulators. You can really expand your library with emulated games. If you're new to it, Ludo is a good option to get started with support for many emulated systems. You can "check out" games from archive.org with effective searching. :)

Ludo Download the tar.gz, extract, and double click ludo inside

Works well, but navigation is pretty bad if you don't have the exact roms they specify. In that case you would have to: Load core - fceumm_libretro.so - load content - navigate to rom

Ludo, the minimalist frontend that makes libretro damn simple to use.

Same as RetroArch but with preconfigured cores and basically all options but controller input removed. You put your games in the right folder, you select your game, and voilà.

There's the Ludo frontend by the same team as Retroarch which aims to be simpler with sane defaults. It's more controller centric than the OpenEmu desktop program but it could be what you're looking for.

There are currently 2 or 3 UIs, but none of them look like EmulationStation.
Adding EmulationStation to Lakka is of course possible, but would result in a different product, which would deserve a different name.
You may also want to check https://ludo.libretro.com/ that has an OS version called LudOS, also based on LibreELEC. It is very similar to Lakka but uses Ludo in place of RetroArch. It's a WIP.