Track time played about cartridges

[kra-mo]

While very hard, I don't believe this would be impossible to do. Implementations exist, though usually very spotty.

I still don't think this should be implemented as Cartridges is not a library management app, but a launcher. If you uninstall a game, you are expected to remove it from Cartridges. As such, a feature like this would be at odds with the core idea of the project.

[Arcitec]

Unfortunately we can't do that. We don't know what process we are spawning. We just tell the operating system to open whatever is associated with the game shortcut you gave it. It's very often (by default) a random "mime-type" handler which the OS then goes off and spawns some random process from (can be Steam, can be a game, can be anything...), usually it spawns something like Steam which then starts the game later as yet another separate process. All of that is totally outside our view. Furthermore, we're inside a flatpak sandbox, we can't spy on the system to see what was spawned even if we wanted to. It's a miracle that we are even able to launch apps on the host at all (we're doing that via flatpak-spawn which is a privileged "marked as unsafe" instruction and is the only way to do that...). After we spawn the process, we cannot see it anymore since the launched game runs on the host, not in the Cartridges sandbox.

Furthermore, another core feature of Cartridges is to launch a game and then exit Cartridges immediately (it's a preference), which would also be incompatible with trying to track time even if we were able to do it.

This is unfortunately a feature that has to be implemented by the game stores or Wine managers, like Lutris, Heroic games launcher, Steam, Bottles, etc.