Spool is a game library and launcher for Windows and Linux handhelds. It launches
your games, and for each session it will restore your saves before play and back
them up on exit. It uses ludusavi under
the hood. The point is to make moving between a desktop and a Steam Deck painless:
your saves follow you, and you can copy game installs straight across your network.
What it's good at
Reliable save sync between Steam Deck and PC
Spool wraps ludusavi to back up and
restore saves automatically around every play session, and syncs those backups
through any cloud remote (rclone is bundled — Google Drive,
Dropbox, OneDrive, WebDAV, and more). The freshest save is pulled before launch and
pushed after you quit, so you can stop on the Deck and pick up on the PC without
overwriting yourself. If both sides changed, Spool shows a conflict picker instead
of guessing.
LAN transfers between devices
Copy game installs directly between machines on your network — no internet, no
re-downloading from the store. Enable LAN sharing and your devices find each other
automatically; a peer's games show up in your library, and you pick one to transfer.
This makes getting a game onto the Steam Deck much faster than downloading it again.
Transfers verify every file, resume if interrupted, and add the game to your library
automatically when done.
Built for handhelds
On a handheld the library switches to a big-target touch layout — a shelf of large
tiles you can drive with a touchscreen or a gamepad, instead of the desktop sidebar.
It picks the layout automatically (or you can force desktop or touch in settings),
so the same app feels right whether you're at your PC or on a Steam Deck.
Achievements
If a game ships with a Steam emulator (Goldberg/GSE, EMPRESS, CODEX, RUNE,
Reloaded/3DM, Skidrow, SmartSteamEmu, CreamAPI, OnlineFix), Spool reads the
unlocks it records and lists them on the game's page with your progress and
unlock dates. While you play, a new unlock pops up in the corner of the screen
over the game (windowed or borderless fullscreen), and in Game Mode as a Steam
toast through the Decky plugin. With cloud saves set up, unlocks sync between
your devices, so the list shows everything you've earned on any of them. Add a Steam Web API key in
settings to get the official names, descriptions, icons and unlock rates.
Play status
Mark a game as Playing, To Play, Finished or Dropped from its page or its
right-click / long-press menu. The status shows as an icon on the game's cover
everywhere it appears, and you can filter the library by it from the sidebar
(desktop) or the shelf tabs (touch). With cloud saves set up, statuses sync
between your devices.
Decky plugin for Game Mode
A companion Decky Loader
plugin lets you manage your Spool games directly in SteamOS Game Mode, so you
don't have to drop to Desktop Mode. From the Quick Access menu you add any Spool
game to Steam with a tap — from then on each game's Spool details live right on
its own Steam game page: cross-device playtime, last played, and the save-backup
and cloud-sync status, plus a menu to back up now, install Windows dependencies
(Proton), or delete the game. You can also browse and install games shared by
other Spool devices on your LAN. And it backs up your saves if Steam force-closes
Spool when you quit a game, so a session is never lost. Install it in one click
from Spool's settings.
After you play, the game page opens with a post-game summary of your last
session on that device and the achievements it unlocked. The Activity tab lists
your sessions and unlocks by day across all your devices, followed by the game's
full achievement list.
Download
Grab the latest build from the Releases page:
- Windows — the
Spool_<version>_x64-setup.exe installer.
- Linux (x86_64) — the
Spool_amd64.AppImage.
- Linux (ARM64) — the
Spool_aarch64.AppImage, for ARM handhelds such as
the AYN Thor running Armada.
Both platforms auto-update in place.
On Linux, to drop the AppImage into ~/Applications and add a launcher entry
(with icon) so it shows up in your desktop's app menu — KDE Plasma, GNOME, etc.:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aidankinzett/Spool/master/scripts/install-appimage.sh | bash
The same script lives at scripts/install-appimage.sh;
run it with --uninstall to remove the AppImage and launcher entry.
Platform support
Spool runs on Windows and Linux, including the gaming-handheld distros
(Bazzite, CachyOS, SteamOS / Steam Deck). The library, save sync, LAN sharing, and
cloud sync work on both. A few extras are platform-specific: the Linux build runs
Windows .exe games through Proton and adds the SteamOS Game-Mode splash and
Decky plugin; the Windows build adds run-as-administrator and Armoury Crate launcher
generation.
Documentation
User guides, the full feature list, the Decky plugin docs, and developer/architecture
documentation live at the Spool docs site.
New here? Start with Install Spool.
To build from source, see Getting Started.
Spool is built with Tauri 2 (Rust) and
SvelteKit 5. Saves themselves are handled by
ludusavi.
License
See LICENSE.
