Stride Launcher 6.0.1

What's Changed

Auto-generated; a maintainer may hand-edit.

🖥️ Launcher

• The launcher has been rewritten from WPF to Avalonia, a cross-platform UI framework. This release is still Windows-only (@Kryptos-FR, #3276)
• A visual refresh brings a proper title bar, new icons for the Getting Started and News tabs, clearer primary buttons, consistent colors, rounded cards, and a status message while the launcher is syncing (@Jklawreszuk, #3383)
• The launcher is dark by default again, with the red accent from the 5.x launcher. A new settings gear lets you switch between Dark, Light (preview), or follow the system, and the crash report window now matches that theme (@xen2, #3506)
• The versions list has more room to work with: the two Visual Studio extension buttons sit side by side with short labels, the VS 2019 button greys out when it isn't installed, and a red bar marks which version Start will launch. Local builds now line up with store versions and get their own folder/Visual Studio/remove buttons, and picking an exact build from the alternate versions names it in full (e.g. "Stride 4.4.0-beta7 (not installed)") (@xen2, #3506, 98be1d6, a5f3f45)
• Light mode now passes accessibility contrast checks, the Discord link moved next to the other social buttons to free up room for the versions list, and the local-build buttons now stretch to fill their row like the others (@ferafiks, #3502)
• Recent projects now open with the exact build they were saved with, falling back to the newest installed build of the same version and warning when that counts as an upgrade; the right-click menu now matches Game Studio's, including Open in IDE (@xen2, #3509)
• Fixed the right-click menu on a project row being disabled whenever its Open button was disabled, which made broken or outdated projects impossible to remove from the list (@ferafiks, #3483)
• The release notes panel now loads from its new documentation location, animates more smoothly, always shows its scrollbar, and has an outline button to jump between sections (@Kryptos-FR, #3372; @xen2, be99673)
• Fixed the Visual Studio extension install button for VS2022 and later (including VS2026), which had stopped working correctly (@xen2, dc8ba75)
• Fixed locally-built (dev) versions sometimes failing to start because their .NET runtime wasn't selected, and corrected their version number display (e.g. 4.4.0-beta1 instead of 4.4.0.0-beta1) (@xen2, 293d9d7)
• Updated the launcher's brand icons (@minktusk, #2345)

📦 Install & Updates

• The launcher can now opt in to pre-release (beta) builds of itself from the new settings gear, and updates to a newer launcher happen in place with no separate installer or admin prompt; a beta is never installed automatically (@xen2, #3500)
• Installing and uninstalling a version now shows real progress (download size, package count, cleanup count) instead of an empty bar, you're only asked once to close a running version instead of once per package, and the version list now appears almost instantly even with many versions installed (@xen2, #3507)
• Fixed beta builds placed in a tester's local package feed showing up as "installed" on their own and reappearing after being uninstalled; the install/uninstall lock file now lives in your own user folder, so it no longer fails when the launcher starts from a read-only folder, and is shared correctly with the command-line tool (@xen2, #3513)
• The installer no longer bundles the old .NET Framework or DirectX redistributables, which aren't needed anymore, and no longer supports Windows 7/8 (@xen2, 9bd76ff)

🧰 Tooling

• Game Studio can now run a project on a newer .NET version than the editor ships with: it restarts itself on the version a project needs, and the launcher offers a runtime selector to try a newer .NET ahead of time (@xen2, #3440)
• Crashes in the launcher, Game Studio, the command-line tools, and the asset compiler are now reported through a new crash reporter: nothing is ever sent without clicking Send, repeated crashes can be muted, and reports can be saved or attached to a GitHub issue (@xen2, #3348)
• Removed the old anonymized usage-metrics and crash-report system; Stride no longer collects any telemetry (@Jklawreszuk, #3279)

🔧 Under the hood

• Early groundwork for today's cross-platform launcher: made the shared UI layer cross-platform-ready and modernized its code (@Kryptos-FR, #2082, #2658; @Jklawreszuk, #1605)
• Build upkeep: adopted central package version management, fixed cross-platform path handling, and moved the launcher through .NET 7, 8, and 10 (@Kryptos-FR, #2052; @Jklawreszuk, #2371; @Doprez, #1616; @Eideren, #2888)
• Small build fixes that kept the launcher compiling through larger engine-wide refactors (@Jklawreszuk, #2205; @Kryptos-FR, #2783)

Full Changelog: launcher/5.0.6...launcher/6.0.1