I was doubtful that the Steam Deck would take off enough for game devs to even make *considerations" to think about any decisions that would improve their game’s compatibility with Proton.
Even as a decades long Linux user, I never thought it would sell like it did. And that the editors followed is even more surprising.
I got one early on, even though I really have a hard time using a controller interface for the first time. So I end up not using it as much as I’d like.
I hope this ends up being better, than what Vortex was built to be.
After hearing that one of the primary developers behind Mod Organizer got hired, i was super excited, but Vortex ended up being inferior in… practically every single way. I still wouldn’t recommend it even to brand new people, because the learning curve of MO is considerably lower, than the error fixing curve with the other
Do versions newer than 2.4.4 work properly now? Last I checked (with proton 8.0) the only version that worked was 2.4.4. Newer versions would not load USVFS and your mods don’t get loaded.
A long while back riot used to be a fun sorta disruptive thing that was pretty healthy overall. It was awkward and fun. That was before it was purchased though. Now riot exists to make money for big china. It isn’t that company anymore. It’s a facade.
You can’t fix it, nor can the employees.
Riot is a skinpuppet that has no autonomy. Unlike the employees though, we have the choice to leave that failing franchise and move on. Rootkits aren’t acceptable and that needs to be the standard. It wasn’t okay when Sony tried it in the name of anti-piracy and it’s still not okay now. No person should be okay with installing a black box with greater admin rights than they have on their own machine. That is not okay. It is security heresy. That blog uses hand waving and bullshit to sell the concept to people that don’t know any better. And honestly? That’s almost just as bad as the rootkit itself.
A rough translation is:
Be a good drone and put the slave collar on. It’s good for you. Don’t ask questions, you don’t need to know why. Just do it. You are the product and you have no rights.
I disagree that they went downhill post-purchase. They were shit from the very start when pendragon decided to burn one community to promote his own in the name of capitalism.
They had their issues, sure. But most studios will have burned bridges in their wake. Not a hard and fast rule of course.
When I refer to downhill I’m looking directly at the slippery slope that is changing from profit as a target to profit above all else. When you sell a company regardless of who you retain - there will be a value shift as the head drives the body. The existing cracks got worse and new ones formed. People that care the most generally give up, leave, or both and the whole thing falls in on the void left by those support’s absences.
You may be right that a shift in ideal started then. I’m not terribly familiar with the story so I’ll defer to you on that.
Arch takes the majority because SteamOS is based on it. Unfortunately, I don't think there's anything in the data that would allow discerning between those two.
I’m not sure if that’s the case, since looking at the stats you’d expect SteamOS/Holo to beat a couple of these listings if it was truly being counted separately to Arch
ProtonDB reports PC and Steam Deck separately. So unless the video creator took the PC stats and then added in Steam Deck and just counted SteamOS as Arch themselves, it’s probably just omitted entirely.
Also actually watching the video: Arch was already riding along at 20-21% before 2022. And in some cases dipped down to 19% mid 2022… So after the Steam Deck launched, the Arch numbers went DOWN. So yet another sign that Arch isn’t Arch + SteamOS: this is purely desktop usage.
The article says Microsoft would like to buy Valve. Of course they do. Valve is actively working against Microsoft’s interests (and we have to thank them for that).
It does not say Gabe Newell has the slightest intention to sell. Because he doesn’t.
Yea, but Gabe is not going to be around forever, and any successor leadership might have a different philosophy. And it’s never a bad idea to have a backup.
I hope to god he personally takes a someone he wants as his company successor under his wing and mentors them under his ways so that we may not worry as much. That’s if he doesn’t already have one or doesn’t have plans for it.
Yeah for a while now I’m been buying games on GOG where possible and keeping an archive of them, because I know at some point every company will eventually let you down.
The GOG launcher is optional (I don’t use it). On their website you can download offline installers for every game you own, and these installers don’t require the GOG launcher or any account authentication.
Honestly I’m not sure - as I said I don’t use it. I know of at least one game that’s “DRM-free” but requires the GOG launcher for multiplayer (No Man’s Sky). That’s fairly controversial and I think the only reason why it’s on GOG is because it came onto GOG back when it was a singleplayer only game.
Did everyone conveniently forget that Steam DRM is the reason why Steam came to prominence, and why it was ever used by any devs in the first place. Yes it’s easily cracked and barely an anti-piracy measure, even admitted by Valve, but it is still DRM.
@XenoStare@headmetwall that’s right. Steam is a business. They are not really for open source. Open source, is still a business model. It’s not public domain or libre software. Then can always make their stuff closed source at anytime. Just need to gather free work from the community and to elevate its private business. Still, there are articles detailing Valve as anti-consumer. It’s a search bar away.
But... Uh... Do you really need all this credit card data and my banking password to show me more accurate search results? Sounds like a pretty convoluted tech to me... Well, who am I to question Google, right? There you go.
The awnser is a firm no. Cheaters have moved to hardware based cheats with DMA boards. On valorant some cheaters have started exploiting remote play services to use machine vision based aim bots. Neither of those two methods can be detected by a kernel level anti cheat.
And now they have more fun working with hardware than software. No needing to reverse engineer the game either since you’re just processing display output and executing inputs on separate hardware like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi
With DMA based cheats I disagree as if you were developing a DMA based cheat you would still need to understand how the game works so you can figure out what memory adresses are for what part of the game.
The whole setup makes no sense with Linux in mind and screams of a rebadged Windows notebook. Just go with an AMD-exclusive system, perhaps with an Intel WiFi module.
Agreed with Linux gaming AMD all the way. For laptops if you don’t wanna go dedicated GPU they make some wonderful budget friendly performance APUs (CPU plus GPU like Intel integrated graphics but more capable for light gaming :) IMO of course
As far as I can tell, there isn’t a single Linux laptop with an AMD GPU. Admittedly, even in the Windows world AMD laptops are a lot rarer than Nvidia ones, but there are still a few. None of them come with Linux out-of-the-box, though.
Well, then those Linux notebook makers do a crappy job. Radeon is the best supported gaming GPU on Linux as of now. That’s just fact. Any notebook manufacturer would look which vendors Valve uses for Steam Deck and pick whatever is the latest component from that vendor because all the driver improvements made by Valve also benefit the newer, more powerful GPU.
Taking an obvious Windows notebook and just rebadging it isn’t a real Linux notebook anyway. If I were to buy a new notebook, it would be the Framework 16. Sure, there is no option for it to ship with Linux but the DIY edition ships without Windows.
Yeah but consider the following: CUDA. I don’t even game that much (and I was okay with older games that can be played on a Ryzen APU) but I had to get a laptop with a 3050 for GPGPU shenanigans. It is definitely a downgrade in terms of Linux compatibility compared to my older laptop (the machine doesn’t go to sleep properly unless you are running Ubuntu 20.04, which I discovered accidentally)
Not doing a great job running basic modern desktop environments with Wayland, though, where workarounds are required everywhere to make shoddy Nvidia drivers work. Very recently (I think is was just last week) I’ve read that the developers need to give Nvidia special treatment just to make the cursor work. That’s just fucked up.
A house build on shortcuts and workarounds is not on a strong foundation. It’ll break down on the user at some point.
Technically you can, but anytime the shaders need to update it’ll download the full shader cache back to the boot drive so there’s a lot of back and forth
No its Just that at some point disk speed provides marginal improvments for most games, especialy since most games were designed with hdd drivers in mind . And sd vs ssd in steam deck are at that point. There are exceptions to that, but they are pretty rare ( alghtough i cant remember one right now but i know i watched one comparison where nvme disk provided actual reasonable benefit compared to sata so i imagine its even bigger with sd card ). So unless you play very specific game a lot that you know benefits from fast disk speed then it dosent really matter that much.
I used Linux before Steam came to Linux, those were the good old days where every game required tinkering in WINE. I actually didn’t have a Steam account until it came to Linux, and then I played only a handful of Linux-native games (Rocket League was one of them).
When Proton came to Steam, a whole new world opened up, and now I can basically assume a game will work and I’ll be right more often than not.
So from my perspective, it wasn’t a rocky start at all, but a gradual widening of my gaming library. I’ve since played a ton more games, so I’ve rewarded Steam for the effort.
I spent ages thinking that I’d found a title that didn’t work, getting barely double-digit frame rates in the 3D hub area.
And about two months later I realised that what I’d actually done was lock the laptop into low power mode with the CPU and GPU being way underclocked and locked to that regardless of load. One metaphorical switch flip later, 60+ fps.
I’m not a game dev, I’m a web dev. I’ve never made anything more complicated game-wise than 2d fishing animation games
Well… At least the dev is honest about it being just for fun… I’ll give it 2 months before it’s a dead project. There is literally no way someone that has zero gamedev experience can remake a multi-million dollar game.
Steam downloads its own client updates. It’s very rare for them to need to update the flatpak itself because usually any updates can be accomplished through the built in updater.
Mesa comes as separate flatpaks which is hidden in the GUI, and is automatically install when you install a flatpak. The system can have multiple versions of the driver installed. When Steam is ready to use a newer Mesa version, it will do it automatically.
Mangohud, on the other hand, is a flatpak you need to install manually via the command line. You should follow the instruction on their Github page for that.
P.S: In case you like a GUI for things. You should install Flatseal, which provide a GUI for configuring flatpaks.
Makes sense, I was wondering how that worked when I saw some of those in my list. Is that another layer to the flatpak, like a Docker layer or are Flatpaks allowed out of their sandboxes to talk to other Flatpaks?
A flatpak can name extensions that are mounted into the running container if they’re installed.
or are Flatpaks allowed out of their sandboxes
Be careful when thinking of flatpaks as sandboxes. What they confine is (by default) up to the maintainer of each flatpak, and most of the ones I have audited are very permissive.
You can mitigate this somewhat by editing the permissions of each flatpak before running it for the first time, with the command line or a GUI like flatseal. But that only goes so far, since some of the permissions are not fine-grained enough to provide meaningful sandboxing while still allowing games to run. (For example, shared memory and network access.) You might also consider creating a second linux account just for games, and logging in to that account’s desktop when installing or running them.
A Flatpak container is better than nothing, and will probably keep you safe from most programming mistakes, but I wouldn’t consider it a security/privacy sandbox by any means. If you want that, a hypervisor-based virtual machine would be better.
I’m not sure on the exact details of how it sources mesa, but you can check what version of mesa steam is using by clicking help in steam, and selecting “Steam Runtime Diagnostics”. My flatpak steam install reports that I’m using Mesa 24.0.2-arch1.1, which is the same version I get if I check glxinfo | grep Mesa. I’m assuming that means flatpak Steam is using my system’s mesa.
I do have some versions of Mesa installed through flatpak in the form of freedesktop.Platform packages, but they’re older versions than what was reported from inside steam.
I’ve never once touched the logs button until I used linux. Over my time asking for help with anything wrong on my machine I’ve been asked to provide logs, replication steps, what went wrong and what’s supposed to happen. This has trained me to be a good reporter and sometimes these issues help me fix them myself. Thank you Linux community for providing these skills. This isn’t gaming industry specific but even with things like protonvpn, vmware, virtualbox, and stuff on Arch I use.
Part of it too is that logging on Windows is just dogshit. No one uses event viewer so it’s not like the end user even knows where to look for logs, and most of the shit in there is like"lol computer crashed and idk why go fuck yourself"
Some games have such community, that it treats life as this game. For example community of certain factory optimization simulator was so enlightened, that optimized it and made 30% faster.
with the issues you’ve had i think it’s perfectly understandable, but I’ll agree with other commenters that arch is not a good choice for a first distro. i recommend trying dual booting windows and a more "beginner " distro like Linux mint or pop_os
the reason why arch gets recommend a lot as a gaming distro is that it is bleeding edge. Their for has very up to date drivers and parches that can help gaming. But with the current state of gaming on Linux this is a bit less of a requirement. most distros are new enough for most games. Exception might be debian LTS or something.
So i totaly agree that choosing something other then arch for gaming is a good option if you are rather new to linux.
As a longtime Debian Stable user, I can attest that gaming on it works just fine, whether via Proton or natively.
It was rough at the first half year or so after Steam Linux client launched where system libraries were simply too old and one had to smuggle in libc from Ubuntu, but that got solved by the next Debian release, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. :)
Of course, I wouldn’t recommend Debian for a gaming system for a newbie. It’s just what I’ve been using as my daily driver for decades, so I did not want to switch to something else just for something as unimportant as gaming.
Bleeding edge should still work though. KDE Plasma does not seem ready for Nvidia. They should have a big-ass banner on the wiki that says “this DE will be janky as fuck if you have an Nvidia card”.
I’m saying that it doesn’t work. At least not without some pretty serious bugs. Perhaps there are some magic fixes out there that I haven’t found, or perhaps I have some taboo combination of hardware, but so far I haven’t been able to fix the visual and latency bugs that are present with KDE Plasma and an Nvidia GFX card. I’ve followed the wiki thoroughly, and some instructions on some forum threads, but none of it helped.
I have used Freebsd for sometime on my desktop back in 2021. For the most part I had a good experience except that I couldn’t figure out how to connect earphones/mic on the ports on my PC case. I had to plug it directly to my motherboard for Freebsd to detect them. I used an Nvidia card at that time and it also worked very nicely although it had much older drivers than Linux.
I ended up switching back to linux because of 2 reasons -
I have a few BTRFS drives that I use regularly and couldn’t afford to buy some new ones for Freebsd at that time.
I couldn’t play games using steam proton. I don’t know the situation these days, but I’ll surely check it out If it has improved since then.
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