The most interesting part of the article was the mention of a /nix partition, as I didn't realize the steamdeck supports nixpkgs, after researching it more, they do indeed (not installed by default, but at least it is possible without having to fork an entire os to get it on the device).

You can put the nix store in any writable location and modify $PATH to point to the symlinks directory.

The root issue can only be addressed by ROM updates from the manufacturer but I'm running an old DL360 that's no longer supported by HPE.

The patch itself is only one line change but updating the kernel is a pain since I have to : - get SRPM (there's no git repo) - unpack SRPM, apply patch - rebuild and install

1: https://github.com/Steam-Headless/docker-steam-headless

1: https://github.com/games-on-whales/gow

https://kubevirt.io/user-guide/virtual_machines/host-devices...

Declarative cloud native game launching!

      kubectl apply -f crysis.yaml

Do people not use the term HTPC or "media center" anymore?

I recently moved to Arch after a few years of NixOS (preceded by years of Arch) and I think the fears of the author are misplaced.

Arch is definitely a very serious and mature distro and I'd trust them more than Valve.

The quality of the packages available for Arch is what made me move from NixOS. The main repos are updated really fast and AUR has a lot of useful packages.

You and I can, the overwhelming majority of computer users cannot. Valve clearly focuses on building for the average person, something that Linux distributions (as much as I love them) still don’t really do (well).

The system automatically recovering from a failed upgrade is essential in a low-maintenance OS at this point.

Could, sure, but we have the technology to make it unnecessary and disk isn't that expensive, so why not?

Can you give some examples of this please?

I generally find the NixOS packages high quality.

I'm undecided on what I think about this since... I frequently get bitten by reproducibility issues of pip packages.

Anything packaged in nixplgs generally rarely fails for me, especially in the more complex cases of cuda/pytorch.

I suppose I'm more likely to want "pytorch except" where that except is a newer dependency or build flag improving performance.

I'm using NixOS, which can indeed be a tinker timesink, but is good for exploration. You can easily try different components, and then completely remove them (aside from some ~/.config pollution) if you don't want to keep them. It's also trivial to patch things before you install them (such as adding some kernel patches to make Linux usable on esoteric hardware like a gaming handheld).

There's a NixOS community called Jovian that's reconstructing Valve's random SteamOS tarballs into tagged commits on GitHub, which you can browse as if you were a Valve employee. They've made it so you can install your own copy of SteamOS atop NixOS by adding a few lines to your Nix configuration. They're clearly Linux experts, and you can see from the source that you're getting Valve's packages unadulterated, save for simple adaptations like introspecting instead of hardcoding the power button location.

So, if you want a pure SteamOS experience without hosting your own mirror of Valve's update system (or if you want to be able to browse Valve's source without downloading a 3GB tarball), give Jovian a try.

Install instructions: https://jovian-experiments.github.io/Jovian-NixOS/getting-st...

Mirrors of Valve's source: https://github.com/orgs/Jovian-Experiments/repositories?type...

https://universal-blue.org/guide/fork-your-own/

And yes, you can roll back to previous images as its an "immutable" OS as well should issues arise

I'm not deep enough in their weeds to perfectly explain it in a concise HN comment, but it's all about having a read-only known-good Linux distro at the root and then layering packages on top, taking much inspiration from server-side containers. It's supposed to be both more secure and more reliable/reproducible/customizable than traditional Linux. You just write in a container manifest which packages you want. When an upgrade comes out, it runs the upgrade, then reinstalls your packages on top.

> Bazzite is an OCI image that serves as an alternative operating system for the Steam Deck, and a ready-to-game SteamOS-like for desktop computers, living room home theater PCs, and numerous other handheld PCs.

https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/

Worth visiting the readme even if not interested. There's a huge list of included stuff, and a lot of it seems really cool.and helpful (for gamers or streamers mostly).

Bummer. This rules out 76% of steam users, according to their hardware surveys.

It almost feels like they're trying hard to make the experience worse for everyone: users, OS developers, app developers, hardware developers... I don't know what to make of it, if you want NVidia you should pick an OS other than Linux (I've heard FreeBSD actually works fine), if you want Linux pick a GPU other than NVidia.

Unreal works okay for me, but I’ve had to submit a few patches upstream to work out some Wayland issues. Other than that, it’s about as bloated/buggy/slow as it is on windows. Most of the time if I think there’s some Linux-specific issue I’ll open the same project on windows only to discover it was the same.

I had a lot of trouble getting the unity editor working on my steam deck, but that may have been due to using an editor version from 2021 (for unrelated reasons). It seems to behave fine on a normal desktop environment though.

As far as I know they also prefer to upstream things in general. I think AMD's amd-pstate / amd-pstate-epp and related work was kicked off becasue of Steam Deck, but it all went upstream.

After hearing people be ecstatic, I thought I’d go full-in on Linux gaming. I have a pretty bog-standard gaming PC that is very Linux-compatible (Intel i5 + Radeon 6800XT) and on there Apex Legends has horrid frame pacing issues, Mirror’s Edge doesn’t work with wireless Xbox controllers. You lose out on a lot of GPU suite features that Windows has. Gnome doesn’t support VRR. Etc etc.

There’s so many small issues it’s held me back from deleting my Windows partition. Maybe in a year or two?

That said, these things work flawlessly on the Deck.

For Mirror's Edge, were you using Steam Input?

> For Mirror's Edge, were you using Steam Input?

Yes. The problem lies in the fact that only the Xone driver properly supports the Xbox wireless adapter, but it doesn’t play nice with Mirror’s Edge. Xpad and XpadNeo do work, but those require USB or Bluetooth.

And me having to tweak a million things tells why gaming on Linux still sucks, aside from Deck’s blessed config. I don’t want to deal with a thousand papercuts, I want to boot my system and play. Windows is still closer to that experience than Linux.

But if it's the difference between gaming working or not for you, wouldn't you rather use it? Surely you barely interact with it anyway while gaming, only to get into Steam?

If this is a machine you use for something else too, you could just have a gaming user that logs in to KDE and your normal user that uses Gnome?

I'm a Linux desktop user and I drop into a game once in a while while I'm waiting for another meeting or waiting for a build to finish or whatever. My work desktop doesn't use VRR (the just-for-games PC uses Windows), otherwise I'd be in the same boat as 'jorvi because it quite matters to me that games on my desktop integrate into everything else at a passable level. For me, GNOME does a better job of integrating my different activities than KDE (which wasn't always the case! I was a KDE3 user for a long time!), so I use GNOME. And it remains an unsolved pain in the ass that the Linux desktop experience isn't coherent enough to mean that we should only be thinking about desktop environments if we want to.

Coherent, holistic switching between tasks is a thing that people are allowed to want and attempting to convince people that they don't is a bad look.

> If this is a machine you use for something else too, you could just have a gaming user that logs in to KDE and your normal user that uses Gnome?

This is a really sad observation on the state of the Linux desktop. Still.

> This is a really sad observation on the state of the Linux desktop. Still.

It seems like a somewhat odd observation, is it really necessary to have another user to do this? I can easily switch between Gnome, i3, and Sway on my system, I mean that’s going between X and Wayland, no issues… maybe KDE and Gnome have some specific incompatibility though? Odd.

Anyway, at least there’s a workaround. If Gnome is a hard requirement, how is Windows even a candidate?

Ok, sure, it was just the first solution that came to mind. On mine logging in launches straight into sway. I think only in the first session (to allow recovery in case of some related issue) so I suppose I could switch tty and then manually launch whatever DE.

But to me I think the odd observation is that it doesn't need to be a different user if we're talking about still having to log in again anyway.

Unless you mean some kind of session saving, swaymsg exit, and then launch the other one? But then you have to maintain whatever session saving (probably different in each) solution and what have you really gained.

It's a layer down from the DE itself, it's the window manager beneath it. GNOME ships Mutter and KDE ships KWin. GNOME is pretty tightly tied to Mutter; KDE is less tied to KWin, but KWin also tends to support shinier features than Mutter does anyway so I don't know why you wouldn't use it anyway.

> It seems like a somewhat odd observation, is it really necessary to have another user to do this?

Strictly no, but having to have another login session, period, is bonkers to me. It's reasonable to respond to that suggestion with incredulity.

> If Gnome is a hard requirement, how is Windows even a candidate?

For me, it's not. At the moment it's inertia, because Windows has legit become the best Linux dev environment I know of with WSL2. I originally switched back to a Linux desktop because I was working on some hardware stuff that benefited from being on a Linux platform, but I'm certainly not tied to it past that.

The calculator app just recently did this, and now I have to type and enter one line of numbers before the text control realizes it's too small and resizes itself. That first line of numbers is nearly invisible. Happens again every time it's opened.

I'm not sure who decided that desktop apps need to look and feel like touchscreen-first mobile apps, but I don't particularly like it. KDE still feels like a desktop environment, so it's my strong preference. I'll put up with a very slightly less polished experience if it means stuff stops rearranging itself just for the sake of change every couple of weeks.

(Aside from KDE, Cinnamon is pretty solid and less feature packed, maybe give it a whirl?)

What makes this all worse is that GNOME has acres of space reserved at the top of the screen with its statusbar, most of which is empty and doing absolutely nothing. It could house a macOS-style global menubar (as Unity did for fullscreened windows) with room to spare… Though global menubars aren’t everybody’s cup of tea I think many would agree they’re better than the alternative of oversimplified hamburger menus, and they would help achieve the clean look GNOME is going for without so dramatically impeding functionality.

OT, but I recently started using a Python REPL as a calculator, leaving it open full time in a window. It's pretty great. Haven't touched an actual calculator, or a calculator app, in weeks.

You can install it upon Arch from AUR.

Putting that aside:

Windows users always find a reason not to switch to Linux because some missing feature. In two years? There will be another new feature or game on Windows. I remember people insisting on using Windows because it support their „3D-Shutter glasses“ or their card from Nvidia. Either you want use Linux or not :)

Why are many features initially only available on Windows?

First. That is wrong. Important features like cgroups, namespace and containers/Flatpak where novelly developed upon Linux.

Second? MBAs only look at past numbers. So Windows often get traditional Windows stuff first. You make guess it, innovative companies care about what will be possible in future. Valve for example.

The MBA style thinking is also in many consumers. Still buying Nvidia? Because they were faster in the paper sheet? I prefer the cards which works well with Linux, so AMD or Intel. Frames actually generated are more worth than problems with proprietary drivers.

PS: Linux has maybe won the war against drives. Seems like Nvidia open most stuff slowly and feature land in the nouveau-module or mesa. A decade to late. I’m already in Team AMD ;)

I'm not sure how this is a bad thing. I don't run Linux to run games because Windows is a better supported platform for running games. I'm not "looking at past numbers", I'm looking at the situation in front of me as it exists, setting aside my personal feeling on what might have been and instead focusing on what actually exists, today, for the problem I am looking to solve today.

I don’t want a huge problem tomorrow.

Likewise the rationale why people buy the Steamdeck. Other than Windows it just works. And it is tweakable.

On Linux you could automate that task. How would you propose automating "open disk utility and click a few buttons" on Windows?

This is less of a "Linux can't" issue and more of a "I quickly know how to do it on Windows after years of experience and I don't know how to do it on Linux." Linux not being identical to Windows isn't a flaw. No one blames you for not wanting to relearn, but pretending like Linux is bad because your Windows muscle memory doesn't apply is nonsense.

You got a less than stellar recommendation based on your desire for parity with ease of use with windows. Lubuntu is a more niche distro aimed at lower resource usage at the expense of the ease of use you are looking for.

If you had installed KDE, you'd likely have explored the start menu and found gparted or typed 'disk' into search and found gparted.

(Not write caching for removable drives should just be the default. Windows hasn't used write caching on removable drives for 20 years. It also presents a toggle in the drive properties if you really do want it on though.)

In fact a lot of things are easier. On windows, you need a third party tool to install an iso onto a disk. On Gnome, you open disk manager, right click disk, click restore from image.

0: I care about responsiveness, so I've always disabled animations on every device, so I have no experience if some animations can run at 60fps on some hardware and 30fps on others.

Instead one should recommend using KDE or Gnome and turning down all of the graphical settings if needed to improve performance.

It hard to install, update or remove software. The validation of the system isn’t possible. Aside from the missing security.

On Windows changing a setting has become a horrible task for me. Where is it? Why does the search doesn’t find it? Should I try to find the Win32-Dialog from Win2k or is this setting in WinUI3 the same? Why I have to sit in front of an installer wizard an „click through it“?

On Steam I can do a file check of a game and it verifies its integrity? My wish. All package-managers on Linux should provide that :)

Because the OS is a tool, not a religious/political statement.

Therefore I'll use it if it works the way I need it and it solves my problem, or not use it if it doesn't work the way I want it and ends up creating more problems for me than it solves. Simple.

I get your overall point, but the first "process containers" code that later became cgroups was merged to the kernel in 2007. Windows came out with the Job Objects API in Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) in 2000.

Steam Input is rapidly becoming the Google Play Services of the desktop linux world. On Steam Deck for a long time you couldn't even use the touchpads without the Steam client running.

I find it helps with pacing. It also supports VRR with a commandline argument, '--adaptive-sync'.

VRR may need support in the environment to work, I'm not sure. Sway/wlroots does it fine. Presumably KDE does/can too since that's what the Deck uses in 'desktop' mode (otherwise, gamescope).

edit: I see in another post - you have! Agreed on KDE being scattershot. I hope the Gnome people clear things up for you. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest i3/Sway, even though I'm happy with them

    env DXVK_ASYNC=1 SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11 gamemoderun taskset --cpu-list 0-7,16-23 gamescope -W 3840 -H 2160 -r 160 -o 160 --borderless --fullscreen --rt --steam  -- %command%

I think the 'SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11' part may be key; I didn't need this before, but now I often do. Not every game requires it. It's weird.

It helps if something crashes because "wayland isn't available". Adding '|& tee /tmp/game.log' is useful for debugging.

Pinning (taskset)/gamemode stuff left for context. This example gives a game the cache-rich threads on a 7950X3D.

Beyond '--adaptive-sync'... I believe VRR calls for the feature to be enabled on the output in Sway.

See 'man 5 sway-output', looking for 'adaptive_sync' for more info on that

edit: One last note. I'm on Fedora - the libraries here are so new that Flatpak-based Steam tends to work best.

Apex Legends run flawlessly for me, but only on KDE/X11 with Nvidia reflex enabled[0].

If you are on Radeon though, I bet the problem is your window manager. I have the frame pacing issues on:

- hyprland/wayland (even with no_direct_scanout = true; and floating game windows) - KDE/wayland

I also had a weird issue using gamescope as my DM where apex got resized into a tiny frame in the top left that was like 200 pixels or so wide.

> That said, these things work flawlessly on the Deck.

Likely due to running into these graphics driver -> WM and similar compatibility issues and fixing them. The other performance improvements from kernel changes probably don't hurt either.

0: Requires unreleased proton-ge build: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/pull/104...

Valve should be the only one that is worried about your opinion here. I think they develop SteamOS as a backup plan, though, in case Microsoft ever starts to take their own App Store seriously.

While that was obviously speculation, at least the dates match up (October 26, 2012 for Microsft Store launch and December 13, 2013 from SteamOS launch according to Wikipedia)

Anyway, agree—I wasn’t trying to belittle Valve’s motivations, just wanted to include a thought about why they seem to be happy serving both platforms.

May i ask what driver features are you missing? I only want some decent fan control instead of relying on random scripts off github. AMD has to release some sort of GUI panel for sure.

Have you tried CoreCtrl [0]?

> My 5800x3D and 6800XT deliver an outstanding Linux gaming experience.

I have a 7900XTX and performance under Linux has been at least on par with Windows, sometimes better (though not by much).

> May i ask what driver features are you missing?

I'm not GP but I'd love to see frame gen and stuff like anti-lag and upscaling integrated into amdgpu with some sort of official way of setting it (though looking at Adrenaline it might actually be best if it's left up to the community to create the GUIs).

[0] https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl

I'm told it's better in Mesa 23.3 though, haven't tested.

For example: Halo Infinite works fine, but Destiny and Call of Duty don't.

What do you use for the VM? Last time I checked, I couldn't find any free/FOSS VM tooling that allows me to do GPU pass-through on a Linux Host to Windows Guest.

Linux hosts had GPU passthrough working well before commercial software had such options. Nowadays it's just work out-of-box with Virt-Manager that just run QEMU under KVM.

It's been working for years for 99.9% of games excluding some invasive anti-cheats that ban you for VMs, but there literally only a few games that have issue with virtualization.

But if you’re running a standard distro, there are guides for most them.

* Arch guide (excellent resource, applicable to all distros): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

* Ubuntu: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/gpu-virtualization-with-qemu-...

* Gentoo: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GPU_passthrough_with_libvirt_qe...

You can also find countless blog posts and videos on setting up GPU passthrough.

One excellent resource for gaming use-cases in particular is this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/

Last thing to note is that your motherboard can make the process easier if it has good IOMMU support. Basically, you want a MB that puts your PCI slot in a separate IOMMU group. You can find examples by searching for “(MB name) IOMMU groups”.

Up to date compelling SteamVR options are starting to appear however so I might see if I can move over to one of those in the next year or two.

This is true for at least EAC/EasyAntiCheat. This covers a lot, sure, but not everything!

Most AC used in the competitive Counter-Strike community isn't supported, for example. Only first-party VAC.

I didn't really want to start itemizing things. Most competitive Counter-Strike anti-cheat isn't supported.

I've had some luck with the Windows VM approach instead. One may have to disable quite a lot (ie: Hyper-V enhancements) to truly trick them.

Citation needed. I'd be quite surprised if it were common for servers of professional games to trust the client in that sense (i.e. allowing it to decide game logic like what gets spawned where).

As far as I'm aware the most common types of multiplayer cheats are

* wall hacks, which you could probably prevent by not sending the client any information about objects that the player can't see, but that would require the server to calculate the line of sight for every player/object, * and aim bots, which I don't think you could prevent at all on the server side since they don't rely on the bot having access to any information that the player isn't supposed to have. They just rely on the bot being better at aiming. I suppose if you did all rendering server side and only sent the rendered graphics to the client (i.e. streaming), that would make it harder for the bot because it'd now have to do image recognition to find the target, but that just makes it harder, not impossible. Plus, game streaming wasn't well received for a reason and anyway, I don't think that's what you had in mind when you talked about "not trusting the client".

It isn't. If you play with people you don't know, some of them will cheat. If you don't want that, stop playing with strangers.

Btw tell me exactly how an aimbot that takes the visuals from the player's screen and tilts the player's cursor so (or not so) slightly towards identified moving targets, are to be avoided from the server. Modern cheating is already a hard-ass problem to solve, much more so if no client-level monitoring is desired.

The very same way that you'd do it on the client. If I run an aimbot on an nvidia jetson devkit, using HDMI in to get the screen image and USB emulation to send inputs, your anticheat has to do the same work regardless if it's on the client or the server.

If we complain about companies being too quick closing up their servers when games are not as successful as they hoped... imagine if those servers were x10 or more expensive, due to that kind of analysis for all players. Companies would be much quicker to pull the plug, I guess.

I can make a game with full server trust to show you if you like.

When I start a game and I see an Easy Anti-Cheat banner I think to myself "Great now I can be killed by an aimbot while simultaneously hosting a root-kit voluntarily."

Why do you think these systems are advertised like that, at the forefront of the game load? It's so that the developers create a false trust in the playerbase that they're doing their damnedest to prevent cheaters, when the reality is that they paid a small amount of cash to a third party to use a system that does a piss-poor job at everything aside from being a symbol of effort and adding incompatibilities where there shouldn't be.

eac bypassing is trivial to a laymen, that doesn't bode well as a defense against people that have made cheating their hobby.

and to be clear : I use EAC as the example because to me it symbolizes the 'security theatre' side of the effort. Real anti-cheat efforts exist, and those should be applauded. EAC ain't it, but it's the industry standard... worrisome.

Realistically these days with how expensive most of these games are to run and make, if you do not keep cheaters away it can tank the entire project, e.g. Cycle: The Frontier basically had to shut down because they couldn't keep cheaters at bay, in a system that heavily relies on player count to remain healthy and fun. Once the cheating gets bad enough, people stop playing the game, which leads to a death spiral: it starts with bad queue times, which leads to people playing other games, and that spiral further diminishes the playerbase beyond a point of no return. Cycle barely made it 12 months and the result was a multi-million dollar project getting flushed down the drain.

So players of those games are sacrificing privacy for no security at all by the sounds of it.

I am glad that Bungie is going with fog of war for Marathon. And heck, given the features Marathon is getting, maybe someday Destiny can have those nice things too. We'll see...

It's pretty hard to have fun when the server is full of cheaters.

I mean, hard to call cheating in a multiplayer game the same as cheating in a singleplayer game. The former ruins the experience of others, the latter just affects your own session. Hard to be against cheating in a singleplayer context.

That user would happily play that game, but the game publisher doesn't want them.

Incredible.

What is productive is calling out hostile behavior and comments that do nothing but hurt the ecosystem. I see these type of strong negative opinions in a lot of areas of the Linux community. “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that”

The best possible, most correct, most defensible, most world-improving advice to give for dealing with a user-hostile product or service, is to have the strength of will to reject it and live without it, and live the example to show that it's possible and you won't die.

Or at the very least, it is AT LEAST as defensible a stance as "The more pragmatic/adult approach is to give the bully whatever they want than to go without their product or service".

That philosophy is not remotely automatically more correct or more adult or nuanced or any of the self-serving words anyone typically uses to try to grant their idea more legitimacy than it deserves.

Calling the principled stance "hostile" is itself hostile.

You can phrase it in a way that sounds emotional and shortsighted and jeuvenile, and certainly there are many juveniles who are guilty of that.

Never the less, rejecting a bad deal is still fundamentally a reaction not an action, a defense not an offense.

The publisher promulgating a user-hostile deal is inarguably the offender, the initial hostile actor.

You can decide that the bad deal is tolerable for yourself, but that is entirely your weakness and does not make that policy smarter or more correct than that of those that decline.

I am not here debating DRM or anticheat. Simple pointing out that telling someone the game they play is garbage because it uses anticheat does nothing but hurts the Linux ecosystem.

You can come up with another essay but I don’t think it disproves what I am saying. Telling someone the game they play is garbage is not increasing the Linux user base. I am sure there will be a retort here, “we don’t want those kind of users or related software”.

The people you're trying to criticize are themselves only rejecting the software and the publishers that use it, and for a completely explicable and defensible reason, not because it's the wrong tribal colors or religion.

You are consistently neglecting to acknowledge the basic order of operations and ignoring the initial act and offense in order to focus on a reaction that you don't like and to excuse the initial act that you personally don't have a problem with.

I am saying that you only have the right to say that the deal proposed by drm and anticheat systems is acceptable to you, not to go one mm further to say that anyone else is ogbligated to feel the same, and is in any way hostile or harming the ecosystem or anything like that if they don't.

Okay; anti-cheat is user-hostile.

> “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that”

Okay, the thing I want is to use a game that I paid for, play it on the machine I own, and run it without giving it any special privileges (certainly not modifying my kernel). I trust that you will support that and not be negative about the way I want to use it?

- DRM does not serve the consumer, but the producer.

- Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. And if someone cannot design a game, their anti-cheat is often a disservice to the consumer.

I don't like either DRM or anti-cheat solutions, not because I am not willing to pay the producers, but because I have been burned too many times by dysfunctional solutions.

That silly "speed of light" thing? Just design better.

Nonsense. It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days, but anti-cheat technology definitely raises the bar. It's only "unnecessary" if you're willing to accept a large number of cheaters.

Some anti-cheat stuff definitely goes to far but to dismiss the idea entirely is just naïve.

It worked pretty good, but all of that was taken away.

Well-designed games offer limited potential for cheaters by design. An anti-cheat software can help to eliminate the little potential that is left, but often games are designed without cheating in mind and some anti-cheat software is put in place to solve all the issues that were produced by the bad design.

[1] Unless we're talking about captcha solving competitions, for now, maybe. :)

But the question I want to ask is: Is that a problem?

If all the bots and cheaters are playing indistinguishable from high-level real humans, where's the harm?

Or, to quote Westworld: If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?

You don't have to reach pro levels, it often only takes small assists to turn a balanced game on its head, ruining someone's experience with a game. Repeat often enough and the userbase will leave, feeling cheated or at least demoralised for being unable to compete or improve.

And allowing machine-assists, thus leveling the playing field, turns the game into a completely different one that is (imho) drastically less fun whoever may not be interested in (or may be unable to) running/coding their bot.

There is a difference in skill level distribution. If everyone playing at a highly skilled player level, then it's simply not fun and doesn't provide an opportunity to get better.

Anyways, playing with cheaters isn't fun and if you want to play without them then you need anti-cheat and/or game to not be free.

In fact, I'd like to see the same bots developed by cheaters be used for NPCs as well.

Let Valve do the needful for running them under GNU/Linux, if at all.

One is that developers now a specific hardware + software combo to test their games with. Even if it’s the same build they’re sending out, they’re still testing their game on the Deck and fixing issues, leading to a better (but not perfect) experience for Linux gamers. Here’s a video of Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian studios playing a game released by his studio on the Steam Deck - https://youtu.be/kzfEkSGa45k. He’s very pleased and promises to test future games released by his studio on the Deck. And he stuck to that promise - Larian released several fixes specifically for the Steam Deck to make Baldur’s Gate III run better. Linux gamers benefit from that.

Second, this increases the % of gamers using Linux. After the Deck’s success in the last couple of years Linux is at 1.91% of the respondents of the Steam Hardware Survey for Nov 2023. Linux was at 1.15% 18 months ago. Doesn’t sound impressive, but if that growth continues and it reaches 3-4%, at that point developers will find shipping native Linux builds more attractive.

Studios don't care about native GNU/Linux, despite the games being shipped with Android/NDK, PlayStation POSIX environment, and the available APIs on Switch OS.

All of them much easier than porting from Windows/XBox, almost straight ports if coming from Android/NDK.

OSes are irrelevant these days and having basically libwindows.so these days only underlines that.

Valve only stresses the relevance of Windows.

In various benchmarks Proton is now outperforming Windows. There is no need for it anymore, outside some niche applications.

I know pretty well how Proton works.

From a quick search this is the best description of it I found: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

Ah well, it's funny to see people complaining because it really solos out the OS you're using. Windows users have native DirectX, Linux users have near-flawless DXVK, and Mac users... well, Mac users get what Apple gives them, and they have to learn to be happy with it.

Game studios aren't FOSS indie devs stressing out about 3D APIs.

They are used to specific hardware since the Atari and Magnavox.

I'd be curious to hear why. Arch deserves it's reputation for poor stability, but for Valve's application with OSTree and immutable root should work fine. For users who don't want to tinker, they can receive a quality first-party experience with smooth upgrades. Users that do want to tinker are largely funneled into using Flatpak or AppImage, which are much more stable than AUR packages.

I love Arch, but it is a demanding mistress. If you get behind on updates, you're asking for pain. Also it can be very disruptive to suddenly get a new major version of Gnome that breaks extensions you used, or applications, etc.

What we instead should say is not that Arch is "unstable" because I agree it's not, but rather that Arch requires a lot more care and feeding and if you don't do that, it can lead to instability

I switched to Gentoo and it fixed all the issues I was encountering with Arch, and was more stable. Now I'm on NixOS, which is far more stable than Arch or Gentoo were.

Now, that said, the way SteamOS uses it, I don't see any issues. With an immutable system, A/B updates, and tested images, the compatibility and update issues are solved. Using flatpak for user applications solves the rest of the noted issues. Would be ideal if I could install with Nix instead of Flatpak, but ran into some trouble there.