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Steam Families announced with parental controls, no more library locking
By CatKiller, 19 March 2024 at 10:34 am UTC

Quoting: poiuz
Quoting: CatKillerNot unless you Family Share with yourself as an alt account.
Did you or someone test this with the beta client? I don't think I saw this scenario mentioned in the FAQ.
I'm pretty sure that having an alt is against the TOS, so they're unlikely to recommend it in their FAQ.

Apex Legends Global Series postponed due to mid-match hacks
By dpanter, 19 March 2024 at 10:27 am UTC

...we investigated the investigation of ourselves... <crickets>

Apex Legends Global Series postponed due to mid-match hacks
By Liam Dawe, 19 March 2024 at 10:10 am UTC

Updated with statement from Epic Online Services.

Steam Families announced with parental controls, no more library locking
By poiuz, 19 March 2024 at 9:47 am UTC

Quoting: CatKillerNot unless you Family Share with yourself as an alt account.
Did you or someone test this with the beta client? I don't think I saw this scenario mentioned in the FAQ.

Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars remaster hits over £400k on Kickstarter
By scaine, 19 March 2024 at 8:06 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: kokoko3k
Quoting: chuzzle44the fact that I'm willing to buy a remake of a game I already have for free says
...that software houses needs to make remakes to fight piracy?

No, that anti-piracy measures are pointless. They already said that. Why you trying to rewrite their comment?

Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming
By TheSHEEEP, 19 March 2024 at 8:00 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: CatKillerIt very much sounds like a scam to extract money from venture capitalists.
. . . Mind you, I don't have a big problem with that. Those folks clearly need money extracted from them.
Please don't make fun of them.

Just like cows who will be in pain if not milked, venture capitalists are in pain if money is not extracted :(

Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming
By Tevur, 19 March 2024 at 8:05 am UTC

Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: CatKillerIt very much sounds like a scam to extract money from venture capitalists.
well at least it will be from venture capitalists lol

Well, sadly this money isn't their own but from the small people in search of a way to invest a little money to supplement their pension, whom they sell shitty financial products with big promises but no real return.

Steam Families announced with parental controls, no more library locking
By doragasu, 19 March 2024 at 7:35 am UTC

Awesome! I thought they would never do this, since I suspect they get a lot of pressure from many publishers against these kind of features.

Thanks Gabe!

Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars remaster hits over £400k on Kickstarter
By pleasereadthemanual, 19 March 2024 at 7:19 am UTC

Quoting: whizse
Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThat's good to hear. A track record like that makes them trustworthy and gives that claim weight.
Revolution is my favorite dev. They almost always do the right thing:

Worked together with ScummVM devs for the Broken Sword support.
Made FLOSS releases for older titles (Lure of the Temptress, Beneath a Steel Sky) game data and source code (when it was available. Lure I think was lost?)
Totally cool with fan fiction like the excellent Broken Sword 2.5.
Hired people from the community. (Don't recall if it was from ScummVM or BS2.5?)

Plus of course the Linux ports for their recent'ish games.
Revolution sounds like a great developer. While Kickstarter campaigns are infamous for not fulfilling their promises (Re: Sharin no Kuni for a visual novel example, and I've already linked the "nevermind we can't do Linux" examples), some really cool stuff has been funded. This seems like the latter.

Broken Sword may not be the sort of game I typically play, but as I said, it looks cool, and I might buy it when it's out on GOG.

Steam Families announced with parental controls, no more library locking
By CatKiller, 19 March 2024 at 7:03 am UTC

Quoting: mZSq7Fq3qsDoes this allow me playing a game with my steam deck and another game with my pc?
Not unless you Family Share with yourself as an alt account. You could already play on both with the one account if one of the devices is in offline mode.

Steam Families announced with parental controls, no more library locking
By 200Puls, 19 March 2024 at 6:56 am UTC

It was getting a bit annoying when my kids are playing in the living room on my chimera os box and I cannot use my desktop or steamdeck.
So awesome change!

Steam Families announced with parental controls, no more library locking
By mZSq7Fq3qs, 19 March 2024 at 6:47 am UTC

Does this allow me playing a game with my steam deck and another game with my pc?

Steam Families announced with parental controls, no more library locking
By ElectricPrism, 19 March 2024 at 6:40 am UTC

Quoting: Mountain Manbut I can't imagine developers and publishers are going to be too thrilled about the possibility of this feature cutting into their sales.

The primal human -- using the lower brain functions is definately going to be afraid of "loosing sales".

But kick in higher brain functions & logic and get the opposite result. The more people that play your game the more The Network Effect happens and the more sales.

What's worse than people playing your game and talking about it among family? Nobody playing your game and nobody talking about it.

Lower & Higher brain functions can be a funny thing.

Apex Legends Global Series postponed due to mid-match hacks
By tuubi, 19 March 2024 at 6:15 am UTC

Quoting: hell0
Quoting: tuubiHow are these Windows permission management features much better than their Linux equivalents? Are there relevant studies, or maybe some solid metrics you used to rank them yourself? Or did you base your claim on something else entirely?

POSIX ACLs use the group permission as mask, this means non-ACL-aware programs can completely screw up permissions by changing what they believe to be something different. It is also impossible to set a default ACL that allows traversing directories but not executing files. There is also very little support for ACLs, you're pretty much stuck with "setfacl". Meanwhile, on Windows, you get a complete and robust tool by right clicking any file/folder.

It gets worse if you try to manage permissions over a large group of devices. Windows has Active Directory, on Linux you can sort of achieve something similar by slapping together LDAP and a bunch of other softwares but it's nowhere near as complete or easy to setup.

One point on which Linux is more advanced though is containerisation/sandboxing. Going back to the original topic, running steam through some sort of sandbox (flatpak, snap, appimage, firejail) could, in theory, limit the damage a RCE could do (disclaimer: as with all thing security, it's more complicated than just "use this and it's safe" so do your own research).

Okay. I hear you. I'm not convinced that Windows is better at this stuff than Linux, as my experiences differ from yours and so does the research I've read on the subject. I guess these things are complicated enough that people will disagree. And the implementations are certainly different under the hood.

I'm not going to debate this any further, simply because this is too close to stuff I have to worry about at work. Windows is bleak enough to think about even when I'm being paid for it.

I will say that the only relevant thing to this discussion is the security of the typical gaming setup on Linux vs one on Windows. Optional enterprise features aren't going to come into play.

Steam Families announced with parental controls, no more library locking
By based, 19 March 2024 at 5:18 am UTC

This is AWESOME

Quoting: Nateman1000Thank god there’s gonna be a time where I need to pass down my steam library to be little brother

You don't need to pass down your Steam library to be a little brother :p

Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars remaster hits over £400k on Kickstarter
By kokoko3k, 19 March 2024 at 8:04 am UTC

Quoting: chuzzle44the fact that I'm willing to buy a remake of a game I already have for free says
...that software houses needs to make remakes to fight piracy?

God of War now DRM-freed with a GOG release and discount
By ToddL, 19 March 2024 at 4:30 am UTC

Quoting: juliandelphikiI'm curious: what is the best option for playing gog games on linux these days? I have quite a large library and would love to continue supporting gog for their DRM free stance, but once I switched from Windows to Fedora last year the fact that they don't offer a linux version of their launcher left a bad taste in my mouth and I just decided to expand my steam library instead. I'm assuming lutris or heroic games launcher are still the best? Can they really compete with the steam stability or is manual tweaking for each game still a common occurrence? Thanks for the info!

Since I game a lot on the Steam Deck, what I usually do is take the offline installer and add them as a Non-Steam game in Desktop Mode so that I can install the game into the internal SSD or microSD card. After that, just add the artwork and update the Target and Start In to point to the executable and game folder, respectively. This way, I have them appear as separate games in Gaming Mode. Of course, you can use Heroic Launcher if you like to keep them organized.

Steam Families announced with parental controls, no more library locking
By CatKiller, 19 March 2024 at 2:33 am UTC

Quoting: Mountain ManI guess the "one person is banned, you're all banned" rule is meant to safeguard against a dozen people all sharing the same game library, but I can't imagine developers and publishers are going to be too thrilled about the possibility of this feature cutting into their sales.

That's not how it works.

The person who got themselves banned is banned. The person who owned the copy of the game (if there are multiple copies in the pool you need to say whose you are playing) also gets banned. Everyone else in the pool can keep playing.

Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming
By Pengling, 19 March 2024 at 2:01 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThey did.
A Linux-user never forgets!

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualBut the quote that makes me laugh and laugh is this:

QuoteAnd he says games like Fortnite and Roblox shouldn’t have to fear hackers reverse engineering their anti-cheat solutions because its Fedora Silverblue base has an immutable file system.
I wonder what their special-sauce is for getting these companies who refuse to support Linux to support Linux?

I mean, really, this comes right off of the back of Roblox recently blocking Linux when they didn't before...

The Mirror aims to be a Roblox & UEFN alternative and now it's open source
By elmapul, 19 March 2024 at 1:54 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: benstor214What's with the words popping up in the video? Am I supposed to karaoke along?
they tried to provide their own captions with some tech, i think (the tech) is open source, i remember that someone was developing an great tool for that, but the fact that they let one word at the time instead of one line or two make it harder to read, not to mention this tool dont know the word godot and write it differently each time this word appear.

they should soft sub it instead of hardsubing it.

Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming
By pleasereadthemanual, 19 March 2024 at 1:48 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: PenglingHang on a minute, Ayaneo already bailed on a Linux-based machine this year once as it is!
They did.

But the quote that makes me laugh and laugh is this:

QuoteAnd he says games like Fortnite and Roblox shouldn’t have to fear hackers reverse engineering their anti-cheat solutions because its Fedora Silverblue base has an immutable file system.

Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming
By elmapul, 19 March 2024 at 1:46 am UTC

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThe Verge article is very enlightening on many subjects. Please give it a read if you haven't: https://www.theverge.com/24090470/playtron-gaming-os-linux-handhelds-exclusive

Further excerpts from The Verge article:

QuotePlaytron will cost companies like Ayaneo a fraction of the price of Windows, he says, around $10 per head instead of the $80 that OEMs tell him they spend today. And he says games like Fortnite and Roblox shouldn’t have to fear hackers reverse engineering their anti-cheat solutions because its Fedora Silverblue base has an immutable file system. (I thought SteamOS was immutable, too, but I’ll let more knowledgeable Linux users argue that one.)

what a load of bullshit.
imutable distros arent that hard to break into, at the worst case scenario you fork it and sundely you have an system with anti cheat disabled.
or maybe their anti cheat solution is proprietary but then they enter in a minefield of GPL.

Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming
By elmapul, 19 March 2024 at 1:38 am UTC

Quoting: CatKillerIt very much sounds like a scam to extract money from venture capitalists.
well at least it will be from venture capitalists lol

Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming
By Pengling, 19 March 2024 at 1:36 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: elmapulthat reminds me of smach z, they promissed make an controler that even valve cant match in an computer with good specs and many other things, initially they said they were going to use linux for some reason, but then, they felt enough pressure to change to windows and...
where are they again anyway?
took people money then disapear?
Oh goodness, I haven't heard the Smach Z mentioned in aaaaaaaaaaaages!

The last stuff I heard was by way of this video about the continued lack of a prototype and the company's president being in hiding, and that was five years ago.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThe Verge article is very enlightening on many subjects. Please give it a read if you haven't: https://www.theverge.com/24090470/playtron-gaming-os-linux-handhelds-exclusive

Further excerpts from The Verge article:

QuotePlaytron will cost companies like Ayaneo a fraction of the price of Windows, he says, around $10 per head instead of the $80 that OEMs tell him they spend today. And he says games like Fortnite and Roblox shouldn’t have to fear hackers reverse engineering their anti-cheat solutions because its Fedora Silverblue base has an immutable file system. (I thought SteamOS was immutable, too, but I’ll let more knowledgeable Linux users argue that one.)
Hang on a minute, Ayaneo already bailed on a Linux-based machine this year once as it is!

Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming
By pleasereadthemanual, 19 March 2024 at 1:35 am UTC Likes: 2

The Verge article is very enlightening on many subjects. Please give it a read if you haven't: https://www.theverge.com/24090470/playtron-gaming-os-linux-handhelds-exclusive

Further excerpts from The Verge article:

QuotePlaytron will cost companies like Ayaneo a fraction of the price of Windows, he says, around $10 per head instead of the $80 that OEMs tell him they spend today. And he says games like Fortnite and Roblox shouldn’t have to fear hackers reverse engineering their anti-cheat solutions because its Fedora Silverblue base has an immutable file system. (I thought SteamOS was immutable, too, but I’ll let more knowledgeable Linux users argue that one.)

QuoteMcMaster says he’s hired the developer behind Box86 to bring Windows games to efficient Arm-based silicon, potentially getting us out of the rut where today’s portable PCs max out at two to three hours of AAA gaming battery life.

QuoteIf you’re wondering how a brand-new startup convinces hardware manufacturers and mobile carriers with what looks like a glorified games launcher and a few big ideas, you’re not alone. Even Playtron’s allies aren’t trying to claim this is a sure bet.

“It’s a game of conditional probabilities; 10 different things need to happen and each of them has a very low probability of success,” says Carlos Castellanos, an investor at Samsung Next who led Playtron’s first round of funding. Game publishers, hardware manufacturers, cellular carriers, and the community would all need to be engaged.

QuoteThat said, Lagerling also helped broker Google’s short-lived purchase of Motorola, and McMaster probably destroyed CyanogenMod while trying to turn it into CyanogenOS. He tells me he learned that you shouldn’t try to commercialize an open-source project with a significant history because it can lead to culture wars — but says that, this time, everyone’s aligned from the start.

“They all have the open-source ethos, but they’re all gamers... they want to build an open source operating system that allows them to play unencumbered.”

QuotePlaytron hasn’t quite decided just how open source it’ll be, though, and how much it will cater to Linux power gamers versus the next hundred million that Playtron hopes to bring into the fold. McMaster tells me Playtron’s definitely skewing more toward the ease of use of a Nintendo Switch, partnering with Perplexity on an AI agent that could keep “core-casual” gamers from ditching games prematurely just because they got stuck on a challenge or puzzle. There’ll be no Linux desktop mode.

QuoteAnd yet, Playtron’s also hoping to get help from Linux power users, releasing a public alpha in the next 60 days so the community can request features, contribute to code repositories if they can, and help improve game compatibility by building launch configs and test scripts.

QuoteValve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais now tells me the company’s finally working directly with other companies to bring SteamOS to its handhelds

Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming
By pleasereadthemanual, 19 March 2024 at 1:13 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: melkemindI think some people are confused by this announcement. They're not making another handheld. They're making an OS. This is essentially a new Linux distro. But I'm guessing it'll end up being more like ChromeOS (with proprietary bits on top) than your typical distro.

From The Verge interview Liam linked:

Quote“We’re in conversation with numerous OEMs and mobile operators to build and deploy Playtron devices around the world in the 2025 timeframe,” McMaster tells me — adding that Ayaneo plans to ship a native Playtron handheld by the end of 2024.

Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming
By elmapul, 19 March 2024 at 12:51 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: PenglingGiven the names involved, hopefully this won't end up being yet another one of those cases where it's revealed as a Linux box and then there's a bait-and-switch to "Oops, we're shipping with Windows instead because people asked for it!".
Well, the entire idea is based around it being Linux, so that won't happen.
the issue is that this look like a solution in search for a problem

Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming
By elmapul, 19 March 2024 at 12:43 am UTC Likes: 1

that reminds me of smach z, they promissed make an controler that even valve cant match in an computer with good specs and many other things, initially they said they were going to use linux for some reason, but then, they felt enough pressure to change to windows and...
where are they again anyway?
took people money then disapear?

Playtron plan to launch PlaytronOS, a Linux-based system for gaming
By cbstryker, 19 March 2024 at 12:42 am UTC

QuoteTheir CEO is also Kirt McMaster

Isn't this the same guy that said he was "going to put a bullet in Google's head"?

I think I'll pass on anything this guy touches.