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I actually just played through these not long ago. I remember playing Hexen as a kid and never finishing because I was totally lost. I figured it was because I was just a dumb kid.

But re-playing it now, the maps were so labyrinthian and the changes done by the million switches you have to hit were at times so subtle that I still couldn't beat it without consulting a walkthrough.

They were decently fun to play through, but I am kind of sick of them after having gone through all of it. I'll have to give it a while before I try the new content. Hopefully by then gzdoom will support the new episodes.

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"a gift to hackers and hostile actors"

translation: a gift to governments. They ARE the hostile actors.

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FAR Changing Tides and its sequel were very good, great on Steam Deck. Short and fun and memorable, shorter than A Short Hike maybe.
Alba of course is excellent, benign, cute, and the main photography feature very well thought out. Classic game.
Pretty good bundle actually.

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The native package pulls in the libraries - and so does the Snap package... Of course. They're needed. You don't really see the count of packages containing the libd as a disadvantage, do you?

I do.

Ok. I don't.

Die folgenden Pakete haben unerfüllte Abhängigkeiten:
steam-installer : Hängt ab von: steam-libs-i386 (= 1:1.0.0.79~ds-2) ist aber nicht installierbar
E: Probleme können nicht korrigiert werden, Sie haben zurückgehaltene defekte Pakete.

Well, there's something wrong with the state of your packages.
(Which should be repaired in any case, no matter Snap or Steam.)

steam-installer depending on steam-libs-i386 (= 1:1.0.0.79~ds-2) seems right according to https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/steam-installer

Wanna share what you've got in your sources list(s)?

I guess "dpkg --get-selections | grep hold" yields nothing?

Synaptic has a function edit => fix broken packages. I just learned about it and never used it, but you could give it a try.

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https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/08/farlight-84-is-now-broken-on-linux-steamos-steam-deck/

(You even commented on the game not running before writing above comment...)

That's a multiplayer game.
For obvious reasons (and as I'm pretty sure I wrote above), MP games are exempt from this - they would run just fine, if the player wasn't flagged as cheater.

I did comment under the full assumption that that is the case - because, well, that's what it almost always is.

Oh! I do remember a crash now that I had under Proton when changing certain graphical settings in a game, maybe a year or two ago, which didn't happen under Windows.

However - that crash was unrelated to Proton, it was (IIRC) some sequence of AMD GPU calls (on Linux only) that would cause a crash no matter what tried to execute them. It was just through Proton and that game that I noticed - others had the same issue coming from other sources.

Nothing the dev could've done about it, either.

So yes, there was such a bug that did not happen under Windows. But it didn't affect my ability to play so I quickly forgot about it and don't really consider it important.

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But I cannot even remember the last time Proton was not able to run a game. It must've been years ago.
For a while I checked ProtonDB before buying a game - I don't even do that anymore.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/08/farlight-84-is-now-broken-on-linux-steamos-steam-deck/

(You even commented on the game not running before writing above comment...)

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The gist of everything is that for anything serious to happen, the share has to rise.

I agree with that.

But.

If we're now shouting
"Just use Proton! Don't do ports! Ports are bad!"
... I fear, developers might later, when the share has risen, just say:
"Just use Proton! We don't do ports! Ports are bad!"
It's what Linux gamers said! For years! Right?!?

People used to try to push the doors open for Linux being a first class gaming system.
I agree with you that it might have been mostly futile. I know for sure that it wasn't 100%. (I am at least responsible for one port, just by friendly nudging.) But yes, I don't think it accomplished much.

But what people are doing now, they're Linux gamers mind you, is pushing the doors in the other direction.

If you're fine running your games with Proton, alright. No problem with that.

But would you then just leave the doors to first class Linux gaming as they are?

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I might split my answer into side-track and the important stuff.

Obvious side-track:

Nowadays not only "I can run it." seems to be enough for most people.

I am going to assume the first "not only" is too much, otherwise I don't get that sentence.

It's supposed to bind the sentence to the next one. I'm no native speaker, but I think it should work out in context:

Nowadays not only "I can run it." seems to be enough for most people. They even started to actively ask developers to not port games.

(emphasis added)

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I hope Mangohud continues to get support and development though since not every game is played via Steam.

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I'm gonna advertise my work a bit here then, for I have a set of python scripts that allow one to automate the compilation and install of julius (and some other free game reimplementation) in fedora and debian systems https://codeberg.org/b10p1x3l/ludotheke

Just in case it's useful for someone

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@theriddick look up steamcmd

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Valve should just do a CLI API that forgo's all UI GUI functionality. Much like how Legendary can launch epic games without anything but command line arguments.

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@Mountain Man Chromebooks completely took over education, at least in the US. It was happening before covid, but covid's what completed Google's conquest.

(tbf, the desktop computers we used when I was growing up were running streamlined ZENWorks on top of Windows, so it's not like we were much better off as far as learning how to use a workstation from school; I don't want to give the impression kids now are relatively disadvantaged by using one giant corporation's solution instead of another)

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It was working very well, what a shame... Mostly with "old games" true, but still it was a blast. Yes I bought a gaming Chromebook a few years ago, and I didn't regret it until now ^^. Pretty disappointed, but I guess I should have seen it coming.

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On the question of how well Proton works vs. native, the thing about some of your points is that people expect Proton not to work. I mean, yeah, they figure it will work most of the time, but failure is part of the normal parameters of using a thing like Proton;

Maybe initially, when it all started out?
But I cannot even remember the last time Proton was not able to run a game. It must've been years ago.
For a while I checked ProtonDB before buying a game - I don't even do that anymore.

Besides, plenty devs officially support Proton at this point - of course people then expect it to work, just like they would with a native port.

At this point in time (with the exception of MP and VR games), Proton is very much a "it just works" thing. And widely perceived as that as well. You are honestly the first person I see viewing it so negatively.
And I talk to lots of Linux folk, and even more to gamers outside the Linux sphere (usually talking about the OS itself), all of which very much seem to think they could run their games very well on Linux (and they expect occasional fiddling), but they are intimidated by the OS itself.

You are really allowing your own exceptional experience to cloud your judgement of what most people see - for that, a look at ProtonDB reports is more than enough. Way over 90% silver+ for reported games puts failure outside of a "normal parameter" with Proton at this point.

Nobody reports it to the devs when they try a Windows game in Proton and it doesn't work; they know it's not supported.

That depends a bit on what your definition of "reporting to devs" is.
You can find plenty of bug reports of people running a game through Proton on Steam forums. Most of which of course not related to Proton.
But in the past, for example at least until Proton got its video support fixed, you could see a lot of issues raised ala "game works fine through Proton, but videos don't play" (remember that "TV test screen" thing?). Usually devs reacted to it, pretty much always others, with a variety of end results.
But it did get reported - official support or not.

If you are specifically talking about some dev-specific bug report channel, then yeah, you are probably right - but it's not like those are ever used by most people to begin with.
The vast majority of users, as in 90+%, do not ever use bug reporting features or "proper" channels (and I can tell you that from decades developing user-facing software) - and I'd wager gamers do it even less.

And again, lots of official Proton (often in the form of Steam Deck) support by now.

Then, it also depends on which dev you are talking about.
There is the Proton bug tracker, the Github one - obviously most people will never have a Github account, but considering that (and likely due to the higher amount of techies among Linux users) the amount of reports there are surprisingly high.
So, one could argue those very much report to the devs - the devs of Proton.
If some Proton-related bug is more likely to be fixed by the game dev or the Proton dev depends on the case.

It's not a symmetrical thing when it comes to how and whether people complain,

Oh, man, people complain.

Doesn't matter if anyone thinks it is "reasonable" or "plausible" - we are long past the times where one could expect people to behave in those categories, especially online.
If you think people wouldn't complain to a developer because something is not officially supported, then you live in extreme contrast to reality.

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I thought The Forgotten City was great / agree with the overwhelmingly positive reviews.

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google is way more stupid than i thought

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I have a Chromebook, but it stopped receiving updates years ago, so I put a regular Linux distro on it (can't remember which one). As it's an x86 Chromebook, Steam runs perfectly on Linux. Since then I've also been Degoogling. I don't even use Google as a search engine anymore. I used to think their using Linux would be good for us, but boy was I wrong!

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@Tevur No, but I just noticed these two projects exist:

https://github.com/dalerank/Akhenaten (for Pharaoh)
https://github.com/MaurycyLiebner/eZeus (for Zeus)

So I'm very excited about it, as I like them a lot more (I didn't play Caesar III at the time), but didn't tried those yet!

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I look forward to more feature as mango hud doesn't show power draw on my cpu, as well as a few other details

If you're using an Intel CPU your system is probably configured in a way that only root has access to that data by default hence you need to give your user the appropriate permissions to access that data aswell.

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I look forward to more feature as mango hud doesn't show power draw on my cpu, as well as a few other details

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This is surprising. Not that Valve is abandoning Steam on Chromebooks but that Chromebooks still exist. I thought Google had already discontinued them.

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The thing is... All the known distributions will drop 32-bit at some point. And for the same reasons why 16- and 8-bit binaries are not suported (natively) anymore.

So it's not a matter of "if", but rather "when".

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Local gaming always felt weird, on a cloud based laptop. GeForce Now, Xbox Gamepass (cloud) and Amazon Luna are feeling more aligned with this philosophy.

So... A Valve branded SteamOS laptop?

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I've installed LACT as I got adviced to use it for VR, there should be a VR profile, but for me on nVidia (2080 and 3070) there are no profiles at all. Has anyone use this and has profiles?
Someone stated SteamVR on Linux is putting the GPU into a kinda save mode periodically and that profile would change that. Yet, I've not been able to find a VR profile neither in LACT nor in corectl.
Any help would be appreciated.

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Big recommend for Journey to the Savage Planet - absolutely loved that game. I think there's a sequel just out too? Or about to land?

And obviously a Short Hike is incredible.

I might splash on this one though, cos I haven't played the others.

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I had a lot of fun playing through Pharao a couple years ago, so I might need to give this a try.

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No surprise considering that ChromeOS is already dead.

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https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/google_announcement.png

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Fixed long loading times in God Eater Resurrection

Finally God Eater is fixed I think this should fix God Eater 2 as well I think it had the same bug so they should be playable now. The long loads were 5-10 minutes maybe more for everything the game had to load every character option, every weapon, loading a level. Will finally be able to the game now because this game was first broken by the DRM then when they fixed the DRM issue this bug was their since 2019 I think.

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