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The beginnings of a Facepunch redemption arc?

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That's a good question. I've read a fair number of comments and reviews from people saying that being able to just pick up the Steam Deck and play a game, rather than sitting down at a full-on desktop PC, somehow made it easier for them to find time to play. I'm also wondering if having the extra device will mean I can more easily play multiplayer games with friends/family at home.

We're playing Minecraft with two people in one world with PC and Steam Deck. So, yes, this night work out!

BTW, still searching for tips how to play split screen on one PC. I cannot get two controllers to work, the two Minecraft instance's controls are always interfering with each other.

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The camera comes in close sometimes in tight spaces. So if you're using a VR headset to play, then RIP.

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checked it out briefly before, they seem to be making very good decisions generally.

if they get the licensing sorted with valve for people to do standalone releases, i think you'll see a hell of a lot of general uptake.

especially devs still using unity, which i would imagine apart from inertia is mostly for first class C# support, and the many good editor UI/UX decisions (which s&box seems to be fulfilling very well too)

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Hmm... probably we'll have to give up some things we (or at least I) got used to when switching to Wayland.

I've been using Wayland now for a while, and yes, it does have its benefits. E.g on my Surface Pro 7 with Gnome, I can use the full resolution of 2736x1824 with frictional scaling to 175%. It runs very smooth. With X11 performance is very laggy when moving windows and mouse speed feels way to slow. My workaround for that was to use a lower resolution, but none matches the full 3:2 screen, closest I could get was 1680x1050 showing some black bars on top and buttom.

Also Synergy/Deskflow/InputLeap/Barrier (it's more or less all the same) still has issues, on some I get the desktop-portal question for which screen to share and permission each time I start it, while it doesn't ask it on others. Same version... and copy/paste between devices doesn't work on Wayland yet.

But I can get along with these little annoyances. What I'll really be missing is the input-overlay plugin for OBS. To show the MoveMaster keypresses on screen. But input-overlay relies on libuiohook, which apparently cannot easily be made compatible with Wayland.

VR on Ubuntu 24.04 with Gnome 46 is missing DRM leasing, but that's fixed in the next version.

My only real issue is the input-overlay. Wayland works for me pretty well otherwise, I'm using it on my Ubuntu desktop PC with nVidia, old VR gaming notebook running arch and nVidia, vBazzite uses it on my Legion Go and CachyOS uses it on my ROG Ally. And the Surface Pro 7 also running Ubuntu.

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There still isn't an onscreen keyboard that rivals 'Onboard' or anything close under KDE / Wayland. In fact, im not sure there even is a fully functioning onscreen keyboard under Wayland KDE-Plasma right now


the last i read about it was here (last post 6 days ago):

https://discuss.kde.org/t/plasma-6-and-wayland-no-on-screen-keyboard-working/17799/53

where the workaround requiring GDK_BACKEND=x11 & adding it to environment variables. Seemingly not working on Fedora. Look at the first post in that thread and see who the kinds of people are effected by the forced switch to Wayland. People are still struggling with this all the way back to the beginning of Wayland's inception. Sure there are workarounds to some extent but it's not a very user friendly solution, when you are telling regular folks to switch to Linux.

I guess valve might use xwayland on SteamOS for the onscreen keyboard ? will that cover every feature of a regular keyboard idk.

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Quoting: Cley_Faye

Quoting: melkemindSo, is Plasma Wayland in a good state for Nvidia users now?

I tried switching back to Wayland two days ago, with a relatively recent version of KDE Plasma (using KDE Neon) and an NVidia RTX 3070Ti using the latest proprietary driver.

On the upside, the issue of having *anything* with transparency freezing the whole desktop is gone. This included extensions popup in firefox and the time tooltip when hovering the clock in the notification area…

On the downside, it made weylus unusable (a particularly niche case unfortunately), related to how window location and screen arrangement are reported. And video capture is not happy too…
OBS became unpredictable (a relatively larger case I'd wager). Related, the portal popup that allow selecting a screen/window for screen sharing freeze with a particularly obtuse error message in the logs (`mesa: error: MESA: failed to import sync file 'too many open files'`) rendering the whole thing useless, as even screen sharing from the browser is now borked.

And, still happening, trying to use the clipboard from a terminal application (say, using clipboard manipulation in vim in konsole) still won't work without setting up some call to external scripts that can't handle all common use cases.

So, one day ago, I switched again to X11. Everything works, and since I have no use for fractional scaling or anything fancy on my decade old displays, there's no tangible downside.

Also, since we're on the internet, some disclaimer: I *know* that this is only a personal experience. But it exists; on a system that's mostly a vanilla installation of Ubuntu+KDE Plasma, using very common software, on a graphic card from a manufacturer that represents a large share of the general public. And some of these issues are so often brushed off that it really irks me. I don't really have the resource to put development time in Plasma's implementation of wayland, and trying to raise awareness is usually met with a wall, which is frustrating. But as it is, switching to Wayland, on my relatively modern, up-to-date system, means losing features, having some software completely unusable, and the only recourse as a user will soon disappear. It does not feel great.

Thank you for taking the time to share your experience 😌. Articulating all of this - despite previous frustrations with talking about this - sounds like not insignificant effort and time (it would be for me anyway 😄).

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Quoting: Tethys84You'd think that gamer friends of a gamer would know about all these games too.

Not necessarily. Everyone has different tastes, and there are far too many games coming out every day to keep track of all of them, let alone play them. There are tons of games I've played that my friends haven't, and vice versa.

Now, is this the best way to tell your friends about games you like? Eh… Conversation is how I prefer to do it.

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Quoting: yndoendoWent with a Framework recently.

One design competence that most companies fail at is properly balancing the USB ports. USB-C & USB-A should have one on each side versus same side next to each other. You Don't know if the power will come from right or left of the laptop from the outlet. It improves user experience when lying down on a couch because it allows the cord to be plugged into the non-backing side.

I agree, but I'd argue that is a premium feature. It almost certainly costs less to put ports of the same type next to one another. (I don't know much about PCB design, but I can speculate:) e.g. if your USB ports can do PD, having traces go all the way to the other side of the motherboard (or a second set of electronic components providing this is noticeably more complicated.

My next laptop will be the Framework 12 probably, since I really enjoy a touch screen and also a stylus for drawing/sketching (even if I don't have a great workflow for either). I also really like repairability as I've repaired my current laptop 8-10 times (both self and repair shops). That said, I still hope the Slimbook does well.

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It will fry your brain just as much as your eyes, as the action truly gets intense

Epilepsy Simulator 2025

Probably too intense for me, but it looks pretty fun !

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Fedora, like Gnome, have gotten stuck in a mindset of toxic-positivity recently imo.

It very much reminds me of an external speaker our uni teacher brought in who tried to argue for why we should stop using "negative" words like problem and instead use "positive" words like challange.

Safe to say, bringing this up in a uni environment of software engineers did not go down well. No attacks were made on the speaker, only criticism of the idea and criticising the idea that problem was a negative word. Overall we considered it a positive thing as we were taught to be in the mindset of problem solvers.

And I feel like Fedora are in the same situation as our external speaker, and consider words like criticism, and problem as inherently negative. This causes them to get really defensive as we can see from e.g. the moderator Francesco in the thread linked.

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Quoting: melkemindSo, is Plasma Wayland in a good state for Nvidia users now?

I tried switching back to Wayland two days ago, with a relatively recent version of KDE Plasma (using KDE Neon) and an NVidia RTX 3070Ti using the latest proprietary driver.

On the upside, the issue of having *anything* with transparency freezing the whole desktop is gone. This included extensions popup in firefox and the time tooltip when hovering the clock in the notification area…

On the downside, it made weylus unusable (a particularly niche case unfortunately), related to how window location and screen arrangement are reported. And video capture is not happy too…
OBS became unpredictable (a relatively larger case I'd wager). Related, the portal popup that allow selecting a screen/window for screen sharing freeze with a particularly obtuse error message in the logs (`mesa: error: MESA: failed to import sync file 'too many open files'`) rendering the whole thing useless, as even screen sharing from the browser is now borked.

And, still happening, trying to use the clipboard from a terminal application (say, using clipboard manipulation in vim in konsole) still won't work without setting up some call to external scripts that can't handle all common use cases.

So, one day ago, I switched again to X11. Everything works, and since I have no use for fractional scaling or anything fancy on my decade old displays, there's no tangible downside.

Also, since we're on the internet, some disclaimer: I *know* that this is only a personal experience. But it exists; on a system that's mostly a vanilla installation of Ubuntu+KDE Plasma, using very common software, on a graphic card from a manufacturer that represents a large share of the general public. And some of these issues are so often brushed off that it really irks me. I don't really have the resource to put development time in Plasma's implementation of wayland, and trying to raise awareness is usually met with a wall, which is frustrating. But as it is, switching to Wayland, on my relatively modern, up-to-date system, means losing features, having some software completely unusable, and the only recourse as a user will soon disappear. It does not feel great.

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Quoting: MayeulCI fully agree with bisbyx above, nothing prevents a compositor from implementing this today, or even a separate app, like KDE devs did for X11 screen capture compatibility. Obviously better if the apps register shortcuts themselves, though.

Quoting: syylkviewport/video memory sharing

Now I don't understand this. We already have dma-buf.

---
Back to the article: an interesting tidbit is that, last time I checked, the Steam Deck was still using the X11 session. I wonder if they are going to change this?

yea, once the X11 session is dropped, I expect SteamOS will also drop it, though probably not immediately since SteamOS packages are quite far behind.

Overall this is a welcome change, I've been running everything under Wayland since about 3/4 year and had zero issues that I could directly attribute to Wayland. Flameshot said something about Wayland being incompatible but the flatpak seems to work fine. I think it's in a good enough state so they can drop the X session entirely

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I fully agree with bisbyx above, nothing prevents a compositor from implementing this today, or even a separate app, like KDE devs did for X11 screen capture compatibility. Obviously better if the apps register shortcuts themselves, though.

Quoting: syylkviewport/video memory sharing

Now I don't understand this. We already have dma-buf.

---
Back to the article: an interesting tidbit is that, last time I checked, the Steam Deck was still using the X11 session. I wonder if they are going to change this?

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So, is Plasma Wayland in a good state for Nvidia users now?

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Went with a Framework recently.

One design competence that most companies fail at is properly balancing the USB ports. USB-C & USB-A should have one on each side versus same side next to each other. You Don't know if the power will come from right or left of the laptop from the outlet. It improves user experience when lying down on a couch because it allows the cord to be plugged into the non-backing side.

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You can find the latest version on Arch Linux and even on Fedora since the day one

Strictly speaking, both Fedora and Arch have their own testing repos that everything goes through for a while and they delay things too, but it doesn't necessarily save you from everything. Same as Debian didn't save me when LTS kernel suddenly had regressions when it wasn't even new anymore, but the probability of that on Debian is much lower of course

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Embracer, Extender, extinguisher?

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My understanding of Fedora is it's essentially a test bed for Redhat. As in it's generally stable, but if you want to depend on it, you should... probably use something else because things will happen sometimes and they will fix it, and repeat.

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Quoting: syylkWayland needs a secure and backward compatible (which, unfortunately, rules out secure) way to manage global shortcuts and keypresses and viewport/video memory sharing.

These are two sore points of still incomplete feature parity with X11.

Yes, there are workarounds. Yes, the old ways were insecure by design. Yes, it's damn hard to provide these features to unmaintained software that expects stuff to work in a certain way.

But removing used/useful features is not exactly progress, no matter in name of what is being done.

I feel like there are so many ways to do this that could be fully backwards compatible.

The way KDE is mostly handling it right now is that XWayland apps can just fully listen to everything if you allow it, just like they could on X11.

No app changes necessary.

This could go further... give me a dashboard for the portal that allows me to pick specific apps. Discord can listen to all my keypresses, so i can use PTT. Now discord doesnt have to know if its in focus, or change any code to request anything, It just needs to know "when I see the keybind, i respond". No app changes necesary.

Then they could make that dashboard allow specific keys to pass to specific apps. Now instead of passing all my keys to discord, only my PTT key needs to go. Again, they dont need to know that they arent seeing global keypresses, they just need to know to respond to the keybind, which they will see without understanding why. No app changes necessary. Still fully backwards compatible.

And then all apps need is some sort of way to interact with this dashboard, so users don't need to go to a KDE dashboard to configure discord (or OBS, or etc), the app can say "oh my PTT keybind is now X, and I see the user is on wayland, I should make sure X is a keybind I can see globally"

And then taking it _even further_ it would be neat to allow the sharing to not be global. "This app overlay can only listen to my keybinds when the app it is an overlay for is focused." Steam gets around this by being the one who launches the game as a child process, so it can listen to the game keybinds in its overlay, but I have other apps that have 3rd party overlays that I _want_ to allow to listen to my keypresses when Im using the app, but not globally.

I believe for the most part, these things are sort of what KDE is currently doing... It has a way of requesting global shortcuts, which it adds to its global keybinds (the keybind for X becomes "send keystroke X to specified app"). However in my experience in the past, global DE keybinds tend to consume the keybind. If I want "control" to be my PTT button, I dont want discord to consume all control keypresses. I want discord to see control being pressed, but I dont want it to be THE control handler.

The whole interface is currently a bit clunky. But it at least works. I had an app surprise me by popping up the KDE portal requesting a global keybind map. I can find these in the KDE `System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts > System Services > org.chromium.Chromium` config (the app that prompted me to set things up was an electron app).

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Thanks!

Quoting: EikeBut, to be honest: If you're not playing in the first place, do you thing Steam Deck will change that?

That's a good question. I've read a fair number of comments and reviews from people saying that being able to just pick up the Steam Deck and play a game, rather than sitting down at a full-on desktop PC, somehow made it easier for them to find time to play. I'm also wondering if having the extra device will mean I can more easily play multiplayer games with friends/family at home. But I'm also not sure, which is one reason why I'm thinking of the (relatively) low-end LCD model (if I get one at all) rather than splashing out on the OLED.

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Love seeing Embracer go down. Good for Cryptic to be free again. They made some really decent games back then, when they were still independent. Maybe they can again.

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Wayland has some interesting issues, and most of them can be resolved by switching to x11, but the most important thing in life is to have the Wayland Plasma Wiggle Mouse feature enabled.

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I think this is good news and definitely the right call by the developers. It still leaves over a year for the last remaining issues (or whatever justifies keeping X11 around) to be ironed out, and means that developer time can be freed up to making a better desktop overall, and even beyond that LTS distributions will no doubt still offer it for a few more years.

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How repairable are the Slimbook laptops? The only spec that kind of sticks out as not great is the WiFi card, but if it's replaceable that isn't a huge issue.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismRedHat and therefore IBM are terrible stewards of Xorg, which lead to the forking and creation of XLibre, which unlike Xorg is __NOT__ on "life support" with people trying to kill the project.

I've now read about Wayland for 15 years, and it still has basic issues according to conjecture.

Viva La X

More Choices, More Better.

I can understand some Linux users not being informed on such issues but not developers. The fact is, it's been known for years that X was in maintenance/end of life mode. That XLibre developer knew this or should have known this, but made a big stink anyway.

As for Wayland, I use it everyday (with nvidia) with KDE/Plasma6 and I do play some games without issues on Steam.

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Wayland needs a secure and backward compatible (which, unfortunately, rules out secure) way to manage global shortcuts and keypresses and viewport/video memory sharing.

These are two sore points of still incomplete feature parity with X11.

Yes, there are workarounds. Yes, the old ways were insecure by design. Yes, it's damn hard to provide these features to unmaintained software that expects stuff to work in a certain way.

But removing used/useful features is not exactly progress, no matter in name of what is being done.

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Quoting: scaineDisolver Group.

I was thinking Divester Group.

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Quoting: Linux_RocksUgh, I forgot that IBM owns Red Hat now. Even more of a reason to never touch Fedora ever again...

Hey, could be a lot worse. Could be Oracle.

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Poke your eyes out?
. . . Just how close were you planning to get?

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