What have you been playing recently?

I played through Old Skies, the Wolfenstein games, and Planet of Lana, with a little bit of Tempopo. The little one's played Spyro and Jelly Car Worlds.

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They do give this caveat:

What We Haven’t Tested (Yet)

Desktop Linux distributions other than SteamOS (Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, etc.)

If you play on a non-Deck Linux PC, we’d love to hear about performance, input quirks, or crashes. Share your feedback using the in-game socials (Gear Icon > Options > Email) or in the Community Hub.

Given that they've only had 7 reviews, this GOL article could make Linux users their majority customer base. It looks pretty cool.

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I think what they really want is to get the discussion going along the lines of "in order to reduce the maintenance burden of 32-bit stuff without losing too much functionality, what would we need to do?"

"The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

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There will also be multiple models of it, not just for different processors but different storage and RAM sizing too.

A confusing number of SKUs is bad in general, but it's particularly going to add more logistics headaches for a small team and will block off the ability to achieve economies of scale. It's more work for less money, which is the opposite of what you'd be hoping for with market segmentation.

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Realistically though, as I pointed out in the initial article covering it on GamingOnLinux, Fedora's user share on Steam is low to the point Valve likely won't care until more distros do it which will delay it even further.

That's not a viable method, either. You can't have lots of distros planning on breaking everything and hope that Valve swoops in as a white knight to fix it - what if they don't? What if they just keep 32-bit on SteamOS and blow out all the seppuku distros?

The method that would work is to continue the approach that Ubuntu took after they got burned by this issue - identify the 32-bit parts that are needed to keep everything working and make sure they keep working. Ideally work with other distros and application developers to make that list get smaller over time rather than bigger. Perhaps they'd ultimately be able to be put in a separate container like snap or flatpak so that all distros could have access to the same set of 32-bit libraries without having to maintain them themselves. Breaking things is a Bad Plan regardless of what Valve does or doesn't do.

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Disabled experimental support for Wake-on-Bluetooth for Steam Deck LCD while issues with spurious wake-ups are being investigated.

That's a shame. It was a real triumph that they managed to get that function working on the LCD. However, the feature also had issues with spurious wakeups on the OLED at the beginning, so hopefully they'll be able to iron those out and roll it out again.

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It would have been a nicer solution to get mangohud working on Windows & Mac rather than having to reinvent the wheel. Mangohud/mangoapp has worked so well on the Deck. I guess they hit some kind of roadblock for that approach.

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Why bother making a Mac version? You've got to muck around with ARM, Metal, notarising, and the rest, for a far smaller market than the Linux that they've already decided is too small to bother with.

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What are your thoughts?

Microsoft have never tolerated a threat to their Windows hegemony. They poured billions into their DirectX Box project to head off the potential of game developers ignoring Windows for gaming. Now everyone has seen (through the Deck as a demonstration device, and the failure of Windows handhelds to come close) that Linux is good for gaming and Windows is bad for gaming.

I expect that they'll throw a lot of resources at this to try to kill the idea of Linux as an alternative to Windows. I also expect that they'll continue spreading the FUD that downloading a bajillion launchers from a bajillion websites is "easy" (for Windows use) but installing one launcher from the built-in software centre (for Linux use) requires leet haxor skills. I expect them to try to sweeten the deal for getting everything from the Microsoft Store with things like their ActiBlizzard library, Game Pass, and mobile integration - after all, you've already got a Microsoft account, and you're already launching your Steam games from the Microsoft Store app, right?

I expect them to continue to fail to see the advantage of gyro, to continue to fail to see the advantage of trackpads, and to have the sticks in a stupid location.

I expect them to make only vague allusions to rootkit anti-tamper as something that Windows allows but Linux doesn't, rather than ever mentioning it directly, since it also annoys them that that is a thing.

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What have you been playing recently?

On the Deck this past month I've been playing Death's Door, Rosewater and Old Skies. I also did some casual deliveries in Death Stranding. Having finally got through Half Life 2 (on the desktop) I had a hankering to replay Wolfenstein, so I've just started that on the Deck.

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