Quoting: whizseOverall, I'm glad Valve is bringing demos back. But please, keep them in place after the festival is over. There's no way I have time to try out even half the titles that catch my fancy!

This came up with another recent article. A lot of game devs believe that if a potential customer is able to satisfy their curiosity with a demo, the dev won't be able to pick their pocket for the full game price. I think that's an abhorrent attitude. But by enforcing the demos being unavailable on launch day to placate the devs, Valve can get them to actually make a demo in the first place.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeI'm hoping the 'SteamPal' has some sort of modularity to the controller though, being able to hot swap buttons and control sticks around like the Thrustmaster eSwap controller would be amazing!

Yeah, that could be awesome. Having button blocks, D-pad blocks, touchpad blocks, and stick blocks that you can swap out, to suit your taste (not having to choose between GameCube-style and PlayStation-style) or for easy replacement when they get sticky or whatever. They might find that it adds too much cost to the build, or are too fiddly at the size they need to be, though, so that's in my nice-to-have list rather than something that I'm particularly expecting.

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Quoting: EikeWould this mean specialized OpenGL drivers could be abandoned in favor of Vulkan (only) drivers?

I think that existing OpenGL drivers will still be a thing, but I can see new hardware, like new embedded things, and stuff that only has an unmaintained or problematic OpenGL implementation blowing that out to rely on a Vulkan implementation and Zink.

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They emailed to say "Linux won't be available for EA I'm afraid, but we will be working on getting it to you as soon as possible!".

That suggests that they're doing it wrong. Multiplatform from the start makes the whole dev process easier. Trying to shoehorn it in later makes everything harder, and you'll likely have to redo a bunch of stuff that you did wrong the first time, and assumptions you've made or third-party tools that you rely on might mean that you can't do it at all.

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Quoting: HoriObviously you wouldn't see your strategy games there since they don't (IMO: can't) work with a controller

The right touchpad on the Steam Controller worked pretty well as a mouse substitute. I expect the handheld will have that. The left one didn't work that well as a D-pad substitute, so I don't know if it will have one of those. Maybe if they go with the swappable modules they have a patent on. The display is also expected to have a touchscreen. I think that the touchpad/touchscreen combination should work well for a lot of strategy games. Particularly fiddly or particularly information-dense ones won't likely be great, but I can see something like Civ or something like Northgard being fine.

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Quoting: NoStThe problem is that the whitelist is currently very short (less than 100 titles, I think). That's why it needs to be expanded.

The thing with the whitelist was that Valve themselves took on the official support of running it in Proton; the devs were off the hook entirely, and if they released an update (Steam is primarily a tool to get everyone's game updated, after all) that broke the game in Proton, Valve were left holding the bag. They can't keep doing that indefinitely.

Instead, the Proton github contains compatibility reports for thousands of games. They know, for each game, which versions of Proton work (and they're very bothered by any regressions), and they know which settings are necessary. They'll also know all the specifics of the device: hardware, driver version, kernel version, specific runtime. I think they'll use that to initially populate their list of compatible games. But if a game is going to keep its "compatible" tag then the game devs themselves are going to have to test each update in the specific environment for the handheld before it goes live, and remedy it if it doesn't work. I think Valve are happy to collaborate on that process, and make it as easy as possible for the game devs, but they won't want to do all the work, nor have all the liability.

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Quoting: MohandevirTime wil tell... But this time, I'm getting ready to be in the starting blocks, if Valve hit the "sweet spot".

So this [External Link] is the sort of target for a "handheld gaming PC." I think that something from Valve could solve a lot of its shortcomings.

I'm sure this device's 2560x1600 display is lovely, but it isn't able to hit that as a render target, pretty much ever. Dropping that to 1080p or 1920×1200 in the same sort of size will help it run at native res more of the time. Gamescope should be able to do a better job of upscaling than a third party using Windows when the device can't render at native res, too, as well as having the ability to run at 30 fps capped, say, without needing to change the game itself.

Xe is better than older AMD integrated graphics, but RDNA 2 is rumoured to be better still. We haven't had a shootout at the very low TDPs yet, though.

LP-DDR5 should have much better bandwidth at lower power draw than the DDR4 used in that device. I suspect that it will still need 16 GB, though, even at 1080p - less seems like too much corner cutting, which would hamper its longevity.

I think that Valve, as a long-term partner of AMD and (hopefully) getting economies of scale, would be able to get a much better price for the components than a crowdfunded company getting them retail from Intel. Valve also don't need to necessarily make a profit on the hardware. They won't want to make a loss, but they aren't relying on profits from the hardware to stay in business. That means that the price to customers of a Valve device should be quite a lot lower.

As I understand it, Windows is free if the screen is small, so the licence price isn't an issue for a handheld. They won't want to use Windows, anyway, though. It caused limitations for that other device. Valve can control the entire running environment of the games as well as the drivers and user interface, which a third party relying on Windows simply can't.

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Quoting: dpanterhowever, since many are shorter than 80, you'll see the last line from the previous update as well sometimes.

The -n 1 that I snuck into the rsstail should just pull the latest entry I think. My little one is poorly and needed a cuddle, so I stopped testing it after that.

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Quoting: dpanterAs you can see, the text probably doesn't fit in a default sized window.

You could pipe the feed through something like fold or par before you put it in the text file (or after you've pulled out just the last line), and then display the multiple lines in conkyMangoHUD.

So something like
rsstail -N -n 1 -i 300 -u https://www.gamingonlinux.com/article_rss.php > /path/to/file/golrss.txt
and
exec=par 35 < /path/to/file/golrss.txt

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exec

MangoHud is now the conky of gaming.

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