The desktop doesn't, but the gaming session uses gamescope, which is a Wayland compositor. Doesn't that mean that effectively games on the Deck run on Wayland?

No. Gamescope is essentially an XWayland compositor. It uses Wayland protocols to draw X11 applications, but can't handle Wayland-only applications. At some point it will, and at some point the desktop session will use Wayland, but not yet.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The Deck doesn't use Wayland.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Windows simply isn't designed for the use-case of being on a gaming handheld. Forcing you through a terrible setup experience, and just a generally poor experience when using it in this form factor.

Which is exacerbated by the fact that they don't generally come with even one trackpad. They might not be able to master Valve-style haptics, but just the standard trackpads these manufacturers already put in their laptops would be a huge boon for navigating a WIMP interface.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

XCOM 2 is really cheap. The Talos Principle is less than four quid. Poly Bridge 3 is less than a tenner.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Oof. A couple of days after the PPA finally got around to building the non-beta driver from the 570 branch, Nvidia releases a new one. Hopefully they'll move quicker on this one.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'm with dpanter - have it on by default if you must but keep the ability to turn it off.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It is completely unclear how they arrive at one of 3 categories, they should publish some guidelines on what 'Verified' means exactly and what a game needs to support to get it.

FWIW, they have.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/compat#DeckCompatibilityChecklist [External Link]

And then stick to those guidelines, because right now it's just one big mess.

Yep, that's the rub.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'm curious to see what your thoughts are now it's available for testing. Do you think it's too bright? Or do you love the enhancements?

When I watched the DF video about it the biggest issue was that the fire was way too bright. The environment otherwise seemed like a reasonable match to the feel of the original. I'll try the demo later but, with Ravenholm being the reason I've never completed HL2, I don't expect to enjoy it that much.

Edit: to get it to work I needed to switch to Proton Experimental and use WINE_DISABLE_HARDWARE_SCHEDULING=1 %command% as the launch option. Locked 60, but HL2 isn't fun, so I stopped.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

While graphical settings will be locked at launch, you’ll be able to choose the upscalers you want, and we’re looking into providing further options in future updates.

It's a weird approach to even consider locking the settings in the first place. It would be much better to have good automatic detection of capabilities that would work on all the range of PC hardware that's out there to set the configuration automatically, and still allow the user to set things to their preference. Like most PC games have done for many years.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

@LoudTechie The thing is, their hardcore anti-tamper approach is looking at the wrong thing. You don't really care what kernel someone is using, you care what it does. So ship a cheat with your game and see if it works. Use the namespaces and process isolation that Linux already has for srs bsns for the game itself. Have a small eBPF or whatever cheat program and see if it can break those protections. If it can't, you're good to go. If someone has altered and recompiled their kernel to let cheats work then your cheat will work, which you can detect.

View this comment - View article - View full comments