Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI kind of wonder if there's much point in adopting a Flatpak package as a proprietary vendor.

It's certainly possible with any of {flatpak, snap, appimage} to have that be your official distribution method for your software. Any of them will work on any distro. Whether there's any point for a given project is a different question. The Firefox snap and the Firefox flatpak, for example, are both owned by Mozilla, and they specifically requested the Firefox snap so that updates weren't held up by the distro's update schedule and maintenance burden. But most projects are going to be quite comfortable with fan-made binary-only packages - whether in distro repositories or container repositories - without having to do any maintenance themselves.

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who is trying to build a Flatpak package and convince upstream to take control of it once I have it generally working.

I can't help you there. But even if Valve, say, wanted to take over the maintenance of a flatpak that doesn't mean that any other project would want to with theirs.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI don't know what Valve's official statement is on the Flatpak, but I have heard they don't want to take control of it for some reason. That might be due to Steam trying to spawn another sandbox inside the Flatpak sandbox, which isn't possible. I'd be curious what exactly the situation is there.

Their official statement is that it's unsupported. Same as snap, and same as any distro but Ubuntu LTS and SteamOS.

Quoting: ValveSteam only officially supports Ubuntu running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or newer and SteamOS, but the Steam for Linux community is extremely resourceful and has managed to run Steam on a large variety of distros. Valve approves of these efforts but does not officially endorse or provide support for them.

Quoting: ValveSteam has been packaged as a Flatpak app by the Flathub community, but this Flatpak app is not officially supported by Valve...

Steam has been packaged as a Snap app by Canonical, but this Snap app is not officially supported by Valve.

As far as the container goes, the Steam container is the same as flatpaks - bubblewrap - and having a container in a container specifically didn't work for bubblewrap. They had to make changes on both ends so that it would work, as I already mentioned. There are probably Phoronix or similar articles going into what exactly they did to make it work.

Edit: found the change. It was

Allow a subsandbox to have a different /usr and/or /app.
Steam will use this to launch games with its own container runtime
as /usr (the "Steam Linux Runtime" mechanism).

from flatpak 1.11.1 (in 2021) with concurrent changes to pressure-vessel. Prior to that games using the SLR or using later versions of Proton wouldn't work in the flatpak.

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Fixed startup delays when running in flatpak environments.

Interesting that Valve cares that much about the Flatpak package, but don't want to officially adopt it.

Flatpak is the fourth most popular distro in the Steam Hardware Survey. Having had to do a bunch of stuff already on both the Steam side and the flatpak side to have container-in-a-container work at all, if there's more they can do to make it work better - why not?

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One of the interesting tweaks is that Valve adjusted the CSS to "reduce feature leaks", I guess they're growing a little tired of certain people scraping it constantly to see what they're working on.

I mean, it is weird that SteamDB knows which keyboard I've picked for my Deck.

Fixed an issue where after playing a game it would require extra B button presses to back out of the game's library page.

Yay!

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I think the price is the biggest issue here. I really don't like the idea of developers undervaluing their games as they can take a lot of time and effort to make, and pricing even for indies is tough but at £24.99 for a game that really is relying on nostalgia, in years when we've had constant amazing new releases that are either cheaper or a similar price. It's a pretty tough sell.

Yeah, that is way too high. The quality and breadth of their current competitors at that price and below, and of course the long tail of the Steam catalogue, means that game doesn't stand a chance at £25. £7-8 is likely a feasible window if it's mainly fuelled by nostalgia but is otherwise competently executed.

And, for me, since it's got no Linux support, hasn't managed to get Verified, and doesn't entirely work on Linux, it's only worth at most 10% of that.

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Quoting: BrokattRemember that most PC gamers are not that tech savvy.

This still seems weird to me. I can accept that it's true, but it's weird.

I was around for the start of PC gaming, and learning what you could configure, what it did, experimenting, personalising, tweaking, overclocking, and all of that... was PC gaming. When I switched to Linux 20 years ago, nothing particular changed; I carried on gaming, I carried on learning, and I carried on personalising - I just had a broader palette to work with.

That there are generations of PC gamers since that do gaming like cubicle work, with none of that knowledge or variety, always strikes me as a bit odd... and a little bit sad.

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Quoting: GuestWait. Why? Is valve...? Why are they doing this? Is something with nvidia in the works or is it steamos?

Why not? They want Linux to be a viable platform, and most Steam users have an Nvidia GPU by a huge margin. Open source allows them to improve things directly. They poached Pierre-Loup Griffais from the Nvidia Linux driver team, so it's not like they don't have the expertise.

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Men of War II will launch with three playable nations - the Soviets, Americans and the Third Reich

Is the American faction unable to do anything till halfway through the match?

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Quoting: Rui_CastroCool! Now how can we uninstall Proton 8, I've tried uninstalling but always get a error. I know I've done this before for Proton 7. Just don't remember what I did. Any help?

You need to tell the games that are currently using that version of Proton to not use that version of Proton; then you can remove it.

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Over to you in the comments, what have you been playing lately?

I'll probably not be playing much on the Deck for the next little while. I replaced my broken GPU on the desktop, so I'm going back for another go of Death Stranding [External Link] there. I did play a bunch of that some time ago, but towards the end the game removes all the fun & I stopped; I'm starting again from the beginning. What I'd like to do is stream the game from the desktop to the Deck, but Remote Play has gone janky again.

I did complete Full Void [External Link] on the Deck, though. I also had another try of Invisible, Inc [External Link] there; that one would be hugely improved on the Deck if they'd backported the controller work that they did for the console release.

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