Quoting: ssj17vegetaI always wondered. What's in it for the end-user ? (Wayland)

Support for multiple monitors of varying refresh rates, HDR support, and eliminating round trips between the display server and the compositor because the compositor is the display server are the headline desirable features.

The first two only really came about during the long, long development of Wayland, admittedly, and the primary motivation wasn't about features, but just that everyone that was capable of doing anything with Xorg no longer wanted to do anything with Xorg.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EikeWhere did you get the missing Steam Deck percentages? Internet Archive didn't yield data for many months...

Having dredged this data from the Wayback Machine before, I can give you two top tips:
There are two valid URLs for the hardware survey - one with "Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam" and one without. The Wayback Machine archives both of them at different times.
The survey lists the delta from the previous month, so if you've got the value for one month you also know the value for the previous month.

Quoting: EikeI guess you added the trend lines manually?

Well, it's just an "add trend line" in LibreOffice. But it's the least-squares line of best fit, which is what you'd want.

Quoting: EikeI wasn't sure about that either. On the one hand, it looks like bad data, and we know there's problems with the data, on the other hand, leaving something out feels like cheating. *shrug*

Yeah, either would have been valid choices, I think. I gave Liam enough of a push so that it was something he'd definitely considered and made a definite choice about, and then I've gone with what he picked since.

Valve used to correct the survey results later in the month when there'd been an overcount of China, but they seem to have stopped doing that for the past 12 months or so. That's why the later data is so much noisier than the earlier data.

Quoting: EikeI'd say, percentage-wise nothing has happened for over two years, but as you're pointing out, Steam is probably growing, so yes, desktop Linux usage is at least growing along. Good point.

Eyeballing the desktop trend line now and comparing it to how I recall the trend line was when I was encouraging Liam to put the trend line on the tracker graph, it's steeper than it was then - certainly no shallower. Which means the growth rate would be higher now than then. One could check the gradient of the line of best fit over time if they wanted, but "line goes up" is good enough for me right now.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EikeBut here you go...

That's not a bad approach. I've filled in the gaps for you.



(I'd previously discussed with Liam dropping the definitely-bad 03/23 from the tracker and he was insistent that the data we get is the data we get, so I've got the dips you removed in for consistency with the tracker data - same as I've done with the Linux/Mac graph previously)

Note that because this is a record of proportions, if the trend for desktop Linux were completely flat (it's not - it has a positive gradient) it wouldn't mean that desktop Linux usage wasn't growing, only that it's growing at the same rate as Steam as a whole. Since the trend is slightly positive, it means that desktop Linux usage is growing slightly faster than Steam as a whole.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: sarmadWhen will Valve start selling the Steam Deck in China? It's strange to ignore such a big market.

I said in a comment on a different article

Quoting: CatKillerI think having an official third party releasing in Hong Kong is as close as Valve wants to get to an official release in China. They've had to make a Steam For China since Chinese customers were using VPNs and vanilla Steam to get round the restrictions on gaming in China; there are 30-something games released per day on Steam, but around that many are authorised for sale in China per year; if you're too young it's a legal requirement that you're only allowed to spend a specified number of hours per week gaming, and only at specified times. It's just way too many headaches all round to try to sell a vanilla-Steam-based gaming machine whose main attraction is that you can play on it whenever you want.

That's still pretty much what I think.

I would really like to see Valve work out how to ship the Deck to more countries - the fact that people that want one can't get one is the biggest flaw of the Deck. Whether that's with a logistics partner like they've got in those Asian territories, or doing it mostly themselves like they are in North America and the EU. But China, as big a market as it is, comes with its own special headaches.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestI'm somewhat a fan of this idea. I know that most games aren't horrible or inappropriate, but I like to know what I'm getting into and indie titles usually don't have an ESRB rating.

Me, too, actually.

What would be particularly good is if the ratings bodies made it quick and painless (and cheap!) to get the ratings so that indie titles would have an ESRB/PEGI/BBFC/whatever rating.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, these days they could just say "For anticheat reasons, we allow only the Steam Runtime Environment--any Linux that doesn't use that is out."

Oh yes, they definitely could do it if they really wanted. We have all sorts of containerisation solutions that are used for srs bsns that would probably be a good starting point. But... we have 2% of, like, 20% of the gaming market, and the srs bsns containers are predominately geared up to put iron-grip control in the hands of the system administrator rather than some third-party game publisher.

They could also implement actual anti-cheat where they control the playing field and players are only able to take actions in accordance with the rules. It doesn't matter at all what state the client is in then. But every decision made server-side introduces latency, and they would have to pay for running everything rather than offloading a lot of it onto their players. They don't like either of those things, either.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Since I got my OLED, I've completed Mirror's Edge [External Link] and Ico [External Link], played a bit more Art of Rally [External Link], started Ori and the Blind Forest [External Link], and restarted Horizon Zero Dawn [External Link].

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EhvisWhy would that be? I'm not a mac person, but I highly doubt that Apple would make it easy for software to run something at elevated permissions. So maybe the mac built is running with the same restricted "anti-cheat" as they did to support wine. If that is the case, some of these cheaters may just move over to try their luck on a mac. Maybe not as many since that would require a fairly significant investment.

The thing to remember is that "anti-cheat" isn't really anti-cheat at all; it's anti-tamper. They want to know that the software and environment that it's running in hasn't been modified to do anything unexpected. On Windows, you've got a fairly standardised environment, but the broad range of hardware means that you need the ability to load, for example, hardware drivers... so people can load a "driver" that's actually modifying the running environment of user software. So the software developers put their anti-tamper software at the kernel level to be able to check on all the drivers as well as the user software. Macs have a hugely reduced breadth of hardware, so drivers can just come from Apple, and there's a built-in attestation mechanism to say that software hasn't been tampered with. They just use that. On Linux, every OS install is a special snowflake, so you don't even have a baseline standard environment to look for deviations from.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It's a shame because HDMI-CEC (when it works) is a really neat feature that AFAIK DisplayPort doesn't have. Proprietary standards are such a trainwreck.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: denyasisIt makes no sense to send a desktop experience (complete with glyphs, resolution and interface) to a deck client.

Those are all entirely down to the game. If the game uses Steam Input, though, it does get appropriate controller glyphs automagically.

It does seem like In-Home Streaming is a really low priority for Valve, which is surprising when they've released their high-profile hardware where it's such a good fit. But then, you'd think that letting people give Valve money would also be high on the "do not break this" list, and yet the Deck launched without being able to buy things from the Store, and browsing one's wishlist to pick things to buy is still really janky.

View this comment - View article - View full comments