Still, it would be nice no matter what distribution of Linux you pick, if we can just tell people to "go here" to get whatever app it is they're after rather than having to do a support-dance to find out their specific distribution and version to see what's available to find out how they can grab something.

We already can. The "app store" interfaces like Discover don't care if you're on a distro that uses debs, rpms, or whatever, or if you're pulling snaps from snapcraft or flatpaks from flathub; they'll just present a list of applications and an install button. Packaging formats are only of interest to distro maintainers and angry people on the Internet - end users have no reason to care.

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I can recommend Parkitect [External Link] (native / Deck Playable), which is 50% off in the sale.

I'm surprised Two Point Hospital (which is also a great game) isn't included - it seems like it would have been a good fit.

I have Megaquarium [External Link] and Prison Architect [External Link] (native / Deck Playable for both) but I've not actually got around to playing either of those, so I can't specifically recommend them.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThat is interesting--although I think to be fair we should note that many games that don't sell could be perfectly sincere, even good, games that just didn't happen to find their audience.

That is true. And elsewhere in Valve's document they say that the limited community stuff doesn't affect sales for genuine games - it just scuppers those games that only exist for card/emoji/whatever farming.

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Quoting: pbYay, new record for released asset flips! :whistle:

Interestingly, Steam does appear to track this, and it's exposed on SteamDB's year graphs.

All the community trinkets get unlocked for a game "as games reach certain player and sales metrics that give confidence that a reasonable number of customers that are engaged with the game" according to Valve. According to SteamDB, of the 2023 games 3,270 games passed that milestone and 11,258 didn't.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: XpanderPretty sure everything i have on my library works on linux. Though i guess there could be few free to play games that have anti-cheat and not working, which i have downloaded.

113 unsupported is way too much though, but its steamdeck verification.

VERIFIED: 165 games (19.86%)
PLAYABLE: 333 games (40.07%)
UNSUPPORTED: 113 games (13.60%)
UNKNOWN: 220 games (26.47%)

Don't forget that Steam Deck "Unsupported" does not necessarily mean the game doesn't work on Linux. It can mean that it doesn't work well with the form factor or with controllers or like that. So even if Proton worked 100% on everything and the anti-cheat people had given in and made all their stuff 100% work with Linux all the time, there would still be "Unsupported" titles.

VR, for example, is going to be 100% unsupported on the Deck even if it works fine with a VR headset attached to a Linux PC - or on Valve's hypothetical standalone VR unit.

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I figured it's been a while since I've done this, so I decided to have a look again.

 
Year     Total   Linux    Proportion 
2012       323      86      26.6%
2013       460     180      39.1%
2014      1601     495      30.9%
2015      2638     847      32.1%
2016      4279    1059      24.7%
2017      6146    1169      19.0%
2018      8002    1211      15.1%
2019      7691     971      12.6%
2020      9468    1105      11.7%
2021     11200    1202      10.7%
2022     12277    1426      11.6%
2023     14640    1625      11.1%
(this is games released each year, and how many of them have a Linux build, per SteamDB)

Looks like our share of developer attention has stabilised following the plummet after the Steam Machines, but there's not enough signal there to say if it's going up again. Hopefully it will pick up as our market share picks up.

There really are an awful lot of games on Steam - excluding future games and including games prior to 2012 there are 99,226 - of which 13,332 have Linux builds for an aggregate of 13.4%

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Quoting: Purple Library GuySo I make it 4 games that are both Unsupported (but not because of Anti-cheat) and Bronze or worse. So, 4 games out of 100 that just don't work because they don't work. A couple more if you count Unsupported + Silver. That's not bad. Shows that most of the problem is Anti-cheat, and it's a significant problem.

Just spelling it out: the thing that makes it a significant problem is that there's nothing we can do about it.

Wrong file format, using APIs we don't have? We can fix that. Abusing those APIs or being otherwise broken or janky? We can work around that.

But embedding itself in a kernel that we don't have to detect the most miniscule differences between its running environment and a specific known version of exactly Windows so that it can refuse to run? There's nothing we can do about that - and we also don't want to make it easier for people to cheat. We're entirely at the mercy of game publishers that don't give a fig about us, and who aren't at all interested in detecting cheaters on their servers rather than looking for software tampering on other people's computers - which would remove the issue entirely.

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Quoting: PenglingI was in the netbooks community back in the day, and the way things went was downright ugly - not just from how manufacturers were strongarmed into killing the product-category, but also in how shills were sent out to undermine communities from the inside. I really hope that history doesn't repeat itself.

They're certainly going to try.

But whereas Microsoft could kill netbooks to protect their desktop OS monopoly (ultimately clearing the field for iPads to break their desktop OS monopoly), Valve's device is already here, already great, and they aren't selling it to make money off hardware sales. If Microsoft kill all handheld PCs but the Deck, Valve wins; if OEMs keep churning out handhelds that show that Linux is better than Windows, Valve wins; if OEMs give up on Windows and make Linux handhelds, Valve wins; if Microsoft makes Windows as good as Linux and people still get all their games from Steam, Valve wins. The threat to Valve's Deck initiative only really comes if Microsoft brings out the big guns: their own handheld that runs the Xbox-tweaked version of Windows that can only run games from Microsoft's Store - which has just been juiced by the biggest acquisition the gaming industry has ever seen. That could go either way, especially as part of their offensive to get the Microsoft Store on Android and iOS via their Epic stalking horse. Even then, the Deck represents the open PC gaming ecosystem vs the locked-down Microsoft-only ecosystem that Valve have been endeavouring to protect since Windows 8.

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Quoting: Luke_NukemValve are open to helping OEM's support SteamOS, but I suspect that the OEMs want it to be more of a one-way street with Valve doing all the work.

The OEMs are also likely to want a big bag of money from Valve.

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Quoting: Anzaif you get past the few baffling AAA wins

Not "baffling;" trolling.

They're Boaty McBoatface.

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