Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: CatKillerupdates are atomic.

I worry about fallout.

Debbie Harry's got you covered.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedjeWhy would they need two copies of the OS (unless you're referring to the fail over?) I know AtariOS does this with their immutable set up for rollbacks.

If you already know the answer, why ask the question?

The Deck has one /home partition and two completely independent copies of the OS - the current one and the previous one. Updates overwrite the "previous" version, which then becomes the "current" version, and the former "current" version becomes the "previous" version. The device always has at least one complete OS it can boot into because neither version can affect the other - updates are atomic.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Valve are absolutely not going to put a second DE on the Deck. They're space-constrained already with two copies of the OS before you even get to games and shader caches that you have to fit into 64 GB. They aren't going to bloat that out for something (choice of desktop environment) that's an anti-feature for the machine's use case. It's getting one, and Valve have already picked it: KDE. While there are several plausible reasons to choose that one - it behaving like a normal desktop rather than Gnome's One True Workflow, the devs being much nicer to work with, and so on - the reason Valve gave for their choice was that it was the DE that Valve staff use and like.

There is (finally) a Wayland HDR spec that people haven't rejected. But it isn't finished. So Valve took the parts of that which work for single-window fullscreen games and implemented it in their own compositor; KDE are using just that bit for single-window fullscreen games in Plasma 6, too. At some point all the finer details of how to handle mixed HDR and non-HDR content in multiple windows will have been worked out and there'll be a full Wayland HDR and colour management spec that the compositors can implement; gamescope, not yet being a Wayland compositor and only being interested in single-window games, doesn't need to bother with any of that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: BrokattValve officially only supports one distro and that is the latest Ubuntu LTS - with either Gnome or KDE desktop.

They don't support Gnome any more - well, specifically Wayland Gnome; X11 Gnome is OK - because it breaks SteamVR. I can't remember which widget it is that Gnome doesn't provide (I don't use VR and I don't use Gnome) but ISTR that the Gnome devs specifically refuse to support that widget. Someone with more familiarity with the details can fill in the gaps.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedjeSource?

Steam 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.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/platforms [External Link]

Steam 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.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/blob/master/doc/steamlinuxruntime-known-issues.md [External Link]

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedjeDon't they already support flatpak version of Steam? Isn't that what the Steamdeck uses? (Maybe not, I'd have to look).

Flatpak Steam is also unsupported.

The Deck doesn't use flatpak Steam.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestWhat bothers me much more is the uncanny valley of full-price games that depend on online services.

There was a recent related editorial on GI.biz [External Link] that's worth a read.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I just noticed that the game got a lot more language support with this update, including Catalan, Silesian and Welsh. It's always nice to see games become available to more people.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Sail Forth has been on my wishlist for a while, and one of the reasons I didn't get it the last time I was buying games was because it's the kind of game I'd rather play curled up on the sofa than sat at my desk. It just got bumped up the list.

Recently on the Deck I've completed Unavowed [External Link] and Beyond A Steel Sky [External Link], and the little one's been playing Duck Tales [External Link], Skywalker Saga [External Link] and Alba [External Link]. On my desktop I've been playing Parkitect [External Link].

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI'm still curious how this process actually works. Let's imagine I'm a game dev, and I've committed to supporting Linux with Proton. Alright, what do I do?

Full effort version: have at least one Linux machine running Proton plumbed into your CI unit tests and manual testing pipeline, and fail those tests if any build fails to work as it should on that machine.

Less effort version: test your release builds on at least one Linux machine prior to release.

Even less effort version: make some effort to fix bugs that your Linux users report after you've released an update that breaks the game for them.

Least effort version: release updates and let Valve fix them.

Most game devs pick the last one, and a select few pick the penultimate one.

I imagine the only thing I can do is submit bugs to Valve when I encounter a bug with Wine/DXVK/whatever. Does Valve have an official private channel for sending these bugs in? Because there is no open issue on the Proton Github page for SMITE 2. Well, if I had a Wine dev on hand, I could get them to submit patches upstream.

Game devs that have paid their $100 get access to a whole bunch of game developer-only forums and a separate game developer-only helpdesk (it used to be a specific contact at Valve but got amended into a shared pool of staff). Valve also have the resources to pre-emptively test whatever they deem important, or to contact anyone they deem important.

View this comment - View article - View full comments