They say running Steam and games in a container like this "provides another layer of security above normal Linux systems"...

Except that is just an excuse for bad design. Linux has multiple ways to secure a system without the complexity and overhead of a VM: containers / cgroups, chroots, read-only filesystems, etc. And if that is not enough, SELinux exist.

Yeah, I don't particularly like ChromeOS...

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The architecture of Chrome OS is really overcomplicated. They insist on running everything in those "containers", which are actually more like a full blown VM's, because not even the kernel is shared with the host. That is why everything is in constant alpha, and takes forever to integrate into the system. Just seems so counter-productive to me.

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Now if they also added the original American McGee's Alice, and I would throw money at them so hard it would hurt.

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I am really looking forward to all of this goodness coming to the desktop. I use Steam exclusively in big picture mode on my TV, and while it works fine, there is definitely place for improvements.

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Note that a scaling driver (acpi-cpufreq, intel-pstate, amd-pstate) is distinctly different from a scaling governor (performance, powersave, schedutil). Roughly speaking the governor controls what state the CPU should be in, and the driver actually knows how to get to that state.

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I certainly hope that this will not end in a disaster. Right now only a few people have their Steam Decks, so the situation is still repairable. But once they start shipping to the masses, you really don't want to promote broken games. Better to have a smaller library that works, instead of a large one with unreliable ratings and broken games. Could really backfire in the worst way possible.

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I really don't think that it matters, but let's play. :wink:

Wine is not a Windows emulator, because it does not provide a Windows environment: it does not allow using of Windows drivers, does not emulate devices, or network interfaces that would normally be found on a Windows system, etc. That is why most software that interacts with hardware will not work in Wine. Also why anticheat and DRM software does not work.

It's much more like what Mono is to .NET, or like Pipewire to Pulseaudio, or like FNA to XNA, or DXVK to DirectX, etc. They implement the same API, which allows to use them interchangeably without modifying the clients. At least in theory you could write a native Linux application against Wine API and there would be no emulation involved.

But API itself is not quite enough to trick actual Windows applications. That is why Wine does indeed emulate parts of Windows, like filesystem structure and drive names. And the Wineserver process provides roughly the same services as a Windows kernel would.

Wine is largely not an emulator, but has some traits of an emulator. Just enough emulation sprinkled on top to make us nerds worldwide argue over nomenclature. :grin:

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Quoting: AsciiWolfOne of the good things about Stadia was that it could potentially bring new native Linux ports (that could also be made available for regular GNU/Linux systems outside of Stadia).

Unfortunately we have seen none of that as none of the games that were ported to Stadia came to desktop Linux afterwards.

I remember developers commenting that Stadia is quite different from desktop Linux. I have no idea what is actually different, but I could easily imagine that they have their own stuff for input handling, rendering, etc. You know, just like Android is technically a Linux system under the hood, but the API's that you are actually coding against are completely custom.

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I would be shocked if they actually wrote an emulator from scratch. Maybe it is something more akin to the infamous eON from Virtual Programming? Very curious indeed.

Although I fully expect that Google will not release the source code, and that we will benefit from it not at all.

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What Putin is doing to Ukraine is pure insanity. Pointless destruction and death with no goal. A sick power play by an absolute madman. The old man has completely lost it, and millions will suffer because of it.

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