Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: TheRiddickThis looks pretty cool, but not available to us peasants in Australia, probably have to import it at a premium.

Probably because you have Gaben, in Australia. He'll deliver them himself. :grin:

didn't he just move to New Zealand like a bunch of other billionaire/millionaires ? That's close enough for him to hand deliver it to you.

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Getting anti-cheat working on Linux is kind of pivotal right now. We are reaching a point where almost all major AAA and even AA titles require it in order to run. If you can play COD:warzone, Fortnight, PUB-G on Andriod then you kind of need your PC handheld to be able to do so.

Easy Anti cheat is now free for all developers, no matter the engine:

https://youtu.be/X_7fdMpRDEQ [External Link]

That said i just await the myriad of youtube thumbnails, holding a steam deck at an angle with gawping expression "HOW TO INSTALL WINDOWS ON THE STEAM DECK!11!1!! AMAZING PERFORMANCE ALL YOUR GAMES NOW WORK..".

So i don't see it being quite the 'holy grail' of Linux gaming just yet, there is still an ideological uphill battle to fight.

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Quoting: 14So they should get more casuals that wouldn't have considered it otherwise.

I think the casual game market thing is a bit of an overblown sentiment. What even are casual gamers these days ? Pretty much anyone has access to a mobile , console or PC(laptop) to game at a high enough level. There are AAA titles on Mobile now that are super popular and have way more players than PC. In developing nations they seem to have pretty decent phones too, better than my flip phone :P but great internet speed is something only a relative minority of people have even in the west.

On the topic of it making games exploit proof, it won't. Most games these days the customer is the beta tester, they are continually patched until dropped which leads to game bugs and that will still happen with the cloud because of new content patches & deadlines. And if people can't write scripts to hack they will just do it the old fashioned way and find exploits in the game, which just becomes whack-a-mole when your last update created another flaw. Not only that there are other ways in which games can be ruined outside of cheats like griefing / trolling. Cloud gaming won't stop cheating.

As you rightly said, the literal only purpose of cloud streaming (as nobody asked for it) is to lock people into endless subscriptions and transactions. The side benefit might be unbreakable DRM, but i see this as a carrot to lead developers into that business model. It will lock them into that same system, which is a shame as many games don't even require DRM. Is the kind of person who pirates a game going to pay out $$ a month on an entire cloud subscription just so they can get that game ? I thought people mainly pirate because of financial reasons in the first place.

Has anybody considered Cloud gaming might have an opposite chilling effect on the game market. I know that once netflix came along i almost entirely stopped watching movies as my local 'rent-a-DVD' market shut down overnight. I occasionally watch a Blueray or something on TV if i catch it on, Sometimes a streaming site might be playing a free movie. But il never be a netflix customer, and given the creeping price hikes im glad im not. This is what market capture does, it locks the customer into an ever worsening deal.

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Quoting: GuestThat's right kids, now you can let corporations abuse you even more, today!

Don't forget point number 4) which is to buy up viable opensource hardware companies (like intel interested in buying SiFive / RISC-V ) effectively crushing any competition.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: LoftyThe context of the article is to replace traditional high end PC or console gaming via streaming at a low/no net loss to what we have now.

No matter how high end your PC is now - it won't be in some years. That's when it makes sense to check if it's worth to invest one or even two thousand bucks, not when you just bought a new one. (I don't say the answer is clear, just that the question makes sense.)

True, which is why i cede in my post that in the end if prices of hardware do not level out then it is a forgone conclusion that streaming will the be only way for people to game. And the control that gives others over your hobby is not something that most people will look back and say that was a good thing imo. But then again in time you will have entire generations who never knew any different.

(not me tho, as im fine to move to a low powered ARM SOC and play only FOSS & retro games if the alternatives are monthly subscriptions to 10 different cloud gaming platforms with ad littered, 'tiered' access to privileged content )

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Quoting: iiarimy kids and tons of their friends are gaming on their Chromebooks right now (Stadia, Android apps, and web based various educational games), so it's hardly "speculative"... And that's definitely saving me money :).

The context of the article is to replace traditional high end PC or console gaming via streaming at a low/no net loss to what we have now.
Im not saying a mobile game is not 'gaming' though but it doesn't quite fit what xcloud is trying to replace. As for saving money, it's great that you have those options of which the two out of three you mention are not streaming services. Of course, if data holds any value (and big tech seems to think it does) then im not sure how 'free' those andriod apps are that your children are using.

I'm old enough to remember each one of the arguments used against cloud based gaming used to explain why cloud based music and movies would never work. The EXACT same arguments, and we've seen how that's worked out....

Games as a service probably will be the future but that doesn't make it a better future. Well, of course neither is movie or music streaming as technically the quality is worse than what came before it (at least for now). Sure you have endlessly more content but is it quality or just mountains of easily accessible mediocre quantity. In the end the lowest common denominator will win out when hardware prices become too prohibitive for people to purchase.
Im not against the concept of cloud streaming, just the predatory business models that are set to roll out once enough people have moved over to that technology.

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Quoting: iiari

Quoting: JozuaI've never really seen the benefit of cloud gaming

I think the benefits are pretty compelling:
* Only one platform to target for programming, rather than 5 or 6 for a title. Less effort, larger audience...
* DRM, obviously
* For most genres other than FPS/arcade, lag/latency really won't be an issue
* Allows for high end, AAA gaming on even modest hardware. Fleets of Chromebooks haven't been purchased by families since, "Timmy doesn't want one since he can't game on it." That changes overnight with cloud gaming...
* Less hardware costs for families if you can, in a near future, game on cheap Chromebooks or Raspberry Pi's, or dedicated cloud streaming hardware. Gaming is an expensive hobby.
* For some families, theoretically less software costs if any service can break through with a more Netflix style all-you-can-game subscription cost. There's a reason perpetually renewing streaming subscriptions have ultimately proven more lucrative for (some corners of industries) than per-purchase DVD's or CD's....
* If ever realized, some potentially terrific social gaming and interactivity opportunities as part of cloud gaming that's hard to replicate with per-PC gaming...
* Opening up new genres. Look at MSFS's modelling and streaming of the world for the flight sim...

Most of this post explains the benefits of a cloud streaming from a corporate perspective.

The points you make that are more 'family' centered appear to be speculative and if we know anything about corporatism it's that you can take that short term "It's cheaper than what you have now" market capture and apply a huge long term dose of "now it's more expensive, the product is worse, you don't own it and your committed to never ending transactions"

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Quoting: KohlyKohlI've had this installed on my Thelio for a few weeks and it is so much better than Dash to Panel. I haven't had it crash once and it feels like it is actually part of the DE.

Quoting: FrawoThe only reason I did not update to 21.04 instantly is that I'm not sure if Dash-To-Panel will still work.

This is exactly why distro's like this are good because the maintainers fork their own extensions/apps to work with their release and make sure they do.
Unlike a vanilla'ish Gnome release where your working one day with all your extension set to return the useful functionality it should have out of the box then a release happens and all your extensions fail. This pretty much drains all the confidence you had in the desktop experience. Honestly it's a negative look not just for Gnome but for Linux desktops in general.

If you look at some of the more popular desktop's such as PopOS, ZorinOS, Mint Cinnamon they area all based on Gnome but have one thing in common which is the stability of their application extensions as they are built in as a core functionality. So, they may not be trendy in the Linux sphere like Arch,manjaro or fedora etc.. but i imagine they amass more every day users because they have that ease of use and consistency. That brings a larger user base which is a win for Linux gaming.

I should also give mention to SolusOS which is also gnome based but has baked in extensions that work well between releases. Oddly enough another fringe but trusted distro, there seems to be a theme here.. no pun intended.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: LoftyWould this improve older earlier Linux ports that used openGL and had poor performance like DeusEX mankind divided?

excuse my ignorance on the matter, this is new to me.

Not directly.

The OpenGL model is a single threaded state machine. At the time, for the uses it was created for, the hardware itself was a single threaded state machine. Fairly quickly, though, that stopped being the case - programmable shaders and multicore processors being the big deviations from that model, but others too. So OpenGL drivers lied through their teeth about what they were doing: they'd reorder instructions, and batch draw calls, and cache things or not cache things as they saw fit, for better performance; but as far as the application is concerned it was all "single threaded immediate rendering, honest guv," since that's what the spec calls for. Applications have no way of knowing WTF is actually going on.

Vulkan makes all this stuff explicit. The application has to handle the scheduling and the memory allocation and so on, and Vulkan provides the means to find out what the hardware can do and what it's actually doing. No more lies from the driver, but more work for the developer.

Automatically implementing OpenGL on Vulkan (which is what Zink does) means that the driver can provide consistent state-of-the-art lies to the application, but the application's still restricted to the OpenGL model, and was written in the context of the OpenGL driver lies of the time it was written. So Zink might make performance a bit better by providing better lies than average, but an OpenGL driver that provided the lies that the application writer was expecting and testing against would be just as good.

Thank you for the explanation.

In the case of DeusEX i guess the point is probably moot as it should run on Proton and probably faster and smoother too. Then again i can't try this as i have the game but it's enormous & my internet is too slow to bother downloading it :sad:

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Quoting: scaineI enjoyed my time on Mint. The kernel is a bit disappointing, but both Mint and Pop OS have kernel managers built-in anyway, so you can easily upgrade with a couple of clicks from the settings app.

what is the benefit of running a more upto date kernal vs a cutting edge one such as on arch if your not running an AMD/Intel GPU ? i know that there is sometimes new hardware that would be supported better but for the average person is there really that much of a difference ?

Quoting: scaineI'll stick with Pop for the moment though. Having made the jump to gnome for xrdesktop, I don't really want to go back to Cinnamon, despite how slick it is. Maybe one day.

On the plus side cinnamon might be getting some of the PopOS features such as tiling in the future. And of course GTK5 when it arrives although that is some time away.
I have been quite happy with mint, it doesn't feel anywhere near as stale as it used to VS arch now that there is flatpak support built in.

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