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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Would 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.

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Quoting: ShadMessaNow they just need to add that option to CSGO

Yes.

Quoting: fagnerlnPlease Valve... Global Offensive next... I never asked for anything... I love you

Yes.

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Quoting: GuestThe M1 likely won't be available outside of Apple devices, so I don't see them getting into generic small form factor system. Likely another company might have to take up the slack.

True, i was more thinking about buying one and running Linux on it. Well more likely an M2 that is. Ubuntu already can run on the M1 afaik.

Raspberry Pi4 hardware is strong enough for quite a lot of things, but for anything other than light gaming they would need some more serious GPU hardware. Then there's the matter of finding games for arm platforms, but that will depend on which games you'd like to run. Streaming is already fine - or would be, if the software took proper advantage of the existing hardware.

Also true, which is why I alluded to running a dedicated machine just for gaming/streaming and a separate ultra-low power 'box' for all other desktop stuff. Which for me is just the typical browsing,music,retro gaming stuff. id just make sure my next monitor has a built in KVM to swap between the two.

(although, it will be interesting to see if AMD bring a big/little core design in future where by for the casual stuff two low power cores are used. this might mean i would not use the Pi for that purpose)

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Id wait for the RDNA Ryzen APU to come out unless you are in desperate need of a SFF PC as that should be a significant performance boost.

As for their website it claims that the AMD RYZEN 7 4800H is 57% faster than the new Apple M1 ..
When clicking on the source of the claim that website the comparison is between an Intel CPU vs AMD.
When Linux gets good on the M1 or even in future on the M2, i would choose one of those over an X86 for a small form factor system as your not going to be AAA gaming or VR gaming on them anyway and the power usage is so much lower.

Im hoping that the next Raspberry Pi or Rockchip boards are enough of a boost to run a full PC desktop, they are close right now just a little bit more performance and then i can use a dedicated machine/console/streaming just for gaming.

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Correct me if im wrong but didn't the original starcrawlers have a seriously annoying mouse bug on the Linux release that the dev's were aware of but never fixed.
Im saying correct me but i ended up playing the game via proton because of it.

As for the game i found it to be mediocre. It's a shame as the concept and art was nice.

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