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Latest Comments by pleasereadthemanual
MONSTER HUNTER RISE adds new DRM that breaks it on Steam Deck (UPDATED)
22 January 2024 at 1:42 pm UTC

Quoting: emphyThis also highlights my biggest problem with the current classification of deck/proton compatibility: support from the dev remains unofficial (if present at all) in most cases.

Meaning that publishers get to claim plausible deniability, valve gets to blame the publisher for breaking compatibility, and linux based players lose access to the game on their os of choice with no clear line of responsibility to get support for the game they likely would not have obtained had it not gotten classified.
And that is unlikely to ever change due to the very nature of Proton. While DXVK has some suggestions on what Direct X features to avoid to ensure compatibility with DXVK, it's mostly out of the developer's hands, for better or for worse.

You win some, you lose some.

NVIDIA 535.154.05 for Linux brings a few bug fixes
22 January 2024 at 1:39 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: pleasereadthemanualIs this true for NVK too, or only for what the proprietary NVIDIA driver wants implemented? I can't imagine AMD users are getting flickering on XWayland all the time.

Sorry, I don't understand the technical details. And I use KDE, fwiw.
NVK is a vulkan driver, so its unrelated to this issue. But you dont have this issue if you use nouveau instead of the proprietary nvidia driver. Nouveau has historically had bad performance in games because of forced downclocked gpu unless you use the proprietary driver, etc. But I believe that in modern nvidia gpus you can now disable that forced downclocking of gpu so sometime in the future you might be able to use nouveau + nvk to get good performance in games (and have the games work), so you will be able to avoid the proprietary nvidia driver and not have these issues.
Nouveau is part of mesa, just like amd and intel.
Thanks for the info! I really want to ditch the proprietary driver as soon as I'm reasonably able to without seriously compromising performance or other parts of the proprietary driver that actually work.

OpenAI say it would be 'impossible' to train AI without pinching copyrighted works
22 January 2024 at 8:16 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, except frankly copyright was always about benefits for publishers, not really for authors.
Just cutting in here, without the slightest amount of tact, to say that while this was definitely true for a long time, publishing options for authors have expanded greatly. Traditional publishers require you to sell the rights to your book, but you could choose a hybrid publisher and retain your rights; you just need to pay them for their services. You can also self-publish on KDP and many other sites. Eragon is famously self-published.

So, while there weren't benefits for authors before, the landscape has changed a lot.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyFor instance, in 1970 nobody would have connected copyright with property, they were distinct concepts and the moral ideas surrounding property had not been imported into the copyright concept.
It was actually a series of GNU articles on "intellectual property" that taught me about this. I found those very enlightening.

And on a completely different subject, there was no copyright in the 1600s. Don Quixote was a really popular book at the time, but Cervantes was either taking a while to write a sequel or didn't want to. Someone (Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda) wrote an unauthorized sequel; an early example of fan fiction. It was bad. So bad, in fact, that Cervantes mocked it in the eventual sequel he wrote 10 years later. An astonishing amount of meta-fiction for the period...

It's possible that without that unauthorized sequel, Cervantes may never have written an official sequel. So the idea that the absence of copyright leads to worse work and less motivation from authors to write seems to ring false to me. What it really enforces is that authors be good at what they do, lest fans or opportunists take their audience from them. Cervantes was very good at what he did, and Avellaneda was not, so Cervantes did not struggle to capture an audience with his late sequel.

I've talked to a few fans of RWBY; it's rather astonishing how many of them have said, "yeah, I read a lot of RWBY fics but I haven't seen the series in a long time." I'm one of them, actually. I find the fan content better written than the Rooster Teeth series. I've even bought a Not This Time, Fate fan art print... It makes me wonder how different RWBY would be if copyright was weakened or didn't exist. Would Rooster Teeth feel compelled to do a better job? Would Coeur Al'Aran be producing his own RWBY series?

I'd be happy if copyright were just reduced to its original 28 year maximum term, and they can keep the later amendment to make copyright implicit to prevent stuff like Night of the Living Dead's untimely fall into the public domain from happening.

NVIDIA 535.154.05 for Linux brings a few bug fixes
21 January 2024 at 10:51 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI hope this driver update fixes the flickering issues with every XWayland program. It makes using Krita very unpleasant.

NVK can't come sooner.
That wont happen until these commits are merged:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/967
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/proto/xorgproto/-/merge_requests/59
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/90
and depending on which wayland compositor you use:
wlroots: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/merge_requests/4262
gamescope: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/pull/982
mutter (gnome): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3300
kwin (kde): https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/4693
and the nvidia driver will also need to be updated.
Is this true for NVK too, or only for what the proprietary NVIDIA driver wants implemented? I can't imagine AMD users are getting flickering on XWayland all the time.

Sorry, I don't understand the technical details. And I use KDE, fwiw.

Palworld is Steam Deck Playable and runs on Desktop Linux with Proton
21 January 2024 at 3:12 pm UTC Likes: 1

So I played Pal World on XCloud for about an hour. It's not really my kind of game. It seems pretty jank and I don't like open world, survival games.

Can't complain much for $1 on XCloud though.

Palworld is Steam Deck Playable and runs on Desktop Linux with Proton
20 January 2024 at 2:23 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Liam DaweThere's also a very clear obvious difference between

- Someone translating works and then selling it, sure it may add value for that language, but the original work is not their own to sell in any form.
- something that has similarities to something else.
I'd like to clarify that Tanya Grotter was not a translation of Harry Potter; it was a work that had similarities. Even reading the table of similar traits, I'm not entirely convinced it qualifies as a derivative work...

I wrote the comment quickly and didn't properly explain that; sorry.

Quoting: tuubiI think you're veering into straw man territory here, but I'll agree that derivative works infringe copyright.
That's all I was trying to say. I agree with Pengling; just clarifying that a "derivative work" does qualify as copyright infringement. Not saying that Pal World falls under that category.

But I would say that if Nintendo sued, they'd need to defend themselves in court over it. That's how we end up with situations like the Bleem! emulator winning in court, but the company behind them going bankrupt and the emulator disappearing anyway. You don't need to be legally right to win; you just need to have money and ambition.

That's a whole other argument, of course.

Palworld is Steam Deck Playable and runs on Desktop Linux with Proton
19 January 2024 at 10:41 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: melkemind
Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: dlove67
Quoting: soulsourceI'm a bit torn on this one. On the one hand it looks really interesting. On the other hand it's €20 that will be spent on nothing once it gets pulled from Steam because of (rightful) copyright claims by The Pokémon Company...

What copyright claim would Nintendo have?
I would guess that they would argue that the "pals" are derivative Pokémons.

Being derivative isn't copyright infringement.
Well, being derivative is actually copyright infringement. That's why unauthorized translations fall under copyright infringement; they're derivative works.

JK Rowling sued over Tanya Grotter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Grotter#Legal_history

QuoteIn 2003, courts there prevented the distribution of a Dutch translation of the first in the series, Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass, after Rowling and Time Warner's lawyers issued a cease and desist order, arguing that the Grotter books violated copyright law, specifically infringing on Rowling's right to control derivative works.

NVIDIA 535.154.05 for Linux brings a few bug fixes
18 January 2024 at 11:49 am UTC Likes: 2

I hope this driver update fixes the flickering issues with every XWayland program. It makes using Krita very unpleasant.

NVK can't come sooner.

Valve seeing increasing bug reports due to Steam Snap - other methods recommended
17 January 2024 at 11:06 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Kimyrielle
Quoting: TiZNot even one? I have an easy one. First, Steam is proprietary. Valve does do a lot of great FOSS work, and they are generally trustworthy, but Steam itself is still proprietary at the end of the day. And it has made catastrophic mistakes before. Containerizing it limits the scope of the damage it can possibly do.

That's not it, either. I have about... 800+ additional reasons, at least in my Steam library. A whole litany of proprietary, closed-source games. Only a fraction of them are native, and would have hypothetically unfettered access to the whole filesystem when unsandboxed, but that's enough to prefer to be safe rather than sorry. Steam does have its own container runtimes, Soldier and Sniper, but most native binaries don't use them. Proton is their main consumer, actually.

I love open source software as much as anyone, but let's be real here. There are plenty of super serious bugs in OSS applications, too. Saying that anything proprietary is untrustworthy by design is a bit over the top. With your logic, you'd need to containerize EVERYTHING, and the result of this would be a a fairly unproductive and ineffective system. I get containerization for high-risk applications (yes, like the internet browser), but locking software from trustworthy vendors inside a container is a bit much on the paranoid side.
I don't really have a horse in this race, but I think TiZ is referring to the time Steam wiped everything on the user's drive: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671

SMITE 2 announced with Steam Deck support from Titan Forge and Hi-Rez Studios
17 January 2024 at 5:40 am UTC

Quoting: CatKiller
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.

QuoteI 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.
As it happens, I've found a guide for game devs who want to target Linux via DXVK: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/wiki/Developer-guidelines