I recommend switching to bazzite [External Link] instead if you want to play on Fedora. I'm using the flatpak version of Steam and I'm happy with it (not playing much on it). For serious gaming I still have Steam Deck.

As a user mentions in the discussion, removal of 32-bit support will impact Gamescope:

This would negatively impact downstream distributions like Bazzite.

In order for Gamescope to function properly, Steam (and it’s dependencies) need to be packaged as an RPM. Flatpak steam would not work as an alternative.

Neal Gompa mentions:

This also would break OBS’ gamecapture of games since that requires a 32-bit userspace graphics stack.

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Wine 10.x version can now execute 32 bits apps without the need of this 32 bits libraries.

But old Native Linux games can't be run on Wine.

Though I seriously doubt old native Linux games run at all without patching, in my experience :) Hell, there are plenty of native games released less than 10 years ago I couldn't run without patching libraries.

I don't use Fedora, so count me unconcerned. I did...for a brief time. But certain things were just...harder on that distribution. I do miss the extra security though.

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just recently added Easy Anti-Cheat, which broke it on Linux / Steam Deck but now they've enabled it. Nice to see we won't be left with another broken game.

My brain immediately appends "for now" to this sentence.

But hopefully not.

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Now, enabling Wayland in the Proton build would be the next frontier. Not defaulting to it, mind you; just enabling it in the build so you can turn it on one-by-one as a launch option.

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That's a lot of CVEs...

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I don't really know. I believe Catkiller was of the opinion that it was a blind spot and (my opinion follows:) because Proton development is focused on Steam games, which don't ship with Soft-Denchi or BuddyLauncher or DMM Game Player or any of that horrible stuff, they haven't needed to make it work.

And certainly, there is a lot of DRM in games on Steam that works in Proton, I've heard.

I looked up the WineHQ bug for Soft-Denchi specifically years ago, and the problem is the DRM tries to call some sort of string encryption function in the Windows API that is only partially implemented in Wine, so it fails. Somebody submitted for a patch for it years ago - I forget if it was merged or not.

Edit: Here's the link: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52441 [External Link] - Looks like somebody submitted an anonymous patch (????) and took off. Never got merged...

So, if they focused on it, I'm sure they could get it to work. But it seems pretty low priority as Japanese language visual novels are a niche among niches. And according to WineHQ, it's no fun trying to get copy protection to work in Wine: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Copy-Protection [External Link]

Fortunately, I'd say over 90% of visual novels work just fine in a Windows VM that you can run inside of Linux. They're very undemanding games. Hell, you could probably run most of them on a Windows XP VM.

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And DRM! For visual novels. DMM's entire catalogue is unplayable on Linux because Soft-Denchi doesn't work through Wine right now.

A portion of DLsite's games are unplayable on Linux if they use DRM other than PlayDRM. And physical editions of visual novels, if they are encumbered by DRM, usually don't work either.

I haven't tested them, but I would be very surprised if Johren's visual novels worked either.

Still, that leaves you with a lot of visual novels from DLsite and Steam to play.

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Re:

wayland is terrible, they shouldn't force someone to use something. linux is becoming more like windows forcing garbage on users.

You can't force developers to do what you want. Developers can't force you to do what they want. That's how free software works. You've got power and choice.

You can choose a different distribution, like Debian, or you can hack on the code yourself. But it seems unlikely X11 will be removed from the repositories of most distributions any time soon, so it seems likely you'll have the ability to fallback on X11 for a few years yet.

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This is surprising. But I think most people will have fewer issues with Wayland than X11. People who try Mint tend to run into fundamental limitations of X11 and otherwise issues that don't exist on Wayland.

Not that Wayland doesn't have its issues, but compared to X11, they're actually being fixed.

Neither is a great experience right now, though Wayland has been better for me.

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I had a look at the LTT video on this, which was pretty light on detail. There was speculation that all of the work done for this handheld would make it back into Windows proper so that it could have its own "Big Picture" mode. That seems likely.

I haven't used a Steam Deck or an ROG Xbox Ally before, but I've owned an Xbox in one form or another for decades. While handheld gaming still doesn't appeal to me, I must admit the Xbox Ally doesn't look bad. It's definitely a plus that you can play anti-cheat games, because I play at least one of those. Not that playing that game would be at all comfortable on a handheld...

I don't see a reason to get one of them over the other, which is an indication that the devices have parity to my casual inspection. I guess the crucial differing factor would be price, which is an unknown right now, but Microsoft is certainly willing to take a hit.

I don't expect much to change. The Steam Deck will get fewer sales because this is the first competitive Windows handheld and the Deck is getting long in the tooth at this point, more games will block off anti-cheat to Linux (but that was already a trend), and maybe Linux usage on the Steam survey will flatten out. Microsoft finally fixed the UI problem and massively improved performance by killing all the Windows processes. Battery life will probably be better too. If they start letting you play Xbox games directly on the device, that would be a leg up...but does Xbox even have any exclusives these days? It would be more of a killer feature if you could play really old Xbox games on it like Blinx.

I mean, I would prefer the Steam Deck because I like Linux... but I don't expect the average person to share that view. It's good that people who prefer Windows can finally have a decent gaming experience, but a shame Valve had to embarrass them into doing it.

Depending on how well this device handles "side loading" executables from sites like DMM...maybe it'd be a good visual novel device.

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Well, that's expected. I'm surprised they're bothering with the Steam Deck at all.

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