For people who own a drawing tablet there's plenty of improvements there too. There's an overhauled system settings page for tablets, along with a bunch of new configuration options to really set it up how you want it.

Just to be clear, this is for the Wayland session. All of these features already existed on the X11 session for 10+ years.

Joshua Goins and other developers are doing amazing work bridging the gap between the Wayland session and the X11 session for graphics tablets.

There are still more gaps to fill (all of the graphics tablet issues are omissions compared to X11), but maybe in a few more major releases, it'll have feature parity: https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues [External Link]

After that...there's really not much left for the Wayland session to be pretty complete, at least from KDE's perspective.

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Interesting to see some of the artists at Blender Studio using Linux workstations.

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It seems unlikely the video game industry would go back to less-invasive anti-cheats given the general success rate of off-the-shelf products like EAC and BattlEye, while improved over traditional systems, has not proven very effective.

Game streaming still seems like the future. It's the ultimate anti-cheat.

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Looking at the chart again, it seems to imply Linux was removed at the beginning of the week, so the first drop occurred directly after disabling Linux support.

Edit: Okay, I just realized the graph has dates. Linux support was removed roughly Oct 31st, the new season began Nov 4th...

Yeah, it was declining well before Linux support was removed.

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So would the principle of Windows S mode work on a console that is only intended to install software from one place? If it could, then it would make side loading hacks much harder (impossible doesn't exist) and greatly reduce the likelihood of cheating on the platform?

That would likely work, but it would defeat the purpose of having a Linux-based operating system, just like Playstation being based on BSD does not excite me.

Also, I would never buy it, as hundreds of my games come from niche PC stores (not Steam).

Instead of restricting players as much as possible like every other system has tried to do, why not lean into the control you get with SteamOS that no other gaming-oriented operating system gives you? Convergence is cool.

Anti-cheat means a Steam console is dead in the water because unlike with a handheld, it's not a form factor/hardware issue; it's a company relations issue, and players are not sympathetic to plights like this. There are too many big games you can't play.

The Steam Console needs to be just as easy to setup as any modern console. The primary reason people use consoles is because they don't want to deal with the hassle of the PC platform.

Interesting to think about, but I'm not the target audience because I can't play Siege on it.

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It does seem kind of odd to me to use this chart to claim cheating went down because Linux players weren't allowed to play the game as it was already trending harshly down and immediately afterwards starts trending upward again...

If it did have an effect, it didn't stop cheaters in their tracks. It was hardly a death blow. Given another 2-3 months, cheating will be back where it was before Linux was banned based on the trend line.

I'm inclined to believe them when they say banning Linux had a reduction in cheaters. It just makes sense. All you can do is make cheating harder rather than eliminate it outright—not even Valorant can stop all cheating.

I hear all the time that CS2 has a lot of cheaters and that game relies on server-side anti-cheat. But I don't know, because I don't play the game.

I play Siege regularly, which has never enabled Linux, and it's the only game where I've seen widespread cheating. Every other match, someone else has walls or aimbot. That game has two anti-cheat systems! Siege has roughly half the players of Apex Legends at the moment.

Banning Linux is an easy thing to do to reduce cheating, but it's hardly going to make a dent. It's a good start, but for the sake of Apex players, one would hope they've got other things up their sleeve than this incredibly blunt approach...

Maybe in the future, competitive games will only be allowed to be played on Cloud gaming systems like xCloud and GeForce Now... I wouldn't mind that so long as the prices weren't as expensive as they are now.

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For those who missed it, the developer discontinued development of the native release for this game, favoring testing with Proton.

The reason was because the Unity engine was deficient at writing Vulkan calls for Linux, and these bugs/missing features in the engine weren't fixable by the developer. DXVK did a better job of writing Vulkan calls than Unity, resulting in better performance and fewer bugs.

This is pretty embarrassing for a commercial game engine, but it does go to show how far Windows➜Linux translation has come...

I didn't think much of it in 2023, but this game sounds like a fun time. It's not a genre I'd normally enjoy, but it seems charming. I think I'll wait for a sale and a full release though!

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AWS and Cloudflare have noted potential sponsorships, so perhaps Flathub can get in on that too.

Amazon being a chokepoint for free software is concerning if you've ever done any real business with Amazon.

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These petitions are just too soft of an approach. It's just paper with names, even it had million names.

What is your proposed alternative for amending the laws to protect customers?

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Yes?

I'm just surprised to see old man Debian so prominent :smile:

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