Quoting: Nod... and a big F you to NZ.

I keep thinking they might say "oh yea NZ too, we didn't think it was worth mentioning", but that hope is fading.

\

Bruh! You are joking. I obviously, wrongly, assumed New Zealand and Australia just went hand in hand. When I reserved the Steam Deck way back, I told my buddy, "if this steam deck plays a couple games half way decently, I'll consider it a success." Then who wasn't blown away by the Steam Deck and how well it works. The Steam Deck has really become a utility that just makes more and more sense to have it then not. It's basically an ATM for Valve. I really think somebody at Valve is just messing up by not pushing the Steam Deck in to more markets. Especially NZ and Australia. One but not the other???? That's insane. Valve must be trying to squeeze every penny out of every deal they make. I mean, I'm completely ignorant on world trade and import laws and all that. Just seems like the Steam Deck has proven itself over and over. Why keep the shackles on?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: _wojtekI wonder... couldn't Valve just collect the stats without the "survey prompt" to get saner results?

Yes, and I'm sure they do. Valve can track the number of hours you put into a game per platform. When you make a review about a particular game, if more than 50% of that time was played on a Steam Deck, Valve will tag your review to reflect that. Valve's telemetry is definitely detailed enough to tell us how many hours each day are spent on Linux. Right, Valve collects telemetry accounting for the number of hours played per game each week on the Steam Deck. Then Valve gives us a stats page for the most played games on the Steam Deck per week.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: RandomizedKirbyTree47

Quoting: Linux_RocksMan, you can tell that Intel is in trouble if this is happening. This is like Microsoft with Xbox and them trying to act all friendly towards other platforms. If Intel was beating AMD hand over fist again or if Xbox was doing good still. None of this would be happening and they'd be saying fuck off to everyone else. lol

I think it's less about Intel beating or not beating AMD: in sales for new laptops running Windows, Intel is still winning by a lot. I think it's about Intel fearing ARM.

You can't really go by sales of new laptops. Intel pays their OEM's to not build laptops with AMD processors. If you go to a car dealer and the salesman says, you can have a car with any color you want as long as it's green. Then some economist runs the numbers and determines Green is the most popular color by a wide margin. Intel used to have awesome, Intel Inside, commercials. It was exciting to buy Intel. Now you go to a big box store and buy a laptop, statistically you'll walk out with an Intel processor. Intel was dying a slow death when I was working there. At that time they were signing deals to fabricate chips that had ARM cores and not Intel cores. That would have never been thinkable historically. And of course they eventually split off the foundry business from the chip design part of Intel. Tell me Intel has relied on the power of their purse for too long, without telling me they've relied on the power of their purse for too long.

Don't get me started on the Microsoft Tax.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: LoudTechieI'm still curious what took them so long.
It's not chip restrictions, it's not copyright law, it probably isn't wiretapping law and it isn't the market.
Does Australia have some product safety law it failed to meet, such as "all gaming consoles should have minimally EAL5 rated hardware."
Could it be Chinese import/export restrictions.
The closest I get is that it's according to the american government [External Link] a "small competitive market", but that applies to a lot of their already released countries.
:huh:

I would speculate, the engineering challenges incurred when playing the Steam Deck upside down.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: WorMzy

Quoting: Jarmerso basically they want to make it easier for the developers of App XYZ (or Game ABC) to just push a button for deployment and BAM their app/game is available on x86 or Arm? Is that correct?

No, this is purely about the OS layer. At the moment Arch only supports x86_64, and lacks the resources/motivation to support any other architectures because providing packages for these is a timesink/chore right now. Arch has had vague plans to improve the packaging infrastructure (to make supporting other architectures easier) for a while, but hasn't gotten around to doing so. Valve have basically come along and asked how they can help.

That's how I see it. Valve has been doing this with other opensource projects as well. Most will remember that KDE received a bunch of funding from Valve. Valve strategy seems to be, fund open source projects for the features they want/need. Which is ideal. Valve doesn't have to hire or steal developers away from the projects they work on, which keeps the knowledge and efforts localized to the project. If something bad were to happen, everything is opensource and Valve can fork the code and walk away. So Valve isn't worried about losing their investment and the community doesn't split and fracture the knowledge, if you get what I mean.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: M@GOidI'm sorry if this sound harsh but, they get no sympathy from me. People should know that money is not infinite, so if you drag development of something for 6 years, it will end with the project being canceled.

Gaming development is not a new thing. People should know how it works by now and have realistic goals, when they start a project like this.

We are in the 2020's and the writing is on the wall: don't buy anything on pre-release, not from a big studio, nor from a bunch of new kids that don't know what they are doing. If you loose money, it is on you.

100% this. In fact, I rarely buy a game day 1 now.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: mphuZ

Quoting: pbPersonally I find this fascinating that China is so Windows-centric.

Not for long. In the next 1-2 years, the Chinese will significantly completely abandon Windows (even pirated versions will be cut) and switch to HarmonyOS [External Link].

They write [External Link] that its microkernel is 3 times more efficient than Linux. Other sources also say that it will be possible to launch Steam + native streaming of games on DX12.2

I wondered about that. I thought HarmonyOS was Huawei, and they only had 10% of the PC market in China. All of the other mfg would have to write driver's for the HarmonyOS kernel. Which means they would need to have two engineering efforts for HarmonyOS and Windows. I'm sure they wouldn't go cold turkey into HarmonyOS.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Can someone recommend a GOG Linux game that doesn't work out of the box? I randomly(ish) bought and downloaded a game called Silver because:

Works on:
Windows (7, 8, 10, 11), Linux (Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04)
Release date:
August 31, 1999

I thought for sure this is not going to work. I'm running Ubuntu 24.04. But everything worked. I was shocked and disappointed, haha. The last update according to the change log in GOG is from 2018. Seems like they have something figured out.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: whizse

Quoting: HighballEdit: Back in the day, WINE released a libwine library for Windows applications. If you programmed with libwine that would make your program compatible with Linux using WINE. I don't know how much use it got or if it ever got any traction. But, I've said this before, Valve should be developing a libproton library. Or at the very least investing in libwine and promoting that. Future games starting with libproton and Vulkan would be 100% compatible with Linux at that point and use 1:1 translations just like WoW64 does for older Windows programs and games.

I think Winelib is still a thing, at least the user guide [External Link] looks up to date?

But its a native port by any other name. With the same problems. You need active developer support, you have two versions to keep up to date, you need to manage dependencies etc.

Hmmm, that is not how I remember libwine(Winelib). What a mistake. Valve definitely needs a libproton(Protonlib, haha) then.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EagleDeltaHonestly, I get really annoyed by the "Proton/WINE isn't native" arguments. If WINE or Proton were Emulation tools, I'd agree, but where emulation tries to mimic hardware and other aspects that simply can't be done "natively", WINE and Proton's other tools are actually rebuilding the Windows and DX APIs for use within Linux. As such, Proton/WINE are absolutely native but the very definition of what an API does. I'm speaking of this as a Software Dev myself that works with various APIs every day. I've said it before and I'll say it again, if WINE/Proton isn't "native", then no API is native.

Agreed. Most people don't realize it, on Windows, WoW64 is a translation layer as well. It stands for Windows (32bit) on Windows64. All the old Windows 32 bit games are going through a translation layer. Any games that install to the Program Files(32) folder all run through WoW64.

Edit: Back in the day, WINE released a libwine library for Windows applications. If you programmed with libwine that would make your program compatible with Linux using WINE. I don't know how much use it got or if it ever got any traction. But, I've said this before, Valve should be developing a libproton library. Or at the very least investing in libwine and promoting that. Future games starting with libproton and Vulkan would be 100% compatible with Linux at that point and use 1:1 translations just like WoW64 does for older Windows programs and games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments