Quoting: Eike

Quoting: Brokatt

Quoting: Eike

Valve posted asking people to consider using the official Valve .deb package

Please, please, please, please not!
I'm raeding nearly every thread in the Steam for Linux forum, and we hear problems from people having used the downloadable deb for over a decade now! People should use what their distribution made of it, adding their dependencies and such. I cannot believe Valve proposes to actually use that!

What problems? I have been using the official .deb for over a year and it has worked fine. It's not flawless but there are issues with the Flatpak version as well.

As said: dependencies. And I'm not promoting Flatpak either, I prefer the "native" package (deb or whatever your system uses) of your distribution. The distribution makers download the same deb you can download (so they'll hardly make it worse), and they can add to it what the distribution needs to run it. I'm not saying the Steam deb does not work at all, it just might miss dependencies. Of course, if you know what to do, you can install them manually.

People keep coming in the forum with "Steam does not work on Linux", and when you make them show the terminal output, it's missing (32 bit) libraries. And people post "Steam for Linux cannot use games on my hard drive", and when you dig into it, they're using Snap or Flatpak, didn't even know they do, and thus wouldn't know why Steam cannot access other drives.

What's almost never brought up is that if a user is using Ubuntu LTS, and the official Steam package then they can get support directly from Valve. They don't need to go forum hunting, pasting commands lines into their terminal that they have no idea what its doing etc. They can just contact the Steam support and get help from a real company. This alone should make Ubuntu the recommendation for all beginners who, judging by the numbers, are growing. But many active Linux forum users are so proud in their specific choice of distro, package format, display server etc. that they don't take this simple fact into account. I am not surprised Valve is getting bug reports for Steam Snap. I'm sure they get bug reports for Steam Flatpak and all the other packages as well. Heck I'm sure they get support cases for Hannah Montana Linux.

When I time and time again see posts like "Hi I am a Linux noob. What distro should I use" and the top response is Manjaro, I sigh and shake my head. It's no wonder Linux have a reputation for being complex. We don't ease new user in.

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: kerossinI've been running Steam Flatpak on openSUSE Tumbleweed for over a year (maybe 2 years, can't remember) and had no problems.

Would be great if Valve would officially support Steam Flatpak, it would cover a lot more distros than just the Debian family but I believe it wouldn't be that much more work since it uses specific versions of Flatpak runtimes.

Edit: Also, funny how they hired more devs to work on Snap support in other distros while their own doesn't work properly yet.

Don't they already support flatpak version of Steam? Isn't that what the Steamdeck uses? (Maybe not, I'd have to look).

Valve officially only supports one distro and that is the latest Ubuntu LTS - with either Gnome or KDE desktop. They also only officially support one way one installing the client and that is the official .deb. SteamOS is using Arch so the client is packaged by Valve themselves but no other devices that Steam Decks are officially supported - yet.

Even though Valve is doing a lot of cool things they are still a small company (by headcount). I think the chances of Valve dedicating resources to support more than one distro, or more than one way of installing Steam, are slim. Maybe Flatpak could replace deb and SteamOS replace Ubuntu LTS in the future.

Quoting: Eike

Valve posted asking people to consider using the official Valve .deb package

Please, please, please, please not!
I'm raeding nearly every thread in the Steam for Linux forum, and we hear problems from people having used the downloadable deb for over a decade now! People should use what their distribution made of it, adding their dependencies and such. I cannot believe Valve proposes to actually use that!

What problems? I have been using the official .deb for over a year and it has worked fine. It's not flawless but there are issues with the Flatpak version as well.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPI don't have an objection to companies downsizing for cost reasons.
Just makes business sense in some situations.

What makes this so crazy is that they didn't lose profitability due to "the market changing" or inflation or anything.
Their leadership made absolutely insane decisions that cost them dearly, but the ones to pay the consequences of that are the normal staff, while the leadership remains absurdly overpaid.

That's the part that's just really grinding my gears.

I fully agree with you. Just to illustrate how much of a disaster in leadership this is. Unity went from 4000 employees in 2020 to 7700 in 2022. That's almost doubling in size in two years. Now in an even shorter time span they have cut one third of the work force. They are essential back to a headcount they had in 2021. What a roller coaster in all the wrong possible ways.

Quoting: ZlopezI'm surprised to see Jim Whitehurst as Interim CEO for Unity. I thought that he currently has some top management function in IBM after being CEO of Red Hat.

Interesting choice. Hopefully he can bring some of that Open Source and Open Organization thinking to Unity. Maybe he can transform Unity into the game engine equivalent to Red Hat.

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New devices are cool but I don't like the design. Too many sharp edges and all the RGB makes it look like something for the Fortnite generation. Maybe that's the target audience, in which case best of luck to them, or maybe I'm just old.

In any case the specs look good and it will be interesting to see how the Intel chip performs. But I can't find any info on price. Like the old saying goes: "There are no bad products only badly priced products."

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Hope they have the resources to get it nice and stable in time for release. And if not they have some extra time until Kubuntu 24.04 LTS which is probably when I will get my hands on it :)

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I'm so happy Lethal Company won the co-op award. So much fun that game is with friends. Also easy to mod with r2modmanplus (appimage) so you can play with more than 4 people, plus a bunch of more stuff. I will eventually get around to play Dave the Diver. It sits waiting on my Steam Deck and feels like a perfect game for handheld play.

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Quoting: blindcoderAbsolutely, Starfield has pretty much zero innovation. It's a decent game, but innovation is not part of it, at all.

This is probably why Starfield won. https://www.gamesradar.com/starfields-new-game-plus-narrative-is-bethesda-rpg-innovation-at-its-finest/ [External Link]

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Liam you and the Gaming On Linux site are corner stones of the Linux gaming community. I visit it several times every day and it's a big reason why this became the year I finally left Windows. No dual boot or backup PC in the closet, I'm fully on Linux now. I look forward to next year and all the exciting things happening in the Linux gaming space, and I look forward to you reporting about them :) Happy holidays!

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: deathxxxThis ray-tracing is just useless. Heavy drop performance for what?
Are someone care about ray-tracing? If you play game, do you look at ray-tracing? Or look other things, like how to keep alive?

I'd agree about something like Cyberpunk 2077. Performance drop in it is just not worth it. But may be some lighter games can benefit more from it. Didn't something like Minecraft add ray tracing support? No idea how it works without Vulkan though.

Raytracing is good on older games like Minecraft and Quake. The problem is that I have already played these games - a lot. I can't bring myself to start another Minecraft world just to see all the rays. On newer games the performance hit is not worth it and in competetive game I would disable ray-tracing anyway. My brain can't handle more shining lights in Dota xD

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Quoting: Bestia

Quoting: BrokattI am also a Kubuntu user, you have to have Flatpak for this. It's not available either as a snap or deb. If I remember correctly you have to open Discover, go to settings and enable flathub. If I am wrong you can follow these instructions: https://flatpak.org/setup/Kubuntu [External Link]

No you don't have to have Flatpak.

ProtonUp-Qt is available as AppImage.

https://github.com/DavidoTek/ProtonUp-Qt/releases [External Link]

My mistake. I don't use Appimage as if find it tedious to, find the file and right click, open in terminal, everytime I want to run them.

Quoting: sonic2kk

Quoting: BrokattIt's not available either as a snap or deb.

While it isn't available as a Snap or a Debian package, it is available via Pacstall [External Link] for Ubuntu-based distros since January ( DavidoTek/ProtonUp-Qt#83 [External Link] ). There is an open issue for adding a Debian package ( DavidoTek/ProtonUp-Qt#69 [External Link] ).

Historically, ProtonUp-Qt was not provided as a Snap due to some issues with strict file access ( DavidoTek/ProtonUp-Qt#3 [External Link] ), but there was renewed interest and a new issue was opened afterwards ( DavidoTek/ProtonUp-Qt#123 [External Link] ). Hopefully this is some useful background.

ProtonUp-Qt is also available via AppImage as another user mentioned, there are also two AUR packages, and of course it's available on Flathub.

That's interesting, thanks for the info.

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