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Latest Comments by Brokatt
Valve have been funding FEX to get x86 games on Arm Linux
4 Dec 2025 at 9:48 am UTC Likes: 6

One of Valves biggest strengths through the years has been that by being private they can do things that don't need payoff for many years. They can plan long-term in a way that most companies can. They have a steady stream of revenue from Steam and can dedicate a fraction of that to these projects. They don't need to hit deadlines for stockholders or investors. The only company I can think of that functions similarly is IKEA. Both companies have fumbled (they are not perfect) but their dominant positions means they can continue to play the long game.

I think SteamOS, Proton and FEX are good examples of this slow, long term strategy. They don't employ hundreds of developers for these projects, they don't need to show results by next annual report, and they don't have to mean some fundamental shift for Valve. All they need to do is widening the market by a tiny bit and give current customers even more reasons to stay on Steam. SteamOS doesn't mean they will abandon Windows and FEX doesn't mean they will abandon x86. This is not dogma this is long-term business strategy on a level most companies can only dream of.

Right now, for gaming, Snapdragon X Elite is not competitive with Intel or AMD's offerings. This might change in the future and if that happens then Valve will be ready to switch to ARM for Steam Deck. It might also never happen and that is equally fine for Valve. Then don't care as long as they get a good price on a killer perf/watt chip. ARM can be powerful and x86 can be power efficient. Worst case they can release a Steam app for phones and give their customer yet another platform to play (at least some of) their games on.

I myself don't care if I run ARM or x86. What I do care about is that most (preferably all) my games run, I have good performance at a decent price and (since a year back) that it can run Linux.

Valve have been funding FEX to get x86 games on Arm Linux
3 Dec 2025 at 4:05 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: The_Real_BittermanHm, Steam Deck 2 might be ARM based I guess. 🤔
I wouldn't count on it. Valve has a very good relationship with AMD and I don't see another vendor provide an ARM chip with similar gaming performance. But maybe for a Steam Deck 3?

Fedora Linux 44 will get improved NTSYNC enabling for Proton / Wine
3 Dec 2025 at 1:58 pm UTC Likes: 1

Is NTsync stable now or is Fsync still the way to go?

According to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney - game stores don't need an AI label as it will be everywhere
27 Nov 2025 at 2:28 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: syylkOwner of a featureless store claims the features of the featureful competitor are irrelevant.

News at 11.
"Doing something is pointless so we are actually ahead of the curve for once because we are doing jack shit."

;)

Humble Choice for November 2025 has Total War: WARHAMMER III
5 Nov 2025 at 3:14 pm UTC Likes: 1

I really love TW: Warhammer (all 3 games), but I stopped playing it after switching to Steam Deck as the 3 is unsupported and runs really badly.

Maybe when I switch from Steam Deck to something else I will get back to it.
I also quit but I have over 1000 hours in WH2 and a little over half of that in WH3. They are really good games and run well with Proton, but CA really let the AI degrade and is now in a state of disrepair. WH2 has it's faults but it was at least challenging in the first 50 turns, but WH3 is a snooze fest. I really hope they get it to a better state before the last DLC or at least give the community better tools to maintain it.

They really should look at Paradox for inspiration on how to give options to make the campaigns more interesting.

Linux users have no reason to worry about recent AMD GPU driver changes
5 Nov 2025 at 7:35 am UTC

I’m really confused here… x)
Basically it's really confusing messaging from AMD and people assume the worst. But as the dust settles and we have seen a clarification of the clarification from AMD, it all ends up being a nice juicy nothing burger. But don't expect RDNA 1 & 2 to get FSR 4 INT8.

Steam Deck gets a new low-power screen-off downloads mode
5 Nov 2025 at 7:32 am UTC Likes: 3

It's features like this I would like to see in SteamOS for PC. And "wake PC with Steam mobile app" to download a purchased app then turn off again.

Ubuntu getting optimisations for modern processors with architecture variants
2 Nov 2025 at 6:11 pm UTC

Microsoft edit was released this year.
Ok you got a link to the article?

Linux users have no reason to worry about recent AMD GPU driver changes
2 Nov 2025 at 12:29 am UTC Likes: 4

Speaking as an owner of a RX 6800 I'm not very worried that RDNA 2, the same chip that's in two consoles and the Steam Deck, will loose support.

"New features, bug fixes and game optimizations will continue to be delivered as required by market needs in the maintenance mode branch," an AMD spokesperson told Tom's Hardware [External Link]

Ubuntu getting optimisations for modern processors with architecture variants
31 Oct 2025 at 7:55 am UTC Likes: 5

The best thing one can do for performance on ununtu is to get rid of snaps.

The snaps version of microsoft edit was reported (by omgubuntu) to take 5 seconds to start on modern system.
This is simply not true anymore and you need to update your sources. It was true maybe 5 years ago but today the difference between native packages, flatpaks and snaps are negligible if we talk about startups after the first-time launch. Canonical has made very nice [External Link] changes [External Link] to snaps over the years.

In reality this article has very little to do with snaps. I would be very pleased with this change if I was still on Ubuntu.