Apologies for the long-winded (even by my pervasively verbose standards), but this is actually a bit of a passion subject for me:

So, before I say anything else, lemme first just say that if I ever do start messing with Switch emulation on my Steam Deck and try to add those games to my Steam Library, I'm using that "asset does not exist because of DMCA" image as my image for the game! 😂

Now, prior to the advent of the Steam Deck, I had felt myself in a real catch 22:

On the one hand, the Switch was far and away my #1 preferred system thanks to its "console / handheld hybrid" flexibility, and Nintendo was (and perhaps even still is) my #1 favorite company as a content / culture / experience creator, with the Genesis / TG16 and PS1 being the only times in all of gaming history where I preferred one of the rival consoles over Nintendo's entry for the given generation (and yes, that includes the WiiU).

On the other hand, as a litigious, draconian, blatantly anti-consumer legal entity....I HATED them. Full stop.

And this sense of inner conflict over these polar-conflicting simultaneously felt feelings had only been growing stronger and stronger as I had become more and more aware of my feeling them. I felt that I (and all Nintendo fans everywhere) were in an abusive relationship with Nintendo themselves, but that we stuck around because [STRICTLY metaphorically speaking] "the sex was so damned good". So I felt trapped, stuck in the perfect center between extreme love and extreme hate for this company.....

....then the Steam Deck came along, and enabled me to no longer feel so beholden to the Switch, and therefore, no longer so beholden to Nintendo.

And the difference was night and day.

Certainly, I still feel love for their content and cultural contributions to gaming, and certainly, I still enjoy a number of their games and storied franchises. But I no longer feel like the two feelings are a wash or that I'm held hostage by a tie. And now that I have broken free of that, I see their continued actions beyond that point as having been even worse than I had allowed myself to see previously. They're horrible!

While I am stopping just short of commiting to an all-out boycott of Nintendo, they have certainly lost my loyalty. If they offer a product or service that I really, really want, I will not deprive myself that service on principle. But if there is any way to get it 2nd hand, or aftermarket, so as to not put that extra coin in their coffers, I'll be sure to do so. And furthermore, I've allowed my NSO membership to lapse, with it being very unlikely that I'll opt to renew it later. My Switch has hardly been touched since getting the Deck, and I have purchased absolutely zero games of any kind for the system since securing my Deck. When my family gifted me some eShop gift cards, I bought 3DS games with them. Once I got my foot out of the bear trap, I ran (well, hobbled) away as fast as I could. :-)

Now I feel way more anger and sadness when I look Kyoto-ward than joy, and what joy I do still feel is dominated by the joy of relief at no longer being anywhere near so at the mercy of the merciless. The Steam Deck isn't just a great system on its own merits for me, it's also something of a liberation, of an emancipation. And that just makes it all the more beloved to me!

Cheers!

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Quoting: axelb

Quoting: rkfgAnd DLSS needs NVAPI that's also not enabled by default, it only works with Proton as some libraries need to be replaced and overridden in winecfg, Proton automates it:
PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1
After that it should work, tested on Metro Exodus, Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2, all good. Not sure about Steam Deck specifically though.

I additionally had to create
$home/.config/dxvk.conf
with the following content:
dxgi.nvapiHack = False
and I had to add the following to the Launch Options:
DXVK_CONFIG_FILE=/home/user/.config/dxvk.conf PROTON_HIDE_NVIDIA_GPU=0
otherwise DLSS wasnt available

Thanks guys! Yeah, I knew that ray tracing support has been a available on Linux for some time now, both on the nVidia side, and even on the AMD side, it seems.

I only have two, what we'll call "gaming viable" computers: the Steam Deck, of course, and my "big rig", gaming PC, which was built in 2017 and hasn't been hardware upgraded ever since (though it has since seen Ubuntu Studio replace Windows). This means that it still has a pre-RTX card installed (a GTX1070 to be specific). So it's not going to be a player in the ray tracing consideration until I can finally get around to replacing the GPU (hoping for tax return time here stateside!)

As for the Steam Deck, I know hardware ray tracing support is present, and even works right now if one is willing to take the Faustian bargain of installing Windows. But for those of us committed to Linux, my understanding is that our ray tracing fate hinges on waiting for MESA to catch up. It's been long enough ago now since I originally saw this thread and the related article on Phronix, which was more detailed that I can't recall specifically what I saw that made me hopeful our wait was nearing an end, but there was something.

Anyway, anyone know anything about the Deck specifically? :-)

Cheers!

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Sorry if this makes me sound like a noob / dunce, and also sorry for this....shall we wax euphemistic...."not being my first time raising this question", but a sister article on the subject that I read on Phronix specifically mentioned ray tracing. Does this mean that ray tracing for the Linux faithful on the Steam Deck is nigh?! 🥰

I'm certainly hoping so! 🥰

Cheers!

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Well, I know that I've said it here before, but the big headline I'm still waiting for is news that ray tracing is now fully functional in Steam OS. I know the hardware is there for it and I know it works in Windows, but that's not worth it to me. I'm content to wait it out in Linux, but am getting anxious for that headline's arrival! 😊

The sadness that such headline is still absent notwithstanding, I otherwise am pretty happy with everything that -IS- present! The Deck just keeps getting better and better, and is only gonna keep getting better and better....and SOMEDAY, that'll even include ray tracing! 🤣

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Quoting: Mountain ManMy stance is the same as it has always been: I'm not going to beg developers for Linux support. We're long past that at this point. If I'm interested in a game, and it's playable in Linux, then I'll buy it. If it's not playable in Linux, then I'm not interested, and the developer won't get my money. It's as simple as that.

That's a quality, much more succinct version of what I had said. To be even more succinct yet, I'll just repeat the most important line of my entire earlier, longer comment: "I'll care about Destiny / Bungie when Bungie cares about us". :-)

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Here is a copy/paste of my comment on the reddit thread (and I stand by all of it). Hopefully it's helpful to the cause (it has been upvoted pretty well).

-WARNING-: LONG-WINDED:

----------------------------

I enjoyed my time with the original Destiny on the PS4, and what little time I'd spent with its sequel on my gaming PC back when it was still running Windows before my migration over to Linux. While I do have systems where I could play Destiny 2 if I so chose, such as a PS5 that I barely touch outside of major console exclusives, and an XBSX that I touch a little more often thanks to Game Pass, but with it being in just one room with a high impact toddler in the house, that means anything more time-consuming than a few quick rounds of Rocket League and Fall Guys and Tetris Effect rarely gets to happen on it, making Destiny on XBox a difficult proposition for me.

With the Steam Deck, not only do I have the "anywhere / everywhere" flexibility of playing it in handheld mode, but I have a number of docks throughout the house, so that I can use the Steam Deck as a "home console" in a handful of rooms, as well as a "desktop PC" in others, and can do the same, say, when I visit my parents across town, making much easier and more frequent my opportunities to play there - a big part of why it quickly replaced my Nintendo Switch as my #1 most-used system. Moreover, thanks to cloud save, in the distressingly rare instances where I am actually at liberty to sit down in front of my proper "big rig" gaming PC, I can play and experience the game with fewer technical limitations than the more modest Steam Deck hardware would allow.

In short, given the circumstances of my home / work / family life, really the only system where a game like Destiny would be truly viable for me would be on PC, principally via the Steam Deck, and via Linux in all contexts. I would imagine that flashing Windows on my Deck would solve the dilemma for me, but for other reasons, I have no intention of doing this.

Look, I know full well that we Linux gamers are still a very small part of the gaming scene at large, though the Steam Deck is beginning and seems poised to only continue to change that. And it's easy to see, from a business perspective, why a company may not want to invest the time (and ergo, money) for such a small segment, even if it is the fastest-growing. It's not that I don't "get it", but here is my response to it: if it's growing so much, and with Steam Deck, only stands to grow even further, would it not be better to be on the forefront of that and be remembered as forward-thinking and visionary, rather than as stuck in old paradigms up front, and as reactionary at the end? Moreover, unless I am possessed of a serious misunderstanding, the only barrier to Destiny on Linux is just getting a working anti-cheat system going, right? And if so, it seems like a pretty low-hanging fruit to get going.

The question will be "will Bungie do it"?

So, at the end of the day, here's the deal: I like Destiny enough that were it available on the Deck, I'd probably spend some quality time with it, but not enough that I'm gonna bend over backwards to make it work contrary to my use case. Or put a bit more crassly: I'll care about Destiny / Bungie when Bungie cares about us. Until then, I'm as content to live without them as they are to live without me....and that's that.

Thanks for taking the time to read this (if you did), and I welcome your response. I -DO- appreciate Bungie taking the time to set up this focus group! That's a nice step in the right direction, at least!

Cheers!

-St. John from Des Moines (Host of video game music podcast "Nerd Noise Radio - Channel 1" and one of two hosts of "Nerd Noise Radio - Channel 2")

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Interesting timing! I had purchased Vampire Survivors just a couple days ago (haven't had a chance to install / play it yet, though.) I did add the other games in this article to my wishlist, and will hope to buy them soon.

As for whether I feel like this would qualify as an all new genre? Lemme think about it some more and get back to you. I mean, if fusing Metroid and Castlevania gave us the veritably bustling "Metroidvania" genre, which we all recognize as a proper genre, then I suppose mixing rogue-lite elements of, say, Enter the Gungeon or Rogue Legacy with the onslaught swarms of way classics like Robotron 2084 could maybe be a new genre as well, with "horde" being a decent term for it.

I suppose if the existence of "Metroidvania" is "the argument in favor of new genre", then I don't really have a good counter-argument against it. But for now, for reasons I really can't quite explain with any real value, this feels less to me like a new genre, and more like a spate of clever mashups. :-)

I'll need to marinate on this question a little more, methinks.....and most importantly, I suspect: get a little actual hands-on with the games themselves, and not just go by still images and text descriptions. ;-)

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Okay, well this puts my mind at ease, then! :-)

In comments on previous articles, I had speculated worriedly that the number of Windows installs seemed to have been dramatically more numerous than I had hoped going in, fearing, of course, that the more Windows installs we had on Steam Deck (even in dual-boot situations), the more undercut and muted the potential impact that the Steam Deck would have on propelling the Linux gaming scene could have.

I am quite happy to know that those fears seem to be quite well unfounded thus far, and that it is truly a very, very small number of people putting Windows on their devices. Others had speculated that the idea that it was more runaway was simply the "loud minority on social media" effect at play - and that theory seems to have been borne out!

I stand happily corrected! :-)

Cheers!🍻

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: NerdNoiseRadioIt's not that these laypeople are actively choosing Linux like you or I or the people in the group would, but passively choosing it by consequence of simply demurring to actively pursue the alternative.

The same is also true of the majority of Windows' desktop user base.

Oh, I absolutely don't disagree with that. Like the people who use Windows PCs and Apple iPhones. I can't talk too much trash about them, because both my wife and my non-binary teenager [and my parents across town come to think of it] fall into this camp. But for the purposes of our conversation here, the point I was trying to make is that these "I'm just along for the ride" people, sticking with Linux out of convenience rather than passion....they still help our cause of advancing gaming on Linux, even if only by complete coincidence / accident. :-)

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Quoting: constI think it's using PipeWire, but from your perspective, that should be a straight win unless you tend to use virtual sinks. PipeWire is a 99% drop-in replacement for PulseAudio (and Jack), but last time I checked, some special (yet usefull) sinks were missing. There is nearly always a way to circumvent those issues with the jack layer, but it needs some relearning.
USB hubs should not introduce latency. PulseAudio does :D PipeWire is awesome.

Oh, I'm super excited about PipeWire and can't wait to try it. I've heard that with Ubuntu 22.04 (Ubuntu Studio at the very least), that they've added it to the repositories, even though I know from experience that they've left PulseAudio as the default for now. I was very tempted to try installing it. But since I'd break my workflow if anything went wrong, I decided I'd either wait til it became mainstream, or I could try it on a backup device, or at least in a VM. You know, I do have a really old backup laptop that has Ubuntu Web Remix running on it....perhaps I'll give it a try over there. But no, I would not be disappointed in the slightest to learn that the Steam Deck uses PipeWire! :-)

As for the virtual sinks, I have only ever had to try that just the one time - to get a piece of video game music off of Audio Overload over to Audacity since the "export to WAV" functionality in AA seemed to be broken. And that's after almost 6yrs of doing VGM podcasting. So, no, it is not even remotely a part of my standard workflow...however, given that it is at least theoretically, remotely possible that I could potentially need to do so again sometime, I'll need to have some kind of backup plan in place for virtual sinks should PipeWire not support them. Any ideas? Any reason I couldn't have BOTH PipeWire and PulseAudio installed at the same time, and just use Pulse for the sinks? That sounds like the best idea - unless that would break stuff.

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