Metal buttons sound awful. Especially copper. Copper looks cool as hell, but . . . is terrible for buttons. They're heavy and just going to be awful on your fingers.

There are some things plastic is just really good at. Like keyboards, even the craziest mechanical keyboard nerds, they don't want metal keycaps for the same reasons. They might look cool and appeal to some expensive = good crowd, but I don't want to type for hours on a metal keyboard, because I don't hate my hands. This just seems the same to me.

Mmmmmaybe this being some kind of 3d printed resin+metal makes me wrong? But . . . I doubt it.

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Quoting: TheRiddickWould you not be better off just buying a SteamDeck or one of its slightly updated competitors?

If you primarily want to play retro games on a TV, the deck is going to be a lot more expensive and no better than the low end version.

If you want to play newer stuff for about the same price, I'm pretty sure the 8600G will also destroy the steam deck.

It's a good thing. If you don't want to be mobile, I can totally see preferring one of these.

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Crazy. What this really means is, every feature of this controller, any customization of the buttons and features like that, are all being planned, by the maker, to work on Linux on day one.

Right now I really like my 8biitDo Ultimate, but I hate that I can't properly configure all the buttons on Linux.

Good times.

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What's really cool about the giveaway is really just what it says about Linux support. KH doesn't have a native Linux version, but we've gone through this slow creep of like, not antagonizing Linux users, occasionally having patch notes that mention making something work in Proton, to things like Neil Druckman acknowledging that yes they care about Steam Deck, to it being a key piece of marketing on launch day.

Weird times.

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Quoting: Mountain ManWhy do people keep poking the bear? It's not like Nintendo is going to suddenly say, "Fine, you win. We will stop attempting to protect our intellectual property rights."

Yes, why do people keep doing what's right in the face of an idiotic legal system. Silly protesters with their values. We'll never understand. When the deck's stacked against you, just roll over immediately, that's what I say.

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I suspect we'll get an update within a year.

Keeping the specs the same (I know the OLED bumps them a bit, but it's purposefully not a lot faster) for two whole years is an eternity for devices like this. No phone or tablet stays stagnant for more than about a year, and while the Steam Deck is the generic, like the google or the iPad of the space, it does have competitors who will just put out much faster versions of the same thing. Even consoles, other than Nintendo, a "pro" version just a few years in is pretty standard, Valve should fall sort of in between the iPad and PlayStation I figure.

I suspect we'll see an update every 2-2.5 years, basically following AMD's hardware roadmap but usually skipping one iteration.

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I conveniently, just this morning, decided to hit the button and upgrade my main PC to Fedora 40's beta. It seems I got in late enough that I got 5.4.6-1 initially and then 5.4.6.-3 on upgrade, completely bypassing the "probably OK" builds that were up there.

This is a good reminder of how often, boring old versions of software are pretty nice things.

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It's been kind of a big ask, paying $5 a month every month for the last two decades for Neverwinter+, but the value we've gotten out of it is pretty insane.

I know a lot of people bemoan subscriptions for everything, but obviously it would be impossible to get this kind of support any other way.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeI'll have to test it soonish.

Quoting: Brokatt

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: BrokattValve officially only supports one distro and that is the latest Ubuntu LTS - with either Gnome or KDE desktop.

They don't support Gnome any more - well, specifically Wayland Gnome; X11 Gnome is OK - because it breaks SteamVR. I can't remember which widget it is that Gnome doesn't provide (I don't use VR and I don't use Gnome) but ISTR that the Gnome devs specifically refuse to support that widget. Someone with more familiarity with the details can fill in the gaps.

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: BrokattValve officially only supports one distro and that is the latest Ubuntu LTS - with either Gnome or KDE desktop.

Source? Their initial run of SteamOS was debian based, and not Ubuntu based. They include some ubuntu name libraries, and that's about it.

I've literally been installing steam on all my debian systems since it was first added to the repos... about 14 years ago. Never had any issues with it at all. Ubuntu LTS itself only supports their modified gnome install, so there is that.

By the way, Debian's package is now called 'steam-installer' and you can install it with three commands.
 
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install steam-installer steam-devices
And guess what? The /usr/games/steam file is a script that downloads the very official debian Steam package and installs it.

Funny enough, the Arch version likely does the exact same thing. Which basically means it doesn't really matter what Valve officially supports, people will get it installed, and currently the correct way to get the right dependencies, etc is to NOT use the .deb from their website, but to use your package manager on whichever distribution you choose.

Neither SteamOS 2.0 nor 3.0 was/is meant as a desktop replacement. If you look at the recommended specs on the Steam page for any Valve game they only ever recommend an Ubuntu LTS release.

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1114-3F74-0B8A-B784 [External Link]

Quoting: mattaraxia

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: BrokattValve officially only supports one distro and that is the latest Ubuntu LTS - with either Gnome or KDE desktop.

They don't support Gnome any more - well, specifically Wayland Gnome; X11 Gnome is OK - because it breaks SteamVR. I can't remember which widget it is that Gnome doesn't provide (I don't use VR and I don't use Gnome) but ISTR that the Gnome devs specifically refuse to support that widget. Someone with more familiarity with the details can fill in the gaps.

I would be really interested to know that too. I was kind of surprised the deck doesn't at least support GNOME. I get KDE is more accommodating to Windows users and being friendly to them is obviously a high priority for the deck, but GNOME is so good on a hybrid/tablet style device like that. VR being a priority makes a lot of sense.

Edit: it appears to be this: DRM leasing. They don't refuse, it's just never been complete enough to be merged:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2759 [External Link]

As far as I can see Gnome is supported on Steam for Linux. Why would they put resources into supporting Gnome on Steam Deck? I would guess a majority of the Steam Deck users don't ever use Desktop Mode. Other features like HDR support have higher priority than adding another DE to Desktop Mode.

The reason is literally right there in the comment you're quoting? You're welcome to disagree with it, you may be right about the usage, but uh, the reason is right there. I literally think it cannot be clearer.

I didn't say it should be a higher priority than other things, just that I've been "kind of surprised" that it wasn't there. The VR support makes sense.

Also isn't HDR there now with the OLED deck? And much of the development was done by not-Valve. I really doubt that they would have to sarcrifice resources for one over the other.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: mattaraxia

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWhat can I say? My empirical evidence, albeit limited, says different, and you haven't advanced anything except bad analogies to justify your position..

I'll just respond to this point because it's so easy to demonstrate how not true it is.

I literally have. I gave several real world examples in my very first comment, but you just quoted a single sentence and started rambling instead of responding to what I actually wrote.

Here, as a Linux gamer, here's details of a very real world example I already explicitly mentioned. Did you ever run Steam? Real world example:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/431317/scary-steam-for-linux-bug-erases-all-the-personal-files-on-your-pc.html [External Link]

If you think flatpak is too hard to be worth mitigating something like this, cool, but it's a very real world example of why you do have a need for it whether you realize it or not. If you can be bothered to read a whole article, you'll see that problem affected real humans with no, as you put it, movie style hacker attack required. And it's one of several examples from my very first comment you only quoted one sentence of. No app is immune to this sort of thing. Sandboxing technology is the best mitigation for such problems we have.

You can keep trying to be disagreeable all you want, but you clearly haven't actually read what I actually said. Instead, you keep trying to commit me to some position you've imagined, that I think you should run flatpak or snap today or something.

That's a real world example of something, but not of what you would need to establish. We know there are vulnerabilities. That says nothing about how often ordinary people's desktop computers are successfully attacked, let alone in ways that would matter to the ordinary person. Note: NOT servers, NOT computers belonging to large and/or wealthy organizations, and NOT via phishing or social engineering. Ordinary people's computers, hacked, in a way that does something that matters to the individual; how often does it happen? And, to get specific, how many of such cases would sandboxing apps have helped with? If you can't speak to that, you are not speaking to my point or to anything I have a reason to care about.

Far as I can tell, most of what happens to ordinary people is hackers go after some outfit that has a ton of passwords, steals their passwords from that place and messes up the individual without ever encountering their computer. Ain't a lot containerization or any other extra hardening is going to do about that. But it does show that security is important for servers and large organizations' computers.

Heh. Here's my bad analogy: We know orcas are capable of killing humans. It's obvious, you look at the mass, the teeth, the things they do predate upon, and a track record of occasionally snapping and killing a trainer at some Sea World place. But do they? Well, if you're not their prison guard, apparently not. The vulnerability to orca attack clearly exists, and yet there is no point in applying security measures against orca attack except in extremely specific situations. The only place where orca security experts are worth listening to is at places where orcas are in captivity. If orca security experts from those places were to try to apply their principles to whale watching tours, they would be doing the wrong thing.

You're just digging a hole man. I'm not interested in convincing you more, but come on, you know full well you said I'd only provided such and such, and it's just not true. You claiming that doesn't provide enough of an example, for a point I'm not even making you're just trying to commit me to, is meaningless.

I mean again, you clearly can't be bothered to read a whole article, but the example I gave doesn't require "hackers" at all.

You're vomiting up an insane amount of text at this point when you'd be better off just admitting you hadn't read the actual discussion you jumped into.

But really, it's OK, the world will move on without you. Are you still mad that Ubuntu disabled the root user ~20 years ago because it didn't affect you? Luckily, smarter people realized it was a good thing to do, and essentially all distros followed along.

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