Much like my Switch before I replaced it with my Steam Deck, I primarily use my Deck docked, so an improved battery life and wake from Bluetooth are very welcome additions. OLED will be superb, and a slightly better screen (probably from reduced bezels) is awesome. Don't care much about the whole HDR or 60hz+ thing though.

Even though I don't need a new Steam Deck, I do kinda want one... If they release a Steam Controller 2 to go with it I would be sold, that would be the perfect docked experience.

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A couple of buyer-bewares:
- "Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 - Turbocharged" contains Easy Anti-Cheat and, to my understanding, also uses Epic Online Services. This means you're at the whims of Epic Games in two ways, and also that the online could possibly break with an update (or if Epic shuts down EOS).
- "Salt and Sacrifice" was an Epic Games Store timed exclusive.

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Quoting: AdutchmanI mean, KDE and Gnome (mostly Gnome) were the torchbearers of Wayland, so a lot of things needed to be implemented for the first time or even necesitated a new Wayland extention. Now that that work is nearing the end, Linux Mint can piggy back of of a lot of work from Gnome (see Marlocks comment) and look at other programs as an example, so it should be way less work.

Exactly this. GNOME were around before per-window screen capture was viable on Wayland. KDE had to push for (with support from Valve) fractional scaling and tearing extensions. GNOME, KDE, and Valve are also making big developments in the realm of proofing out colour management and HDR on Wayland, as well as VRR.

Wayland today is much different than it was 2 or 3 years ago, and is continuing to get the extensions that once received vehement pushback (such as fractional scaling). The work that GNOME and KDE have done have, for the most part, matured Wayland to a point where other desktops can now comfortably see their future on Wayland. We also shouldn't forget the excellent Wayland compositors such as Hyprland which proofed out Wayland-only applications as viable, and less relevant for GTK/Qt-based desktops, wlroots which provides common code to develop a Wayland compositor from.

The point I'm making is, Wayland isn't as much of an unknown as it was 2 years ago, thanks to the work of many to bring it up to scratch where there is no longer need for private protocols, and work can now begin on porting desktops, because the trail has been blazed by others willing to spend the last 5+ years pushing for improvements to Wayland.

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Happens frequently on Windows, had a friend get banned for about a month after setting up a virtual machine. Other times it just doesn't work and another friend didn't get it fixed until he got a new PC.

I just avoid games with this garbage altogether. If it has EAC, battlEye, EOS, or similar, I steer clear.

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But, either way, if they do manage to finish up their Vulkan work, it will make running it on Linux hopefully better with Proton since there will be less translation that needs to be done which means it should hopefully be smoother.

Vulkan is direct passthrough with Proton for what it's worth, but other calls will indeed need translation.

I think outside of translation though, the absolute biggest benefit that no one ever mentions with native ports, is that start-up times are faster because there is no need to create, update, or repair a Wine prefix, on top of Wine just generally needing to start itself up.

Star Citizen unfortunately incorporates Easy Anti-Cheat nowadays, so I cannot say I will ever go back to it, but it would be great to see a big release like this with native support. I believe it would set a good precedent.

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Quoting: devlandIf not for the quality of the games then just because most others require an internet connection to servers that will eventually be closed.

An excellent point I never even considered, but something which I am wholeheartedly in agreement with. ARPGs are meant to be played solo, they should not require an Internet connection.

Both are also available on GOG, so not only can they be played entirely offline, but also DRM free. I personally prefer the convenience of Steam, but I do occasionally buy games on GOG afterwards and hoard them across a couple of devices, and I may consider doing so particularly for Torchlight II. As far as I'm aware, Steam Workshop content can be loaded onto the GOG release as well by manually grabbing the files (and Torchlight II mods are available elsewhere of course).

In the spirit of offline, DRM-free ARPGs that could be brought to a desert island: Diablo 1 is also on GOG, and is compatible with the various FOSS Diablo engine reimplementations (which also allows for modding support). Fiddling with finding which reimplementation to go with and which mods/tweaks I should use has always been a tad too much work for me so I've never delved too deep, but it's a classic I figured I also ought to mention as it fits this category you brought up well :-)

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Refunded this one last year, it didn't work properly with native or with Proton. Last I heard both are quite rough. They also enforced some very cumbersome setup to make an account with their online service. I think I spent about an hour in-game with most of that being an attempt to set up an account.

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I'll stick with Torchlight II for my ARPG fix. Grim Dawn, while not native, also sates the urge for something a bit meatier in terms of story.

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Oh no, it's going to suck me back in again... Help!

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> Only a single person merges these PR, so they need to assign a second person to the task.

While I absolutely agree with you that they need more people who can merge, two people at least can merge PRs: Yuri Sizov and Rémi Verschelde. Juan Linietsky likely can also merge PRs, as I believe Rémi and Juan were the main folks behind Godot originally. However I don't think others can, though there are other core reviewers (Hugo Locurcio, Clay John, KoBeWi, A Thousand Ships).

Substantially smaller projects (libGDX, Dolphin Emulator) have at least two people who can merge PRs. I suppose it's difficult as well, as even with all of these reviewers, triage is difficult, and PRs can slip through the cracks.

Not to mention, these team members also have to divide their time between the issue tracker, discussions, godot-proposals, and their own development efforts. I suppose perhaps if I could amend what I said, it is not only about merging, but also helping contributors via review to get their changes approved.

The more capacity Godot has to review & help those contributions into the engine in a quality and timely manner, the better. :smile:

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Congratulations as always to all Godot contributors and maintainers. I hope the increase in funds allow them to review and merge PRs faster. I've been following Godot on GitHub for close to a decade now, the explosion in contributions has been excellent for the engine, but I get the feeling they just don't have the resources to review and merge all the PRs that come in very timely (some PRs are in limbo for close to a year).

I still firmly believe Godot maintainers are doing their absolute best with the resources they have. Though if folks from Re-Logic and Robot Gentleman are also going to start contributing code directly to the engine along with their donations, I hope they can get more people on board to help with review and getting features merged faster. I believe this is starting to happen, with big features getting prioritized review (such as Android C# and FSR 2.2)

Though I'm not on the camp on the issue tracker that paints this as Godot being a scam (or even a cult [External Link] ) or anything. I'm looking at this through a developer's lens and I can appreciate the challenge of getting features merged, so I hope as Godot continues to grow they can scale well with the increase in financial support.

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