This is getting pretty bad. Looks like this ACE solution is the favourite for all these games coming from Asia, and as a very promising and quickly growing market, and in times where Western developers continue to drop the ball, it'll be sad to not be able to play the games coming from that side of the world.

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A direct replacement would be TeamSpeak, and TS6 looks to be very promising, if only it didn't take several months for each update to come out for this supposedly "in development" and "beta" version of the software. The foundation is super solid; the voice comms part is generations ahead of Discord and similar services, but smaller things like screen sharing are pretty new to the software so that needs some work (currently can only share camera feed on Wayland).

I've been looking into alternatives to Discord before it became cool, since at least 3 or 4 years ago, when I learned the app records literally every single click you make in it, as well as god knows what else it collects from the PC (we do know at least it monitors every foreground app including its usage time). I just hope this new development of them going public will finally make users wake up.

Becauae that's What keeps baffling me every time, and I'm sure I brought this up in one of the older articles, is how it feels like allll the tech/privacy conscious people just completely give up when it comes to Discord. Like, I can successfully replace nearly every service I use for something free and open source, but not Discord, and everyone just continues to use it, as if it doesn't have these issues, or that they don't literally break the GDPR by refusing to remove your messages from their servers when you decide to leave the service. I'm not making this last part up.

I've looked at every alternative out there, and I keep following how they develop over time. Other than TS6 which I already mentioned, Matrix looks like the best bet, if going strictly for open source. It still lacks in the screen sharing department and I read voice calls aren't super good either, but it's a good candidate for if TeamSpeak fumbles this golden ooportunity of capturing a good userbase from Discord migrants.

Mumble doesn't have screensharing or video calling at all, and the UI isn't something my friend group will appreciate. Arguably the best voice comms though, even better than TeamSpeak's probably.

I also looked at the Slack/Slack-like services and none of them meet my criteria (I just want something for my group of 10-12 people to hang out, with voice chat and proper screen sharing, I don't care about the social "communities" part one bit).

Revolt looked promising but I don't like that it's literally Discord but open source, like it's a carbon copy to the point I can see Discord taking them to court for copypasting everything. Besides, the project doesn't seem to have a lot of manpower and it's been the most stagnant out of all the others I mentioned.

Edit: I saw it mentioned in the comments above but I didn't write about it. Steam chat, I have also tried. The good part is that voice comms are surprisingly very good, I remember I was in a call with a friend on Discord and during the call we switched to Steam Chat, and the differnece in audio quality was significant when put face to face like that. The bad part is that although it exists, screen sharing is separate from Steam Chat and trying to stream your game on Steam in general is convoluted and appeared to actually be broken on Linux, at list it looked like it the last time I tried it. If Steam Chat gets just a little more attention from Valve, I can see them easily taking over Discord for some people. The idea of having voice communications through the same Steam overlay shortcut and not a separate program is fantastic.

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and a new Flatpak store is on the way to replace the aging Discover/Software thanks to Glorious Eggroll.

I'll surely be interested in something that's better than the Discover store.

I will give Discover the credit for being so slow and bad it made me learn how to use the package manager through commandline instead, but a proper GUI app store would be a welcome addition even if I prefer the commandline now.

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"Boring" is a very positive description in this case.

Yep. I remember the first time I updated from 40 to 41 on Kinoite, I was like "wait that's it ?". Upgrading to a major version was like any other regular system update; happened in the background, and when I rebooted I found myself seemingly on 41, no downtime, no waiting to install anything, same story this time. Atomic is the future for sure.

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Upgrading to 42 on my Kinoite work laptop is too easy it's basically boring. Suffering from success :grin:.

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Have a relative who just got a Steam Deck and he's a big Basketball fan so this ought to be up his alley.

It just came to me that there's probably a good opportunity for more indie sports games when paired with roguelike elements. Definitely sound way more appealing than the billion deckbuilders and Vampire Survivor clones out there..

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The photo is amazing.

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It's interesting that HITMAN 2 specifically got a fix, since that game is almost obsolete with HITMAN 3 including all levels from 1 and 2.

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Valve being abysmal in conducting proper survey statistics makes me hopeful they aren't (or at least aren't capable of) data mining our systems. :grin:

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But from what I read they register as a dinput nintendo controller on PC through BT, which results in no analog triggers (bummer for racing games)

Why don't you use the USB dongle and play off that wirelessly ? it's way better than Bluetooth stability wise, (and range too, concerning the rest of your comment) and when connected with that dongle it works in X-input with the analogue triggers and everything.

I have the not-pro controller and it's my favourite controller for modern games, highly recommend.

Edit: I totally misread that the controller in question is the SN30 Pro, because they had their new Ultimate controller which just came out so I subconsciously replaced that with the SN30 Pro when reading the article. My bad.

So, to answer your question, just get the Ultimate controller (non Bluetooth model). It has hall effect sticks, is x input, and the dock is super sweet.

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