Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Valso

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: ValsoYou would have saved the most of the troubles you had, if you had used Arch instead of Mint. Ubuntu, Mint and Debian need an enema in order to make them run any game, not just the VR.

You're skating awfully close to this (excellent) GOL rule:

QuoteDistribution wars that have plagued the Linux community are not welcome here. Bans will occur for people who engage in them or talk down to anyone for their choice.

You can find a link to the rules above the comment box.

Also, you're commenting on a year-old article about problems that by all accounts have since been solved. Just in case you didn't notice.

It wasn't my intention to start any war. I used Mint for almost 4 years, so what I said was based on my experience with it.

Each distribution has it's own quirks, and benefits and disadvantages. I've never really used Mint as it's Ubuntu based, and well I've just had issues with Ubuntu, both technical and their NIH syndrome. But you're in correct in stating that they need an enema. I can't even remember the last time I had to do anything on a debian based system (that includes Ubuntu/Pop_OS) to get SteamVR working besides enabling the 32bit architecture repo, enabling the repos for the nvidia drivers (contrib and non-free in Debian) and then installing Steam. Games work perfectly fine after that, as does SteamVR.

Just for the record, I use Mint and I've never had any problems with any of that stuff. F'rinstance, Steam installs from the Software Manager with a click. Maybe if you can't even remember the last time you had anything to do with a debian based system, and have never used Mint ever, you should consider your opinions on the subject might lack authority or relevance and, you know, not give them.

Did I bash Mint?

Yeah, I kind of think you did. And you know, I don't give much of a damn what that other person says, don't know them from a hole in the ground. But from you it kind of stings.
Just by the by, I've tried Ubuntu, not so long ago. The user experience of Mint is really quite a lot different, so saying that because you can't hack Ubuntu you presume Mint sucks by extension is somewhat off base.
It's true though that if you want/need to fiddle everything yourself and make sure you have all the latest and greatest and bleedingest edge all the time, Mint isn't really going to give you what you want. If you just want a nice desktop that works, though, it's very good. Every time I try another distro I find myself with little pain points that I'd forgotten tended to exist on Linux, until I give up and go back to Mint.

The English language is really stupid. But what you have to understand is, English isn't a language. It's two main languages plus chunks of a few others all smoorged together fairly violently. Old Anglo Saxon, French, Norse, Latin, scraps of Gaelic and Greek and who knows what. So there's bits and pieces of a bunch of different languages' pronunciations and grammar rules jammed uneasily side by side and falling off now and then. It's absurd--amazing the damn thing works at all. Means we have stacks of vocabulary, though, which is good for poetry.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: caseinpointgiven that the Deck isn't very powerful when compared to the rest of the consoles - devs will have to port their games to be able to present a passable product to their customers.

Ya, know, this got me thinking, and yes I'm taking it a bit out of context. I remember reading an article about porting to the Switch and how difficult it can be. Part of the reason is that it is under-powered hardware compared to the other available platforms.

The Steam Deck is in the same boat, no?

That is not the opinion I've generally seen, no. I don't know much about this stuff myself, but most of the comments and the claims by Valve suggest that it should be able to run most games fine, given the small not-too-high-res screen. Certainly everyone seems to agree that it's much more powerful than a Switch.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Valso

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: ValsoYou would have saved the most of the troubles you had, if you had used Arch instead of Mint. Ubuntu, Mint and Debian need an enema in order to make them run any game, not just the VR.

You're skating awfully close to this (excellent) GOL rule:

QuoteDistribution wars that have plagued the Linux community are not welcome here. Bans will occur for people who engage in them or talk down to anyone for their choice.

You can find a link to the rules above the comment box.

Also, you're commenting on a year-old article about problems that by all accounts have since been solved. Just in case you didn't notice.

It wasn't my intention to start any war. I used Mint for almost 4 years, so what I said was based on my experience with it.

Each distribution has it's own quirks, and benefits and disadvantages. I've never really used Mint as it's Ubuntu based, and well I've just had issues with Ubuntu, both technical and their NIH syndrome. But you're in correct in stating that they need an enema. I can't even remember the last time I had to do anything on a debian based system (that includes Ubuntu/Pop_OS) to get SteamVR working besides enabling the 32bit architecture repo, enabling the repos for the nvidia drivers (contrib and non-free in Debian) and then installing Steam. Games work perfectly fine after that, as does SteamVR.

Just for the record, I use Mint and I've never had any problems with any of that stuff. F'rinstance, Steam installs from the Software Manager with a click. Maybe if you can't even remember the last time you had anything to do with a debian based system, and have never used Mint ever, you should consider your opinions on the subject might lack authority or relevance and, you know, not give them.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: CatKillerPeople have already experienced what it's like to have the whole industry under Microsoft's control, and I don't think they're keen to have that continue indefinitely.

Honestly, IMO, most people do not care about underlying technology.

I think CatKiller was referring to developers, not "most people".

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: GuestPretty sure CDProjekt wouldn't speak in German to GOG.

Did not want to use the infamous polish curse word there.

Overall, if we look at the picture as a whole, it seems this is a market share war and Microsoft seems to be the lead in this "dance". Valve does not act; it reacts to Microsoft's input.

That's because the market share involved currently all belongs to Valve. The quarrel isn't about who owns the desktop, the quarrel is about who gets a slice of the revenue from PC games sold. Right now that's Valve, and so they have no need to change anything unless their 30% gets threatened.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quotethere's no light indicators for caps and num lock.

There's no numpad, so would there even be a num lock?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This doesn't actually tempt me because I like itch and I want some of the revenue to go to them.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: slembckeOn the other hand, Proton is really running a fine line as Microsoft could really screw them over if they wanted to. They will also be playing catch up indefinitely.

It's not as simple as that. The problem for Microsoft is, they change Windows to make new Windows software (temporarily) incompatible with Proton, I believe they've just abandoned backwards compatibility with Windows software too. They could find themselves in a situation where all the old Windows software runs better on Proton than on latest Windows. And I'm not just talking about games. That would be bad for them.
And then Proton would catch up, and it probably wouldn't even take that long because Windows is a big old beast that isn't simple to make workable changes to so whatever they did couldn't be that big a deal. Then Proton would be working with the new stuff and working with the old stuff, making it definitively a better Windows than Windows.

Windows breaks compatibility between versions sometimes. To their credit, Microsoft put an effort in to minimise such things, but it does happen.
Microsoft can make it very difficult for future games to run through wine. That's enough to bury Valve's efforts, before even considering legal challenges they could make. Don't even have to be particularly valid legal challenges - Microsoft could just drag it on, and that alone would also be enough to bury Valve's efforts.

Windows do try to avoid breaking compatibility, though. They know it's a big problem for them when they do, because one of the biggest things holding people to Windows is all the back catalogue of software that runs on Windows but not elsewhere (well, as far as they know, or easily). As I understand it, the last time they did was because they were desperately trying to get Windows 7 out of the way because nobody wanted to upgrade.
Breaking compatibility exactly because something exists that can run all that old stuff might make people think about taking a look at that something. Could backfire. Imagine Wine ran existing versions of Microsoft Office, but the latest Windows didn't, and everyone knew that was because Microsoft was afraid of Wine.
No doubt they can make it very difficult for future games to run through Wine--but at what cost? What else stops working? How difficult does it make it to write those future games for Windows? I just don't think it's as simple as some people suggest. You can't actually move the target that much, because doing so doesn't just mess with the emulators, it messes with your whole ecosystem.

As to the legal thing . . . they can drag things out in the courts, but that only matters if they can make an injunction stick. Otherwise Valve can just go along doing their thing while fighting it. I don't know, but I would imagine that you have to have at least a sort of workable case to get an injunction to stick if the defendant has good lawyers and is not indigenous or something. Otherwise every company would just sue on some spurious basis every time a competitor started to eat their market share, and shut down for years whatever it was that the competitor was beating them with. Maybe MS could muster something good enough to actually get an injunction that would stop Steam Deck production, but I have doubts. If all they could manage was to be annoying in court for a few years and cost a few million in legal fees, that would be irrelevant.
Now if they could win, that would be pretty disastrous--presumably that would make Wine itself illegal, and arguably the whole concept of reverse engineering, every emulator of everything. But I really doubt we've gone all this time without that kind of thing ever being tested in court, and there are still emulators.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EikeI'll link an article here. Heise is the publisher of Europe's biggest (paper) IT magazine, "c't".

QuoteSteam Deck: Linux gaming made easy

With the announcement of its mobile game console, Valve is making its Steam library mobile and, on the fly, makes the buyers Linux gamers.

Original, in German

Google translation

That's actually a pretty solid article. It's like the person writing it had some idea what they were talking about. What a weird feeling. Is this normal in German IT news?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Appelsin150 000 units accross the US and EU isn't enought to entice anyone.

They had 110,000 pre-orders in the first 90 minutes. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict more than 150,000 total sales. Call me a starry-eyed optimist.

View this comment - View article - View full comments