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Latest Comments by Purple Library Guy
CD Projekt RED 'working closely with Valve' as The Witcher 3 is Steam Deck Verified
14 Mar 2022 at 6:23 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: rustybroomhandleWow, the comments on that announcement seem to be 90% Russians yelling about nazis and calling CDPR "traitors" and stuff.
Wut? Doesn't someone have to be on your side before they can be a traitor? Never mind. I know I'm an ideologue, but I still don't fathom the thought processes of True Believers, on whatever side.

Steam Deck Verified has issues, Grand Theft Auto V edition
13 Mar 2022 at 6:32 pm UTC

Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: Philadelphus
For me, I don't really think any experience like that should be in the Playable category. Did no testing ever find any of these issues? How deep and repeated is the Deck Verified testing on each game? We really have no clue.
To be fair, what other category would it go into? It went through the verification process, so it couldn't be Unknown. It didn't fit in Verified (for whatever reason). You were able, technically, to get it to work (and it ran rather swimmingly), so it's not Unsupported. That leaves just one option: Playable. I'm not trying to score cheap points here, and I do think this is a problem, but it's a problem baked in to how Valve collapsed the infinite spectrum of "how games run" into just four categories:

Verified: this game fits all the other criteria (like font size, text input, etc.) to be enjoyable on the Deck. (Though looking at the requirements again just now, it technically doesn't specify anything about how well it runs—you could have a game that crashes to desktop every half-hour and it'd still be Verified if it fits the criteria.)
Unsupported: we don't support this game, or it just doesn't run. (You might be able to get it to run, but we won't put effort into making it run.)
Unknown: *collective shrug, we haven't tried it yet*
Playable: everything else. That runs the gamut from "literally flawless performance, but it gives you Playstation controller glyphs" to…well…what we see here.

I think the problem is that those of us familiar with ProtonDB are expecting something like Verified = Platinum, Playable = Gold, and Unsupported = everything else, but it's not a one-to-one translation, and even if it were it'd be more like Unsupported = Borked and Playable = Gold, Silver, and Bronze.

On the one hand, I can see why Valve did it: there's no need to do the incredibly messy task of quantifying how well a game runs. If, hypothetically, they'd introduced an additional "Problematic" category for games that are technically playable, but have problems…well, where would you draw the line? There'd be endless arguments about whether a game was Playable or Problematic no matter what they decided.

On the other hand, we end up in this situation, where if it's been tested (so not Unknown) and isn't Verified, and does actually run, then by default it ends up in the Playable bin, regardless of the actual experience of playing it. It's not a great look, and I think Valve might really have been wise to include a tier for "playable, but it's got serious issues" that they could chuck games like this into. The endless arguments would probably be less problematic than people buying Playable games expecting Gold quality, and getting Bronze. It remains to be seen if Valve will make any changes to the system in light of feedback like this.
Valid points and partly what I was alluding to, it doesn't really deserve Playable IMO when stuff like this happens. Valve don't really have a category it fits into. It's thoroughly frustrating too, because I'm not overstating that it took 30 minutes to get working through what I tried.
Frankly, I probably would have given up and played a different game.

Steam Deck Verified has issues, Grand Theft Auto V edition
12 Mar 2022 at 11:39 pm UTC Likes: 9

I've never really understood the point of launchers. I mean, normally, if you have a program that runs, that's that, right? You "launch" the program and it runs. So with some games, you instead launch a thing that then launches the program and then it runs, and what is this extra step supposed to be for?

Steam Deck gets a 15FPS option, new keyboard themes
12 Mar 2022 at 11:32 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: BeamboomI wonder what their use case is for 15fps, that made it this high on the priority list...!
Maybe it was just really easy to do, so why not?

Steam Deck gets a 15FPS option, new keyboard themes
12 Mar 2022 at 11:29 pm UTC Likes: 5

Quoting: EikeI wonder what I would want to play with 15 fps though.
Not even a point and click, right?
What you do is, you go to 15 fps for a little while, then switch to 30 and it feels smooth by contrast. :grin:

Windows drivers roll out for Steam Deck but Valve won't support it
12 Mar 2022 at 11:26 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: F.UltraAnd LTT is out with a video on exactly how horrible Windows is on the deck right now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNt_ReLwk40 [External Link]
Huh. It references GoL at about the 15 minute mark. Specifically, mentions and briefly shows a screenshot of Ethan Lee's article critiquing Valve's Steam Deck verification process.

Four nerds talk about Steam Deck, Valve, Linux and more
12 Mar 2022 at 10:53 pm UTC

I liked it. I hardly ever watch two hours plus of video unless I'm in a movie theatre, but I watched the whole thing, and there was quite a bit of good stuff.

Wine 7.4 changes the default theme and more PE conversion work
12 Mar 2022 at 12:21 am UTC Likes: 6

Quoting: TrainDocAnyone have screenshots for those at work or no way to build ourselves?
Cheers.
Spoiler, click me
PS: I don't see any link to the actual WINE websire.
Please keep the typo in the spoiler. I love the idea of a "websire" even though I have no idea what it would be.

Heroic Games Launcher now on Flathub, even easier to run Epic Games on Steam Deck
11 Mar 2022 at 5:12 pm UTC Likes: 7

Quoting: slaapliedjeHa, I still do not want to support them (epic, not the devs of the game launcher) in anyway.
Me too. But in the context of wanting Steam Deck to be appealing to the general audience and sell metric kilobuttloads of units, this is probably a Good Thing.

Windows drivers roll out for Steam Deck but Valve won't support it
11 Mar 2022 at 3:58 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: CyrilNot to mention that, last time I installed Windows 10 for a test for someone, it took more than an hour to finally get to the desktop. Linux install, on the same PC, took 10 minutes.
It's amazing how shitty Windows can be.
... and you've got loads of productive software on Linux after this install.

Quoting: CyrilAnd oh my god, the annoying questions about privacy at the beginning... xD
That's an easy one though ;) : Change every single option and you're fine.
Well, for the moment. It will bitch at you every so often forever that you chose the wrong option and should consider doing it their way.