Totally loved this Linux-centric Steam Deck jam spear headed by Jason. All the points raised and the way, when it came to it, the discussion went was really well balanced. I hope you 4 will do it again and maybe once a month? (Or whenever another event as impactful to the Linux community at large as the SD release comes along).

My only gripe is that the device is so limited in its availability, that I'll be getting a PS5 before I am able to even reserve one of these! Alss the same happened for the first two years of the Steam Controller before I was able to get one off Amazon (Steam never had it as available in my region).

One question I'd ask the bulk of you, though on that note, what if Valve signed a distribution agreement with Amazon for global delivery of the Deck instead of having it so tightly locked to certain regions? I am aware that the current situation has more to do with manufacturing yield than anything else, given the shortages we've been having for the past couple of years, but still, damn I am angry at Valve to have us cut off (BTW I live in Mexico, so it is particularly frustrating to me to be so close, yet so far)

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Hopefully these small quality of life changes prompt some devs to fix their notoriously bad bugs with sync and cloud saves (yes I'm looking at you Metro: Exodus!)

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Ahh! The memories!

UT99 was about one of the first games I had on Linux running with Glide on a Voodoo Banshee and later on a Voodoo 3.

Quake 3 ran much better for me back then on Linux than Windows, maybe due to the miniGL implementation Windows used for 3dfx cards and the overall good support for OpenGL through Mesa. I was there when even though 3dfx had gone, support for its hardware was strong (albeit only one VSA-100 was usable on those cards), performance was rather good, as well (for the time, until the GeForce 3 brute forced its way to the top).

nVidia had a rough time back then with its detonator drivers, which could literally explode and leave you with a softlocked system (basically only the mouse cursor worked, all else was frozen, even networking), and it was like that for some years (actually, the last time I got that softlock should have been somewhere in 2010-ish with my then trusty 9800GT). Man! Those were fun times!

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The closest to the Mac experience on Linux, and as such feels really restrictive, though it aspires to offer a cohesive and tightly integrated user experience. For the bulk of us, not our cup of tea, but I do reckon it does have it use cases.

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I'm on the same boat as most for the keypad and layout. Though I can adapt to not having it.

Regardless of the layout, those USB hubs are sweet indeed and I do have more use for those than the keypad.

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I bought this on release, but held back installation until the native support arrived, so I guess I'll be installing it "soon-ish", then!

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About that Broadcom Wifi-Bluetooth combo, I wonder which driver they are using on Linux for it, as BCM usually requires a blob for it to work well (or at all).

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Quoting: legluondunetwhat is the best graphical version? Windows or Linux one?

For this game in particular, the 'best' is to have the S3TC 'high res' textures, though some skyboxes render wrong in both D3D and OpenGL. Performance wise, OpenGL was better with 'beefy' graphics cards, while D3D used to make the game playable with less powerful graphics cards. To my eyes, though, neither D3D nor OpenGL were visually as "clean" as the Glide renderer for 3dfx Voodoo cards**... actually UT99 was one of the few games that actually had the Glide renderer available on Linux, and ut performed just as well as on Windows, back in the day. Damn the memories!!

*Especially noticeable in the foggy areas, such as the initial flyby in both UT and Unreal. I did not notice any banding, while the nostalgia lens may distort reality.

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Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: bisbyxI have no idea if there is any "bad blood" between X and Wayland devs

The X devs turned into Wayland devs; no one is really working on X11 any more.

Seems as if X11 has been on Life Support for the last several years (5? more?), though they are still actively fixing bugs and polishing some features. Wayland needed and still does need much more work to get to the point where it can finally substitute X completely (getting there, though). Some times I see Wayland catching up to the X features in the same way as Wine is catching up to Windows (though much, much faster, LOL! :grin:)

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Having put together a few Ryzen APUs recently and seeing how they perform on Linux, makes me want to attempt AMD graphics again on a personal computer. My last serious experience was waaaaay back when Radeon was still a brand of ATi and fglrx was still a thing. I did have a laptop with some X12xx or the like, not actually game worthy (and by then the open drivers were actually serviceable for every day tasks and desktop use). Other than that I had only tangentially touched ATi and then AMD cards on laptops of friends until recently.

There are a couple of areas where I do care about having pieces that seem to not work all that great on Linux still (like video encode/decode), but pretty much a moot point with current heavily threaded CPUs and Ryzen is a blessing for such workloads, even older ones, though still nice to have little taxation on the CPU when encoding video and recording the screen, which I often do (not gaming, though).

Last round I wasn't compelled to get an RTX card, on the principle of the price pint they got and the fact that RTX was an unproven technology (still is for the most part) and what actually made use of those tensor cores (for consumers that is) had little to do with Ray Tracing at all (DLSS). Plus I game exclusively on Linux (and have been for the better part of the last 20 years now), and seems like Ray Tracing is only going to become to Linux if more vendors support it (be it AMD or Intel).

I do not feel compelled to get a 30 series card just yet, and this time around I am truly intrigued for what AMD has up their sleeve. I'm only hoping it won't be another Radon VII fiasco, but from what scarce tid bits that have been surfacing in the rumour mill, it will be very interesting to see.

Price aside, what intrigues me the most are the Linux numbers we can expect. We already know that (if Windows numbers are anything to go by) Ampere's performance on Linux for both native and Steam Play titles will be amazing and quite on par to the Windows numbers (if not even better on some titles) and overall performance on other tasks such as Blender/DaVinci Resolve most likely will follow suit. AMD on the other hand, depends on so many moving parts that I only hope all is in place or as close as possible to release date (speaking solely about Open Drivers, I'm sure they'll have their proprietary driver ready for select supported distros). Another thing that makes me curious is the performance delta we'll get in comparison to Windows and open drivers, IIRC last time phoronix had something like that it was quite narrow, and even in some tasks Linux performance pulled ahead (though I do not seem able find the article, seems Michael never released a RADV+ACO Vs Win10 comparison for Navi).

Typically we had to wait for some time for good support (was it Southern Islands cards or even older which went almost a year before proper support was in place?), like it was the case for some bits of the R5700XT. Though, being all in the open, we know issues will be ironed out. And even many (most?) tech outlets even use the open drivers to speculate what features will be implemented in the hardware ahead of release (or simply what hardware is in the pipeline like PCI ids, and other info). It certainly has been a fun time watching all the speculation around this release, only not much as to what to expect.

At any rate, this time around I am truy curious of how will Big Navi fare against current Navi plus nVidia, it is about time someone gave nVidia a run for their money!

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