Quoting: marcusHow people think that concepts such as Flatpaks are better than SteamRuntime is beyond me.
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Flatpak has support for runtimes, so if Steam made their runtime publicly available for anyone to use, it's exactly the same as using steam runtime in a traditional sense. Plus you get sandboxing, which limits the security holes impact even more.

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This is not about steam runtime - flatpak has a concept of runtimes, so there should be no problem of flatpaked game to rely on the steam runtime. It would even work outside of steam - for example GOG could offer a flatpaked game relying on steam runtime, and as long the steam runtime is just a collection a opensource libraries, GOG or the game dev could host it (so that they don't rely on a different party), the flatpak installer would download it, and everything would work ootb. The only problem could be with proprietary bits, like libsteam (or whatever it's called) - they might not have rights to distribute it, so the game would need to work with it missing. This is actually one of the reasons why valve could considering allowing flatpaked games - the release story would be much simpler for developers - just a single format could be used in Steam, or on any other linux distribution, regardless of however it is distributed (directly, other store, etc). But they say they're not even considering that atm.

For the user, flatpaked games don't probably matter, because hopefully in the future the whole steam will be served as a flatpak to the user. And then all games executed from it are still sandboxed (which is probably the biggest advantage for the end user).

Their stated goal of allowing easy install of third-party apps on SteamOS is quite exciting, because it could mean more widespread use of flatpak between proprietary software makers (think Netflix, Spotify, Skype, etc). All linux users would benefit from that (everyone could install that, not just SteamOS users).

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Quoting: sbolokanovDidn't both Overlord use wrapper?

I don't know, but that doesn't really matter. Bioshock Infinite uses a wrapper (EON) too. And it improves some titles even with Wine. This is about single-threaded submission into the OpenGL command queue, not about the technology the game uses.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: ripperIf anybody wants to help out testing more games, here are instructions:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Performance_impact_of_Mesa_glthread

What's with all the "disabled" entries, in the Improves Performance section?

I added a note at https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Performance_impact_of_Mesa_glthread#Results_template and also renamed it to make it a bit more obvious. Quoting from https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Performance_impact_of_Mesa_glthread#Measuring_FPS :

Even if you enable glthread, Mesa can still decide to disable it for compatibility.

That unfortunately happens for majority of titles (so glthread has no impact at all, can't be enabled). Marek said there are some issue that could be resolved, but my impression was that nobody intends to work on those at the moment.

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If anybody wants to help out testing more games, here are instructions:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Performance_impact_of_Mesa_glthread

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I created a wiki page for it, if somebody wants to help out:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Performance_impact_of_Mesa_glthread

@liamdawe, maybe it can be mentioned in the article?

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Quoting: wojtek88Sorry for being ignorant, but I felt I must ask:
Why is this information worth writing article about?

Valve only officially supports Ubuntu with their installer. Many distributions don't have Steam packaged and need to add third-party repositories and such. Sometimes those repos are problematic. Having a cross-platform installer in the form of flatpak means users on any distribution supporting flatpak (quite a few at the moment, and growing) can install it. Think of it as a generic exe installer, independent of your distribution packaging policies etc. You also benefit from sandboxing. Very helpful for both Ubuntu and non-Ubuntu users.

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Quoting: ageresIf a game I already own gets ported to Linux, I buy a copy and store it in my inventory. I cannot gift it immediately because I don't have any friends using Linux, so that would be counted as a Windows sale AFAIK. So, what should I do now?

Write the developers to put a donate button on their website. Or at least tell you where you can send them some extra "thank you" money. The usual reply "just buy another copy" won't work anymore. I honestly believe each developer should have such a button, because of sales and bundles. If they don't, they are losing money. I often want to pay some extra (but not necessarily a full price) as well.

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I don't see anything to be hyped about. They didn't even suggest the core gpu driver would get ever opened. This is just a memory handling part. I don't think they even think about having a fully open stack. Their mindset seems to be a very secretive, "mine mine mine!" approach. Just look at what they do with GSync, GameWorks, basically everything. Closed and heavily optimized towards their company, not towards universal industry standards. The polar opposite of AMD. And as long as their approach pays them well, why should they change? Most customers quite clearly like their practices.

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As someone who owns a gamepad but uses it rarely and never used any "configuration tool", what is this good for? Most games allow you to define the button actions in the game config menu, so why is this better/more useful/different? Thanks for explanation.

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