Quoting: BoldosSystem76 is not available directly in EU, is it? :unsure:

Looks like at least Western Europe, actually!
https://system76.com/shipping [External Link]

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This... this is what I'm waiting and hoping for. Time to start saving my pennies.
Hopefully somebody like System76 can get their hands on these and put an all-AMD Linux gaming laptop together, free of binary blobs - that might just be the thing that replaces my 6-9 year old desktop + laptops finally.

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Not really the scope of the article, as I would not recommend it for new users (unless they're really technically inclined and want to go deep), but I switched back from Ubuntu to Gentoo because of just how many times I had to compile things from source because no one was maintaining a PPA, or because of licensing/redistribution issues (e.g. like half of what makes ffmpeg useful, and stuff like NVENC support in OBS).

After spending literally over a year having to grab the Debianised sources, edit the configure options, troubleshoot what other unlisted dependencies those introduced and grab those (some of which may not have up to date .deb files anyway)... my own homebuilt /usr/local/src was ridiculous, pushing 20+ different things I was tracking where repositories couldn't or wouldn't carry them.

If I were a stronger developer, I suppose I could try taking up the mantle of maintaining PPAs for those things, but I figured if I'm compiling half my shit from source all the time anyway... and oh look, the Gentoo ebuilds have USE flags doing exactly what I was trying to do recompiling stuff all the time, handling the dependencies those draw in gracefully, even if the end resulting binary is legally non-redistriubutable. What am I doing with a half-binary, half-source Frankenstein's monster of a system?

So yeah, not a system I'd recommend to anyone starting out, and if your goal is 'use Steam and Lutris and maybe a couple big well-known projects', honestly any DEB or RPM based distro that's kept up to date should do you fine. But if you find yourself in a situation like mine where you're manually walking dependency trees to get the things you want, the way you want from source? Gentoo's probably already got a USE flag for that, and portage rips off my other love, the FreeBSD ports tree. ;)

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I ended up 'downgrading' my GTX 980 to an RX 580 a few weeks ago by swapping with my partner's computer, and the difference between messing with nVidia's binary blobs and AMDGPU + Mesa is night and day. No more dealing with routine kernel upgrades breaking X. The only obvious thing missing is CUDA but I'm not a heavy user there anyway. Heck, I could drop the nVidia USE flag on Gentoo for stuff like NVENC in ffmpeg and OBS since Intel and AMD's encoders are supported. It also looks like multi-GPU support between the RX 580 and my i7's iGPU might work now, judging from logs (I haven't tested this yet).

Performance is a little worse just because of those specific models, but yeah - until nVidia opens up and gets their drivers mainlined, it's just AMD and Intel really at this point for me.

At least until more open hardware takes off (you bet I'm waiting for RISC-V desktops like the stuff SiFive is announcing in a couple days). One day we'll get beyond the blob firmware, too.

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Considering how many games have lengthy cutscenes (i.e. movies), I'm tempted to say that in some ways, this guy's not wrong. For certain games, the 'stream' is basically just the streamer watching and commenting on these lengthy cutscenes. Probably stuff like the interactive storybook stuff Telltale was known for, or extremely linear RPGs where the main gameplay is a ton of repetitive grinding.

Some games, when streamed, are closer to an MST3K deal. Others are not - this argument doesn't hold for sports games, racing, most FPSes, party games, etc. Sports games are interesting, too, with the whole licensing of actual, real players and teams. Music is, of course, a whole other thing on top.

All that said, the technical / legal arguments and the actual realities of streamers helping boost a game's popularity collide in a way that really just needs clarity. Devs now have to account for streamers playing their games, and publishers need to make it clear what is, and isn't OK with the content they're licensing to you, because in many cases *their* hands are tied on e.g. music and likenesses. Bonus points for those who put in a 'streamer mode' toggle that does things like mute or swap out said music or content.

Then you have companies like Nintendo who can be quite aggressive in taking down content that isn't transformative.

As long as the rules are clear before you purchase a game with the intent of streaming it, or the game at least offers a streamer-friendly mode, that should be fine. But by the same token, some games that rely heavily on, say, licensed music (think Rock Band/Guitar Hero/etc)... as a musician I can totally see the argument that y'know, you're not really any different than Spotify or another music streaming service, even if there's a game going on over top, and legally you're likely responsible to ASCAP/BMI/SOCAN/etc. to pay the artist their (tiny, fraction of a penny, sadly) cut.

That said, I could see bigger streamers and services wanting to move to that kind of model around music - paying the artist guilds the appropriate licensing fee that e.g. a bar or whatever pays to have music, and then they're covered to stream whatever copyright music they want because they're paying the monthly/annual license.

Not everything a game dev or publisher puts out is 100% their own IP and content. Going after streamers for extra money is counter productive. But legally, someone likely has to get paid for streaming use of that content, if it can't be avoided.

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Quoting: wintermuteIt's been a while since I tried this, have they added an option where local co-op players spawn in the same location rather than miles apart?

Not officially, but if you use NitroGen [External Link] to generate a world and start on that, there *is* a 'shared, single spawn (Co-Op)' option that I've used with success on our private servers.

You don't get to pick *where* that spawn is... but it does start you all together. Plus, you get a ton more options for tweaking worldgen, including importing your own height and biome maps if you want.

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Quoting: stormtuxI tested the Vulkan renderer but I am affected by the huge delayed input. I tried to run with various configurations (vsync off, compositor off, lowered the graphics settings) but I have not yet found a solution.
The frame rate of the OpenGL renderer is rather low and I hope that the Vulkan will have better performance. Ideas for solving this problem are welcome :whistle: .

If I remember right, the key on my end was using MangoHud's own VSync override plus the in-game VSync config toggle. Some combination of the two being on together or one off and one on tended to either trigger the super delayed input bug or resolve it. I've been getting DiscordOverlayLinux working as well, and that requires the KDE Plasma compositor to be on, which works fine in OpenGL, but I haven't tried that with the Vulkan renderer yet.

I used GOverlay to set both OpenGL and Vulkan VSync to 'Adaptive' system-wide, enable MangoHud system-wide, and I *think* in 7 Days to Die I have the in-game options set to also have VSync on and that works. Turning any of the VSync settings off is what triggers the input lag for me, but I suspect it's probably because 'off' is only really 'off' in one layer of the entire stack, and the extra frames are..backing up/being buffered somewhere..? Maybe? If you manage to turn all VSync settings and the compositor fully off I suspect it might work.

Could also play around with the nvidia-settings app to see if there's any other VSync / Flip-to-Vblank settings there you can tweak, but 'all on' or 'all off' seems to be where I had the most luck.

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Also, in case anyone's curious about testing Vulkan or just running MangoHud with it, here's my doozy of a Launch Options set in Steam:

Spoiler, click me

 
export MANGOHUD=1;export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json; qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor suspend;mangohud %command%;qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor resume

This turns on my install of MangoHud [External Link] for performance tracking, specifies my nVidia card as the primary/only Vulkan driver to load (otherwise my Intel iGPU takes first priority and it fails), and temporarily disables KDE Plasma's compositor while the game is running to avoid an issue with VSYNC and really really delayed inputs.

The 'export MANGOHUD=1' covers Vulkan while 'mangohud %command%' covers OpenGL, as I understand it - you can actually still use these options in the default OpenGL renderer without issue.

I've used GOverlay [External Link] to force Adaptive VSYNC for both OpenGL and Vulkan modes, and left VSYNC on in-game. With KDE Plasma's compositor running, it seems to do the whole 30 <-> 60 fps jump with changes in effort, while with it temporarily disabled, it can run at other framerates in between without noticeable tearing.

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I've been hosting a private server for my friends and having a lot of fun with this while it was the latest_experimental build. Gameplay-wise, it feels like the gear curve is a bit stretched out now (it took us a lot longer than normal to start getting the loot we were used to in A18, but some of that could be us not necessarily focusing our skills down to the end of a single tree right from the start, and a lower XP % boost than we used last time), and there's more of a focus on traders now than before.

Stamina regen has been nerfed quite badly for hand tools when mining, even for the one on our team who went down the Strength tree and got all the relevant perks, making you rely a lot more on things like a steady supply of coffee, or a high level auger and supply of gas instead.

Also, the sounds... the auger sounds horridly obnoxious, now, and I think it generates a lot more on the heatmap than before. Mining near the surface during the day, I'd have to stop and shoot at least 2 or 3 mini-hordes of zombies being 'attracted' (spawned) by my augering, per 'reload' of gas. So it really feels like they've nerfed mining in general - meanwhile, our trader person who joined us late caught up real quick. It's almost better to just quest for and buy your ammo than it is to mine + smelt it yourself from the raw materials.

I'm not sure how I feel about that balance change just yet. It's definitely something that I think is more fun as a group - and being able to have 8 instead of 6 people in your party max now I think is a sign that's where they're going, too.

Server runs great on Linux, of course, and the default OpenGL client has been rock solid for me, too. I have tried the experimental Vulkan renderer on nVidia here, and it 'works' but likes to segfault + crash to desktop quite regularly, especially if you're moving too fast (e.g. exploring an area in God mode flight in single player). Definitely not stable yet, but they don't claim it is. :)

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Fired up a private 7 Days to Die server (also Linux!) for my friends and trying out the latest_experimental branch (A19).
Also have Empyrion: Galactic Survival's 1.0 working via Proton just fine.
World of Warcraft via Lutris / Wine.
Sometimes Europa Universalis IV or Hearts of Iron IV on my own.
Honestly kind of spoiled for choice these days, which is great!

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