Quoting: Wypmanif i play on the vanilla launcher, am i still at risk? or is this only affecting modded players

This sounds like it's specific to mods on those platforms; vanilla should be unaffected as there's no word of any sort of related compromise on the Microsoft / Mojang side.

That said, I was having issues with their authentication service last night so I'm not sure if they're aware and potentially taking things offline temporarily to audit them or not. Safest is always 'not to play at all until everyone gives the all-clear', but personally I think the risk is minimal if you're just on vanilla with the official launcher.

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So don't get me wrong - I have a 2021 'AMD Advantage' Asus ROG Strix gaming laptop that is my daily driver and spends 90% of its time in Linux, and while it has its quirks and drawbacks it's on the whole pretty good hardware wise. But I feel like this is kind of missing the point. New SoC is great performance wise, but as that review states: no touchpads (actually something I really like on my Steam Deck!) and the dodgy Windows experience vs. the work Valve's put in on SteamOS.

...and then the battery life kicker at the end. Yeah, you can get 8hrs out of it, 'just like the Steam Deck', if you drop to 720p and drop all your settings to Low so the thing isn't running full bore. Otherwise an hour and a half is a little quick for a handheld.

It'd be nice to have the option of brief, high power sessions and then a battery life preset, I guess, so at least they're trying something a little different, but if you already have a gaming desktop or laptop and are supplementing with a handheld, I feel like you probably want that battery life.

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Considering the debacle with CurseForge blocking launchers like Prism from dowloading the constituent mods of a modpack, only for them to have to come up with a gross workaround that spam-opens a dozen+ browser windows and uses those to download, and now hearing that they're quietly decreasing the revenue share, and that their own launcher still doesn't have Linux support last I checked...?

Here's hoping this is the start of a move away from the private, profit-motivated CurseForge to something much more open, transparent, and for the community. I hadn't even heard of Modrinth until now, but I'm already impressed with what I'm reading.

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I was honestly kind of expecting the answer to be something like:

'Whatever you're already using and happy/comfortable with' - but that only really holds true if you're talking about managed things like Steam and Lutris that do the vast majority of the heavy lifting for you (e.g the Steam Runtime based off of Ubuntu that everything seems to run against).

There are some really annoying things about Ubuntu for totally new-to-Linux users. Most people have interacted with Windows machines or Macs, and Gnome 3 might be a little hard to adjust to for them; my recommendation there would be the Kubuntu or Xubuntu spins (defaulting to KDE Plasma and Xfce respectively) for a more 'familiar' default UI. (And of course you can add and change that from any starting point; no need to reinstall because you want to use something different.)

The situation with snaps is also frustrating once you start getting into things, but *most* new users shouldn't be raging at Canonical just yet. If you've learned enough to start hating snaps (and systemd... and Pulseaudio...) and start hunting for alternatives without them, congrats! You're not the target audience for this article any more. ;p

Once you dive into the rabbit hole of non-Steam ports, though, yeah - the Ubuntu repos are pretty good. PPAs fill the gap beyond that in the same way the AUR does for Arch (& derivatives). You may appreciate a lot of software being built as and offering .deb files to install, too.

Ubuntu's not necessarily the 'best' distro, the most open, etc., but it's definitely got a lock on 'good enough to get started with'.

Just... be prepared to want to switch in a couple years as you learn and grow. :)

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Used to use Twitter back when it was all geared around SMS; I remember texting one of their shortcodes back on a Nokia 5190 (ah, the T9 firmware upgrade was huge!).

But when Mastodon came around, it didn't take me long to spin up my own private instance, connect to some relays, and generally start playing around with it in parallel.

It wasn't long before I outright deleted my Twitter account entirely (same for an on-again, off-again relationship with Facebook that started back when you had to have a university e-mail to even be able to sign up).

Honestly, ditching FB & Twitter in favour of the Fediverse (Mastodon & other ActivityPub compatible servers) was one of the best decisions I've ever made for my own mental health. Yeah, you need to end up on a well moderated instance and sometimes you need to report the spam or trolls (or as an admin, ban them yourself), but the quality of discourse is just so much higher when people aren't compelled to perform for some algorithm to get 'visibility' and 'engagement'.

Would I run a brand or business solely on the Fediverse? Probably not - but then you're paying marketing spend to exist on those other platforms anyway; it's not the same kind of experience.

To be able to find small, close knit communities - makers, gamers, artists, musicians, photographers, etc. who can finally afford to drop the 'brand' pretense and be a lot more genuine, to not be abused by a platform's shadowy algorithms, is way more like the Internet I remember, of fan forums and webrings and without draconian advertising and pages that would make any dial up connection cry over their heft.

All that said, it's not for everyone. By the same sort of argument, maybe getting off social media entirely is a better solution for some people. For others, it may be too hard to let go of whatever social and support networks they've built.

But I remember the days of ICQ, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN, and how all that has since either vanished or at least faded into obscurity. One day these platforms will do the same as we all move on to some other 'next big thing'. Maybe those support networks are worth saving from the inevitable, and now's a good a time as any to consider just how it can be done.

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I find it kind of strange here that EAC sounds like a hard requirement. *Plenty* of games have it as an option in the menu or on startup, and you can opt to turn it on or off when setting up a dedicated server.

I'd be fine with 'hey, we can't support EAC, but you can play on non-EAC servers just fine and we'll support the underlying game'. I already spin up private servers for my friend group(s) without EAC, because I trust them and we hold each other accountable; I have zero interest in the grief-fests that are public servers in games, but that's OK.

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The saddest part about all of this, to me, was that I don't think it was a technical failing, but a business one.

Sure, I definitely lumped this in with the 'yeah, it's "gaming on Linux" the same way that a PlayStation is "gaming on BSD" or even Android is Linux' - i.e., completely irrelevant except to us nerds who are interested in the inner workings of this sort of thing. But it says a lot when a company like Microsoft can come in and basically eat their lunch with Game Pass. Yes, it's not every game on there, and yes, it's not specifically meant for games in your library, more akin to a Netflix-style subscription where games rotate in and out, but they bolstered it with buying up a bunch of studios and then putting their stuff on 'permanently' - the huge swath of Bethesda and id stuff, potentially Activision/Blizzard if they get their way, etc., without having to re-buy each individual game at full price.

If you want to run a subscription game service, run a subscription service.

If you want to sell games at full price, sell at full price.

But don't double-dip - consumers are wise to that kind of greed, as evidenced here.

In typical Google fashion, you get amazing engineers and minds working on the technical aspects - I'm sure the underlying tech here is nothing short of outstanding - but the beauty of Microsoft's approach, by contrast, is they understand the business side. Reaching out to game publishers, offering them deals to have their games on Game Pass for a set period of time. Sweetening the deal with little addons in their Perks menu (same as Amazon with Twitch Prime). In a world with so many big companies vying for your attention and money, taking a relatively hands off 'build it and they will come' approach like Google did with Stadia just isn't going to cut it.

I'd love to see them open source some of the workings of their stack once it's shut down, but I'm not holding my breath...

...and in the meantime, Valve keeps trucking away delivering real, solid improvements to the gaming experience on Linux with developers working on GPU drivers, in the kernel, on Wine / Proton, and, y'know... releasing the Steam Deck. That's worth spending my hard-earned money on. Stadia... wasn't.

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Neat! My partner and I have been playing our new Steam Decks a heck of a lot more than spinning up big, loud, hot gaming rigs this summer, and her PC is getting old enough now that the Deck isn't even really that much of a downgrade, so I'm very tempted to get a dock for her and just... let her have this as her everything-PC.

That said, I do genuinely want a DisplayPort out as an option, so I think I'll sit tight and wait for Valve here; we have some other generic USB-C 'docks' (really dongles) that came with e.g. a work laptop or a smartphone that work - having a full mouse + keyboard definitely made setting up all the stuff in KDE Plasma / 'Desktop mode' wayyy nicer.

The nice thing about using actual standards, of course, is that these 3rd party offerings can exist at all, and unmolested, to boot, and don't have strange non-compliant setups reusing the same connectors (looking at you, Nintendo). ;)

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Quoting: officerniceBased on Arch but updating like Debian :D 96 is ages old by now.

Genuinely hoping to figure out if there's a way to just... Treat it like any other normal Arch install and use pacman to actually keep the system up to date. And yes, I realise this means messing with the OS read/write flags and/or just blowing away SteamOS entirely in favour of vanilla Arch (well, Artix hopefully).

Yeah, it's a gaming 'console' but if it's also a PC, I want it to be actually kept up to date with security fixes like one. I'm sure I can't be the only one and someone's figured out how to slap the Valve Steam Deck UI atop other distros.

Once I get my Deck, anyway. ;P

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I wonder if the name is a reference to Scott Manley [External Link] and his trademark closer, "Fly Safe"?

As someone with 350+ hours in Elite: Dangerous (and sad about recent developments, or I guess really lack thereof), this looks neat!

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