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Latest Comments by sarmad
Check out the fancy new trailer for Beyond All Reason a really great free and open source RTS
19 Aug 2024 at 8:00 pm UTC Likes: 1

Nice trailer for a good game. I play this from time to time and it's highly recommended if you are into RTS.

Linux hits another all-time high for July 2024 according to Statcounter
1 Aug 2024 at 6:13 pm UTC Likes: 2

If we assume there are approximately 1 billion desktop users in the world, then we are looking at around 45 million people around the world using Linux. That is more than the population of Canada. Pretty nice.

Stop Destroying Videogames petition heads to the European Union
1 Aug 2024 at 6:07 pm UTC Likes: 5

I would say for multiplayer games the publisher should release the server code (whether in source or binary format) with instructions on how to get it up and running and leave it up to the community to do the job.

Will anything dethrone the Steam Deck? Probably not
2 Jul 2024 at 7:07 pm UTC Likes: 5

My cousin bought the Rog Ally and I got to play around with it a bit and the experience was terrible. I started a game from their launcher and ended up thrown back into Windows multiple times to respond to some popups. Eventually I got the game running but the whole experience was just clunky. This is the main reason the Deck sells better; people generally favour smooth experience over smooth fps.

Steam Game Recording Beta announced - works on Linux and Steam Deck too
26 Jun 2024 at 11:50 pm UTC

@liamd, did you notice any impact to performance when recording is enabled?

Steam Game Recording Beta announced - works on Linux and Steam Deck too
26 Jun 2024 at 11:46 pm UTC

Great. Thanks, Valve. Time to spam my friends with my CS2 kills :)

Flathub continues growing with over 2 billion downloads recorded
25 Jun 2024 at 7:14 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: sarmadNice. It's good to see that Steam Deck owners are also tinkering around with the desktop. This will help let people know that Linux desktop is now far more usable than most people think.
I've mixed feelings about that.
At one side it's a sign of failure, at the other it's a driver for improvement.
Pros:
A. Everyone tinkering on Linux makes the whole ecosystem slightly better, just by trying to improve their own experience and gaining expertise, information and sometimes even code to improve it(whoo FOSS collab).
B. It shows to them the value of controlling your own system.
Cons:
A. These people don't tinker for fun, but to run the software they want to run, which indicates that the out of the box experience is still subpar.
Not exactly. We are not talking about people tinkering; we don't know how many people are tinkering around with the desktop. This graph shows you people downloading new apps from Flathub, which means they are people looking beyond what can be found in the Steam store. They could be installing emulators, open source games, or maybe some desktop apps, and that has nothing to do with the experience being subpar. Quite the contrary, this is a positive experience where you are not locked down like is the case with consoles.

Flathub continues growing with over 2 billion downloads recorded
24 Jun 2024 at 8:06 pm UTC

Nice. It's good to see that Steam Deck owners are also tinkering around with the desktop. This will help let people know that Linux desktop is now far more usable than most people think.

Canonical detail improvements the Steam Snap, work to advance gaming continues on Ubuntu
17 Jun 2024 at 6:16 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Tuxee
Quoting: grigiwhy do they always have to do the Not-Invented-Here thing all the time.
You are aware that most of the NIH stuff came before nowadays established alternatives?

upstart (2006) preceded systemd (2010).
Unity (2010) preceded Gnome Shell (2011).
Snap (2014) preceded Flatpak (2015).
And when Mir was announced in 2013 Wayland was a long shot from being remotely usable.
Even Bazaar (26 March 2005) came a few days before Git (7 April 2005 after a 3 day development).
Snap may have preceded Flatpak, but it certainly succeeded AppImage by a whooping 10 years. If they built Snap on top of AppImage Flatpak wouldn't have been popular today.

Prince of Persia The Lost Crown gets a Steam release in August
17 Jun 2024 at 6:04 pm UTC

Quoting: scaine
Quoting: sarmadCan someone explain what's wrong with Denuvo? Does it work on Linux/Proton or not?
Denuvo works okay on Linux under Proton. So far. Who knows if they'll break things in future, like anti-cheat does.

There are several issues with Denuvo:

1. Cost - protecting a game with Denuvo costs the publisher $25K per month. There is also a one-off fee of $0.5 per activation. So if your game sells 100K copies, that's a $50K up front fee, plus the $25K every month you keep Denuvo on there. This is all money that isn't going into development, QA, DLC, paying staff, or advertising your game.

2. Performance. Mixed reports on this, but there's a perception that Denuvo encumbered games will perform worse. Reports on how much worse vary wildly, from a few frames to (e.g. Resident Evil Village) 50% performance. When there's a big hit, the publisher is often forced to remove it (e.g. Village, Rage 2).

3. What it's designed to do, which is prevent you "activating" the game more than 5 times. Probably not a huge issue normally, but if you play about with different versions of Proton, every time you delete your prefix (the PFX folder), you're re-activating the game on a "new PC", which will eventually lock you out of the game.

4. The principle its based on, which is that it "protects" sales, by forcing would-be pirates to buy the game. There are two issues with that. First, would-be pirates are proven in a couple of studies (such as this [External Link]) that they wouldn't buy the game anyway, if they can't pirate it. So it's not protecting sales. In fact, piracy can actually encourage game sales, where the pirates download cracked versions as "demos", and if they're impressed, they buy legitimately. Second, Denuvo encumbered games are often cracked anyway, and pirated anyway. So, in those cases, money wasted.

5. It's anti-consumer. That is, it provides the paying customer a worse experience than if you pirated the game. It "protects" the publisher by punishing the very people the publisher relies on to succeed. It treats paying customers as untrustworthy scum.

...which is why I never buy anything encumbered by Denuvo.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Thanks for the Ted talk :D

I thought Denuvo was an anti-cheat tool for online gaming rather than an anti-hacking tool. Many of those methods that tend to improve sales only does the opposite. I remember being on a visit to the US and trying to rent a movie from YouTube only to be prevented from doing so because my Gmail account is not US based. I ended up simply pirating the movie with no remorse.