Support us on Patreon to keep GamingOnLinux alive. This ensures all of our main content remains free for everyone. Just good, fresh content! Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal. You can also buy games using our partner links for GOG and Humble Store.
Latest Comments by slaapliedje
Valve has formally announced the Steam Deck, a portable handheld console with SteamOS
16 July 2021 at 2:05 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: KohlyKohl
Quoting: scaine
Quoting: Supay
Quoting: Solitary
Quoting: KohlyKohl
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: KohlyKohlI'm also concerned about the switch to Arch. I would have preferred a more stable distribution such as Ubuntu.
It's not like you're going to be installing a stack of AUR stuff. Someone's carefully set up bare-bones Arch is probably very stable.

Arch is inherently less stable by design. Adding in the AUR just makes it more unstable. Arch has its place I just don't think a consumer device is one of them.

Just because it's based on Arch doesn't mean it needs to have Arch issues. The updates are still tested and controlled by Valve. It is SteamOS, not Arch.

Absolutely agree. I run Arch on my desktop and some various home servers. My desktop is the messiest with AUR stuff wedged and lots of random bits I tinker with, and even that hasn't had any issues in a long time. The issues I have had were ones I caused. My servers are kept lean and focused, and I have never had an issue with them. Even when I slack off and realise I haven't updated packages in months, it all just works as it's as minimal as possible.

On the contrary, I recently switched to Ubuntu to give it a go again, expecting it to be something that would just work and have a decent default experience. Sure, it installed easily and had a flashy GUI, and I didn't have to manually do everything as I do when installing Arch, however I have had more issues with Ubuntu in a few weeks than I had on Arch in the last two years. Stuff that just worked in Arch due to up to date packages and a huge central repo has involved forum scouring for fixes, random private repos added, and a host of other issues. Give me Arch anyday.

My experience: the exact opposite of yours. Nothing works easily on Arch, the AUR has heaps of outdated keys and I had to troubleshoot basic things like gamepads not working which work out of the box on Debian/Ubuntu distros.

You know what you know, I suppose, and there are significant differences between the big core distros that experience in one of them doesn't necessarily translate to a good experience in the others.

For a device like this though? Who cares if it's Arch? I'm not going to be looking up the arch wiki if something doesn't work on this thing. I'll be using Valve support, or sending the unit back.

It matters because Valve is pushing the idea that you can install any apps you like and in my experience this is much easier for new users on Ubuntu and not on Arch.
Not really... you have Flatpaks, snaps, and the 'software store' thing, that pretty much is just a frontend to PackageKit and makes most software installations on Linux these days Distribution agnostic. The only real difference these days are 'what is packaged and set up to be installed easy via UI?'

Arch would have a lot more customization options that would allow Valve to 'do whatever they want' with the OS, whereas Ubuntu is... well less so :P

Valve has formally announced the Steam Deck, a portable handheld console with SteamOS
16 July 2021 at 2:03 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: dubigrasuMaybe is a bit silly, but I would love to see a "controller mode only" for this device. Basically using it for your other PC/devices, the same way as any other controller. Not talking here about streaming or anything, but just having it turned off (or some low power/standby mode) and attached to your (more powerfull) PC, instead of the SC for example.
Why, well, because its array of inputs makes it even more awesome and versatile than the Steam Controller itself. Sure, I would very much prefer a SC 2.0, if they ever make one again.
Take that idea a bit further and use it as an add-on screen for games where it makes sense (like the Android app for Fallout 4, where you can put the PIP boy on a phone or tablet.)

Valve has formally announced the Steam Deck, a portable handheld console with SteamOS
15 July 2021 at 11:01 pm UTC

It has been pointed out that the person driving the car in the image with the kid in the back seat at https://www.steamdeck.com/en/hardware is driving it wrong. That isn't how you drive a Tesla!

Steam on a Chromebook could be closer than we think, with an AMD dGPU model coming
15 July 2021 at 10:20 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: MalChromebooks are already great as they are. They're cheap and they can do everything a generalist user need for a tenth of the price of an Apple counterpart.

But if they also start to support steam libraries then there might be a case for buying the premium versions. They would still be cheaper than premium Apple counterparts and able to run more games.

If might help "pure" Linux popularity as well if Chromebooks start to educate people that you don't need to be ripped off by Apple to have a portable pc that actually works. Though, at the same time, ever since Chromebooks I find it harder to justify installing an Ubuntu on a relative's pc given their use case. As opposed to the times when you just had to replace windows with Linux to fix every issue a year old notebook could have, with Chrome OS things just works. In my opinion there are little reasons to "upgrade" to Linux from Chrome OS if your a generic user, gaming being probably the only one until borealis takes it away.
My wife has a Chromebook. And indeed, for her use case it is generally just fine. But a cheap real-Linux box would probably be better. (In theory you can probably stick Linux on my wife's Chromebook, but it looks like it's rather tricky--not like wiping a normal Windows laptop and sticking Linux on it, at all)
The reason has to do with Google's insistence on controlling the experience . . . and the files. This is occasionally irritating in normal use; Chromebooks will let you put a file on the machine itself or into a USB stick or whatever, but they don't want you to and they don't make it easy. Google wants you to be using Google Docs and keeping all your stuff on their cloud. They want you to barely realize your files are anywhere, they certainly don't want you to be controlling them.
This becomes a much bigger problem if something goes wrong . . . which seems to be happening increasingly as the machine gets older and Google want you to buy a new one. A while ago my wife basically lost all her files. The machine had been saying that there would be no more upgrades to the Chrome version on her machine (so she should get a new one), but then something went wrong, and in recovering there was, ironically, some kind of forced upgrade or something, and when the dust settled it had lost her files. They probably exist somewhere on some Google server, but Google said it wasn't able to restore her access or something, so for practical purposes, gone.
There are also occasional annoyances when my wife wants to do something her way rather than Google's way, or wants to do something that's not obviously part of the limited set of things Google has laid out for you to do. This doesn't come up often, but even someone who normally just browses the web, does email and creates a few documents will sometimes want to do something else. On Linux, that means either it's already installed and you check the menus, or you fire up the Software Centre or whatever and install something that does that. On a Chromebook, that means you shrug and do without what you were hoping to do.

So yeah, I think there's still a case for putting a "generic user" on Linux rather than ChromeOS.

That said, this news is still a Good Thing.
Ouch! This is the main reason why I will never trust saving my files to a cloud, and treat it more like a backup than where I would store things. Even then, I prefer to backup to my NAS. Also why I woyld never buy a chromebook, and prefer to just buy cheap thinkpads and throw Linux on them.

Steam on a Chromebook could be closer than we think, with an AMD dGPU model coming
15 July 2021 at 4:41 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: WorMzy'gaming laptop' is already an oxymoron, we're going to need a new descriptor for 'gaming chromebook'.
Ha ha! yeah whenever I hear Gaming Laptop, I think "so an overly large chunk of laptop, that you can't ever upgrade, and will be obsolete in a year or two, assuming it doesn't overheat and die sometime before that."

Netflix is getting into video games, so we'll have another cloud gaming service
15 July 2021 at 3:20 pm UTC

Quoting: Cyril
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: CyrilI can't watch the video, because blocked in my country... but it seems it's the trailer.
What the issue about it? It's the film itself?

The trailer seems ok to me. Especially annoying was Netflix' US poster, compared to the French one...

https://nypost.com/2020/08/20/netflix-deeply-sorry-for-cuties-poster-after-backlash-for-sexualizing-kids/

Yeah sorry I didn't read all posts when posted my comment. Yeah a lot of people, in France at least (I'm French), have speak about the US poster and mostly disagree with it, but the problem here is that because of this a lot of people simply refused to watch the film but still they spit on it...
As I watched the film, it's a good film and obviously don't deserve the shitstorm IMHO.

But yeah, my final word about it, let's stay of the topic.
I haven't looked at the poster or the movie; but like how can there be a shitstorm about that, yet like all that Japanese animations out there...

Netflix is getting into video games, so we'll have another cloud gaming service
15 July 2021 at 3:18 pm UTC

Quoting: TheSHEEEPPrepare for your favourite video game series getting cancelled before the conclusion of the story. Or any conclusion whatsoever.
Can't wait!

I'm only subbing to any of these to watch specific series (or movies) that are already concluded. Anything else just seems to be a waste of time.
I'd play Money Heist as a video game :P but yeah, totally agree about it being canceled before the conclusion :P

XWayland 21.1.2 is out now with support for hardware accelerated NVIDIA on the 470 driver
15 July 2021 at 3:33 am UTC

Quoting: BielFPs
Quoting: slaapliedjeWhy would I have to be a distro maintainer to want to have a stable system?
You gave me the impression in this sentence, my bad
Quoting: slaapliedjeBeta means it isn't going to be packaged by most distributions. Some of us don't have time to muck with betas.

Quoting: slaapliedjeNvidia marked their release as beta for a reason. Usually because they want people to test the new features and make sure they're stable before releasing a driver
So? the point is that they're finally showing support to xwayland rather than ignoring it like before, and Nvidia is the only MAJOR factor holding wayland adoption back right now. Once Nvidia drivers properly support it and Ubuntu lts start to use wayland by default, you can expect the adoption to skyrocket by users, and most important, software developers (I mean in use cases where xWayland doesn't serve their needs).

Quoting: slaapliedjeWayland may eventually be the X11 replacement
Already is. No one is maintaining X.org anymore, not even *BSD users who are the most affected by this transition. The only patches x11 are receiving nowadays are for xwayland which different from bare metal x11 actually requires a wayland compositor in order to work.
nah, there have been updates to Xinput stuff as well. They are still releasing updated modules, they just haven't released any major versions of X.org.

XWayland 21.1.2 is out now with support for hardware accelerated NVIDIA on the 470 driver
12 July 2021 at 5:38 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: kon14Pray tell how you update your ancient, but stable, driver. Do you pin packages from testing/sid or is that also too much of a cheat for you?
Figured I'd create a separate reply to just how shitty this is.

Never pin shit from testing/sid if you want your system to be stable. Also, don't throw random ppa's into your repos. If you have to use a third party repository for something, make sure it is for new packages that don't replace things in your distribution. I've been running mostly Debian in my 24~ years of running Linux, and have broken it many times by many things, while messing with testing/sid. If you're gonna go for the rolling release, and you don't mind some breaks here and there, run Sid. If you want rolling release, but stable, use Testing. If you want something that lasts a few years with security / bug fixes and is rock solid, you use stable. It's as simple as that. If you want rock solid+newer software, you now can use stable+backports.

I run Sid on my desktop, bullseye (testing) in some VMs, and I run Buster on servers. You want ancient, and self-packaged stuff, you run a RHEL based distribution. Debian hasn't been an 'oh, they just have old shit' in them since the last few releases. Just remember, Ubuntu takes Debian Unstable every 6 months and slaps it together for a release. Clearly 'the favorite' must be so much newer than Debian, right?? Just because some Rando on the internet made a name for himself at one point and created a ppa for installing beta nvidia drivers, doesn't mean he isn't still just some rando.