Quoting: s8as8aDoes anyone know if the Steam Deck can boot an OS (or at least a GNU/Linux OS) from a memory card?

Also, does anyone know if the Steam Deck can boot an OS (or at least a GNU/Linux OS) from a USB drive?

Also, does anyone know what the maximum memory card size that can be used with the Steam Deck is?

Well, you would have to ask Valve that as there isn't any out in the wild... but I would hazard a guess that at least USB seems logical. Depending on the SD card reader used, that would answer your other questions. I have never known a laptop that could boot off an SDCard, but I think it would be a cool feature. Make you feel like an old time console, where each 'cart' was a game. Imagine an AmikitDeck distribution on an SD card (minimal footprint instead of a liveUSB stick. Same reason I hate that Gotek went with USB instead of SDCard...)

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Quoting: damarrinYeah, the information about the m.2 sockets is also new, it wasn't there before. As for not being user-accessible, I'm guessing it means you need to open the deck up to access it and it'll void your warranty.

Wasn't there a decision out there at some point some what recently that stated warranty stickers don't mean anything, and outside if a user modifying something in an extreme way, the manufacturer still has to honor a warranty?

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Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: dubigrasuwe have a saying: befriend the devil until you cross the bridge.

we also have a saying: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

And the road to diabetes is paved with good chocolates... hmmm, chocolate...

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Lachu

Quoting: GuestI don't see it good for GNU/Linux however. It's consolidating more gaming under the control of someone who is not the user.

But what else than Valve/Steam? Valve controlling large spectrum on gaming comercial-linux-market. I think open source are not so great than closed source/commercial. I do not tell open source software is bad. It is great. I use only open source software (excluding firmware, DRM for video watching, BIO, etc.), but no games. I am happy with that. If open source games give any alternative, I will use open source games.

I can paid for open source software. I was give donation to KDE team recently. Of course, I give a lot more for closed source software/games, but as regular user, I think open source software should give this benefit (cheaper), because it is a democracy/free market and in this case money are better used (I paid for what I want - for example - I do not like option A, I do not paid for it and it never will be added to some open source software, etc. ). Maybe that means, open source software developers get smaller amount of money, but I am not 100% sure. Firstly, there is no piracy and people will paid as much as they can. Secondly OS developers can collaborate with other projects and charity people (sorry, English is not my native) easier, so there is not the same cost of creating software.

In summarize, I can paid for Open Source software, but if Open Source games are worth it? Of course - freedom is very important and If we paid corporation, it will lobby to take of more of our laws, etc. But gaming is like watching movies - it is like communing with culture. If I do not commune with culture, I will be really freedom?

That's a really valid point. My own take on it is that I'd like to be as extreme as RMS, but in all practical scenarios it's not feasible from a cultural participation perspective (in this case, games). So I instead try for open source on the OS, open source to choose something to run; running a game is my choice, but what is needed to run the game should be open source.

The thing with trying to be as extreme as RMS, is there really isn't any hardware open enough to meet that standard. Would be an awesome, yet different world if there were!

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Quoting: Supay

Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: Purple Library GuyShe's older, but as far as I can tell the younger supposedly all tech-savvy generation is pretty much the same--they're just really comfortable clicking those icons, but they mostly don't look beneath that.

A bit off-topic, but a friend of mine was talking this past week how she was teaching students in high school and had to show them how to do complicated computer things like…creating a folder to put their project photos in (it was an art class), or selecting more than one file at a time. :dizzy: Apparently "digital native generation" doesn't automatically equate to "knows anything about computers beyond surface level"! :happy:

I do IT support and I see a regular pattern that above a certain group (around 60) there is a dropoff in IT knowledge, but now also below 25 there is also a similar dropoff. Go close to 20 and below, and it is intense. I regularly have to talk people under 25 through IT basics, even on Windows. How to create and navigate folders, use Outlook, how to use the start menu, what a browser is and the difference between them, and so much more. The Pi Foundation has it right: education in IT is severely lacking these days and everyone should have to use a Pi and learn IT basics on it.

I think of it sort of like Hunting / Preparing / Cooking food. Like there are generations, maybe a few before mine, where mankind as a whole knew how to hunt, prepare and cook their own food, as occasionally it was required to survive. Same thing with computers, the generation right before mine grew up having to purchase a kit to build their own computers. I started my computing knowledge young, but it wasn't like I needed a soldering iron before inserting the floppy disk. But still had to deal with Atari DOS, knowing that I can load .com and .exe files, and figuring out on Strip Poker, that if you reverse the file names, they'll also be in reverse order as you play! (okay, I didn't figure that one out, at the time the copy we got of the game already had the pictures reversed, and I felt the need to figure out how to fix it! Felt weird to have to win for them to put their clothes back on!)

This brings up the 'people will just install Windows on it'. sure there'll be some people who do that, but I don't think many will (assuming SteamOS 3.0 works really well and doesn't have weird incompatibilities, or crashes.) Many simply won't realize 'it's a mini-PC' means they can just plug in a USB Stick, Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor and install Windows. They'll just think 'cool, I can play Steam games with it.'

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Quoting: GuestHehe, just realized that the Windows-version of the game on GOG is powered by dosbox.....

Well yeah, because backward compatibility with Windows 10 is terrible. I'm shocked Valve hasn't just outright inserted Proton in between for some of the games even under Windows 10. Would be hilarious if they ran Proton through WSL2 to get better compatibility for older games!

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Quoting: Bogomips

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Bogomips

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: BogomipsOk new big stable NVIDIA driver is here. Now waiting for the release of Bullseye after the full freeze…

Worse situation is it'll be in backports. But I'm betting it can hit the exception for making it into Bullseye. Maybe?

For the NVIDIA drivers I'm outside the repos, every time I tried it was clunky at best.

sudo apt install -t buster-backports nvidia-driver

That's too clunky?

No, I mean the result was, with dependency errors and I didn't want to investigate further because the standalone install works fine for me.

Generally dependency errors only occur when you attempt to use stuff outside of the main, contrib, non-free debian repositories, including enabling backports. Sounds like you possibly used some other repository that caused dependency issues. It's why I always shudder when people just suggest 'enable X ppa'. Most of them are not of the quality of what Debian tries to insist their packages are.

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Quoting: CatKillerAh, that's why the main Ubuntu repositories got updated versions of the Nvidia driver with uncharacteristic swiftness today.

Debian is in freeze, but should allow this as an exception. Hopefully they end up with the 470 release in bullseye.

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My thoughts on Proton remain the same. It's a useful tool for those games that'll never get a port, are old enough the company doesn't care about it anymore (and hence aren't patching it) and that is about it. If a game is getting constant patches, it should be native. The developers should treat each platform equally (they usually don't with patches coming out months later, if ever, for the Linux release).

For the games that require third party stores... wonder how they'd work with a native version of their stores, would they integrate Proton into their stores so that older games that they won't patch will work, while newer games could be native? That'd be interesting to see. Either way, very interesting times ahead!

The biggest problem I see is all the 'well almost works flawlessly in Proton, but you have to add command parameters to get it to work' games. People just buying this to have a portable Call of Duty are going to be disappointed when they have to hack around with command parameters to get it to work... and then just try to figure out how to install Windows...

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Pretty sure Uplay or Ubi Connect or whatever it is called this week works fine in wine. I had tried Assassin's Creed Something in it not too long ago and I thought it had worked...

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