Quoting: eroldru

Quoting: StoneColdSpiderOh nice..... I will get some free games and then forget GOG exists again like usual......

honestly that's sad. I love gog's concept and the drm-free stuff, but they don't give out a Linux launcher, have no controller support for their own gog launcher and are (seemingly) not doing anything to be a bit more steam deck friendly. I've had my SD since Q1 and have yet to play any gog games.

For what it's worth, it's really not that difficult to use GOG games on Steam Deck with controller support. You can install them whichever way you feel necessary (such as with lutris, there's even an option to install without a script which just downloads and installs in a prefix or a manual custom prefix) and add it as a steam shortcut.

Once it's a steam shortcut you can set the controller options and the deck treats it just like any other game, so you can easily set up your controller input etc. Heck, sometimes steam will even recognise the game if it's also available on steam and named the same, then you can just download a pre-made controller layout via the menu and just play.

I've done this a few times :smile:

I really don't get the argument that people want a launcher for each store they use - I would much prefer to have a single launcher on the deck (namely, the built in one) as opposed to needing a different launcher for each game. I mean how many launchers do people want?

Games sometimes come with their own extra launchers too:
UPlay
Origin
R* Lanucher
etc etc etc

So you'll launch say, Assassin's Creed on steam's launcher just for it to then launch the UPlay launcher, which then launches the game from that launcher instead. I don't understand why people want it this way.

For me I prefer just one launcher if possible.

IMO: No launcher is a fair trade off for no (sometimes very invasive) DRM. It's nice to not be burdened with yet another bloody launcher.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Had my deck since July :grin:

For all those that are about to get it: It's absolutely worth it! The freedom to play any game whether it's an emulated console game, emulated arcade games, older PC games from GOG[1] or new AAA games! All of this.. on a portable device that you can stick in your backpack and play while travelling[2].

It's the best handheld console since the PSP imo.

Also, it seems interesting how quickly production is ramping up, I can't help but wonder if it wasn't only about a parts shortage that was an issue.

I mean hear me out, Valve came up with this console as effectively a new experiment and they quickly got a lot of reservations, but that wouldn't have been a lot of money in comparison to the cost of manufacturing all those reservations (since it's only £5 per reservation). They couldn't be sure how many of those reservations would turn into actual sales of the device or be cancelled.

So they would have to fund the manufacturing of the devices, but being an experimental idea and device they probably didn't want to produce too many units initially as to not waste money. The Steam Deck is not their only product nor a primary product so they can't just throw all of their money at it, since they have other things to fund too. Probably remembering their steambox experiments (in case the device flops).

Valve has also hinted that these devices don't exactly yield a huge profit for them. Valve would have done several "risk assessments" for their investments into the deck which would have dictated how much money they would throw at it initially.

So my guess is the delay was "somewhat" intentional. As more and more devices sell, the manufacturing expense pot fills up and they can put the money from the sales of those devices towards manufacturing more to hopefully make a profit overall.

So I believe production is speeding up because it was successful, because people completed their reservations and paid. Thus they can put more money into getting more units made for people to buy.

Don't get me wrong, there absolutely has a been a parts shortage in the industry as well which hasn't helped. But I don't believe it's the only cause of the speed up that's happening.

[1] Yes, I still use GOG and buy games from there regularly. I much prefer my games don't have invasive DRM if possible so I'll opt for DRM free first and I also like a lot of older games. I got all the classic SimCity games from there for example, which yup you can put on deck :grin: I don't care much about the launcher argument. The games are DRM free, you don't need an official launcher to use them, just download and run them or use Lutris or some other launcher. We already have what feels like a million different launchers as it is, I don't need yet another launcher tyvm.

[2] Don't deck and drive, let someone else take the wheel.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Welcome to the modern world and future :grin:

If this bill passes:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/uks-online-safety-bill-attacks-free-speech-and-encryption [External Link]

Well, you best keep your opinions to yourself if they differ from others :wink:

Edit: I am probably biased though :tongue: seeing as for many years I have been a supporter and financial contributor to the EFF and FSF :tongue:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

For some reason, I read "Tripwire" from the article title as the security company (The one who makes IDS systems and such). :huh:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: CyborgZetaI am not a software developer or a progammer; I am just a regular computer user. So please do not get angry at me for asking this, as I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

But wouldn't running games, and programs/applications in general, inside containers fix this kind of issue? Isn't that one of the goals of Flatpak?

Yes and no.

It's not so much a technical limitation at this point, but rather a legal one.

It could be done in a number of ways but EAC, being proprietary, cannot bundle a glibc binary into their closed source product for redistribution in another closed source product (the game) for legal reasons since it breaks to LGPL terms.

In addition the glibc devs heavily advise to always dynamically link to the OS's glibc for best overall compatibility and security.

(EAC did correctly here by dynamically linking)

Usually this isn't a big deal in FOSS projects because someone will come along and patch an application to work in a newer glibc and happy days.

But the kicker here is that EAC is compiled directly into the distributed games. Which means distro vendors can't patch it, steam can't patch it and neither can EAC themselves.

The only way to properly fix it (to work with newer glibc) at this point in deployed EACs would be for EAC to update EAC, and then each EAC game updates their EAC and recompiles with the patch.

The other legal issue is that neither EAC nor steam can just come along and just stick a closed source game into a new flatpak with needed libraries, because that would break the games license terms.

Considering many games may not see an update due to inactive devs, it doesn't look good.

At this point best case is that EAC patch to use the modern hash and the game devs update their EAC.

PS: Sorry if I came off a bit brash earlier.. long and bad day...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KlaasYes, obviously. But my point was that the supposedly stable things have large caveats as well and it is really not related to the current issue at all to constantly state that rolling release distribution break everything constantly. This is not an issue of rolling vs frozen distribution.

I don't think things like this breakage can be tested automatically since you'd have to create so many obscure test cases that the effort would make it infeasible.

It's all on usage case. For a server, stable is better.

Both options have caveats and issues to deal with.

My point was that people (such as yourself) often believed that enterprise level distros were pointless even for servers (You have no idea how many times I've had this exact discussion over the years) and proceed to attack enterprise grade distros, citing false security concerns and caveats and would suggest that running arch on a server was a better option.

Meanwhile in the enterprise world we always cited compatibility as a primary concern which this EAC issue highlights.

So my point was merely it would help you understand why we use such software in a stable environment that allows us to keep our systems running without breaking software.

That rolling isn't always a better option, software changes and it's the nature of the beast, it's how you handle those changes that matters.

In my case I use both, I use rolling release for my desktop and stable for servers. Best of both worlds 🫠

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I was speaking more along the lines of RHEL or SLES.

For example, RH very much keep up with latest CVEs and catalogue them for their customers and detail whether it's fixed, unaffected or vulnerable:

https://access.redhat.com/security/security-updates/#/cve [External Link]

With that said having the latest versions of software doesn't make you immune from security issues either, nor less likely.

It can also go the other way, a security issue can occur only in a new version of software but not affect older versions, there have been several security issues over the years that simply didn't affect RHEL because the security bug was only present in newer versions of software.

Also, a security issue can go unnoticed for years in software, even eith latest versions. Then there's developers who deem certain things "not a priority" who don't patch a security bug they know exists (this affects proprietary software like windows mostly)

Don't assume that just because patches are backported that the software is more vulnerable as a result. RH has a lot of professional employed security experts keeping tabs on this.

Edit: Typos.. I hate typing on smartphones...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This is why we in the "enterprise" world of servers prefer distros such as RHEL which backport security and bugfix patches but retain compatibility with existing software for a number of years by locking software versions instead of a rolling release distro like Arch with constant new versions. Yet we were always judged for running "old software" by the general non-admin linux crowd 😂

Maybe now they can understand why we do it that way. 😂

With that said, we shouldn't stop developing or pushing ahead in our FOSS software by holding back development just to keep some proprietary spyware like EAC working that doesn't play nice in the first place.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Nice!

Quoting: mtOnline Game Selling Store does improvements to Offline mode and Free Game Claiming in one swoop.
What's going on here?!? :P

2 things :grin:

1) Steam deck, they want it to be successful which means providing a good service for deck owners.
2) They have more competition now in the form of Prime gaming, Epic games store etc, so if they want people to continue to use their services instead of switching, they have to stand out from the others as better.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PhiladelphusGenerally, I find the estimate of ~2–6 hours is pretty good. A 3D game, especially with more photorealistic graphics, tends to drop it down, and a 2D game without fancy graphics tends to be higher. I haven't gotten too deep into power usage optimization, though.

Hmm, seems on par with mine then. I was a bit concerned about my battery for a while, since playing 3D games from 2006 (Flatout 2 for example) would drain the battery in about 2 hours with all the power settings set to tell the device to use as little power as possible :grin:

But if it's normal, then that's fine :grin:

View this comment - View article - View full comments