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Latest Comments by BlackBloodRum
Proton Experimental pulls in newer DXVK to help God of War on Linux
17 Jan 2022 at 6:43 am UTC

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: BlackBloodRumOh dammit. I bought a windows game.

May the gods of tux forgive me for my sin. :unsure:

Edit: Oh.. no.. sony plan to bring Uncharted to PC too:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1659420/?snr=1_5_9__205 [External Link]

If this works on tux too.. it may not be good for my wallet....
sorry the gods of tux don't forgive you. now as a punishment you need to install Gentoo on 10 pentium 1 laptops. Also you need to pray 50 Hail Linus, (here it is in case you don't remember it):
Spoiler, click me

Our Linus, who art in Finland. Slackware be thy name.

Thy Fedora come, thy 2.6.1 done. On earth as it is in Debian.

Give us this day our twice yearly Ubuntu. And forgive Mozilla for it's shoddy Linux Firefox build. For we forgive those updates that break our drivers. And lead us not into Steve Jobs, but deliver us also from Bill Gates.

For thine is the Red Hat, and the awesome hardware optimization. For ever and ever:

Sudo.
Installing Gentoo on those old laptops sounds like fun (I have installed gentoo before :tongue:) but I wonder how many of them would die from overheating? :grin:

Proton Experimental pulls in newer DXVK to help God of War on Linux
16 Jan 2022 at 12:00 pm UTC Likes: 1

Oh dammit. I bought a windows game.

May the gods of tux forgive me for my sin. :unsure:

Edit: Oh.. no.. sony plan to bring Uncharted to PC too:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1659420/?snr=1_5_9__205 [External Link]

If this works on tux too.. it may not be good for my wallet....

God of War is now on Steam and runs out of the box on Linux with Proton
16 Jan 2022 at 5:23 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: F.UltraDo note that there are plenty of bug reports of VLC stuttering with ALSA as well so there is no guarantee that those specific problems are down to Pulse. Pipewire is better yes, but that does still not mean that it will magically solve problems that wasn't due to Pulse, it's just that the bad state of ALSA (yes ALSA) when Pulse became widespread gave Pulse a bad reputation and now everyone blames every single problem on Pulse which leads to the real source of those issues not being fixed.
One advantage of pipewire as well is that it replaces ALSA/JACK as well - providing an interface that applications can understand while at the same time using a much needed overhaul of the codebase.

Previously with pulse it simply had ALSA/Jack running through it - instead of replacing the interface. This is often what caused the latency in the first place as it added an additional step of using multiple audio systems which got in the way.

Meanwhile with pipewire it simply replaces pulse, alsa and jack all at once with it's own interfaces, while they are still technically alsa and jack they are much more refined (think of it like only getting the bits you need, instead of everything). This is why the latency issues are mostly resolved because you are no longer having to run multiple audio systems to get sound, it's just the one (a system with pipewire properly installed doesn't need to have alsa/jack installed, pipewire handles this directly).

This also makes the codebase far easier to maintain - application has broken sound? Well we've only got to check pipewire's code for the problem, instead of trying to determine if it's in alsa, pulse or jack and then trying to contact those developers etc.

I'm not claiming it will magically solve everything, I'm simply saying it may be worth trying it on pipewire as it may (or may not) fix the issue - as whether you like pulseaudio or not you cannot deny all the issues it caused over the years and pipewire has solved many of them.

Give it a try, you might be surprised at just how well it works. No need to argue over this though, you're welcome to stay with pulseaudio and never install pipewire if you prefer and I will use pipewire as it meets my requirements better than pulse :smile: - that's the beauty of FOSS, we can set our systems as we need them. :grin:

God of War is now on Steam and runs out of the box on Linux with Proton
15 Jan 2022 at 8:01 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: F.UltraThe sound issues in games are not really due to Pulse but down to WINE (hence why they also had to implement a PIPEWIRE_LATENCY env variable) or rather that it's still not clear exactly how the Windows sound system handles buffers, the wine wiki points to this bug https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39814 [External Link] as reference as "known bug in wine for sound issues" and reading it gives me the impression that games asks for a specific sized buffer but then tries to overwrite it before its consumed in full so there are bugs (in that they don't follow the written spec for the API) in lots of games that the Windows audio system somehow have workarounds for.
That may be true for wine in some cases. However, you should also note that pulseaudio had stuttering and delay issues even for applications that are not wine (for example, Kodi and VLC). I remember when pulseaudio first replaced alsa - there was problems in just about everything after.

In any case while pulseaudio worked for the most part and did improve in many areas - pipewire is far superior in many aspects.

For example, pulse would often struggle with some bluetooth codecs and may have sound issues with bluetooth, where as pipewire works perfectly with aptX codecs (no tweaking, out the box) and all other BT codecs so now my sennheiser momentum 3s can happily play along using the aptx codec without doing workarounds.

It also solves the jack latency issues and random issues where pulseaudio would get confused with too many sinks and you'd have to kill pulseaudio and restart it to make it work again etc.

In any case, you're better off with pipewire at this point.

I hated PA when it first came out, and I still hold a grudge to it now for all the trouble it caused me over the years :huh:

With that said I've experienced issues with pipewire too for example sometimes when playing audio at 96kHz/24bit or above it could "pop" occasionally - but then resume playing normally (no need to reboot it or reset it like pulse :tongue:) although that issue seems to have been solved as I haven't noticed it lately.

Long story short, neither system is perfect. But pipewire is better.

Just my 2p

God of War is now on Steam and runs out of the box on Linux with Proton
14 Jan 2022 at 8:24 pm UTC Likes: 6

Oh.. noo!

I always try to avoid buying non-linux games.. but.. but.. but.. but.. it's.. it's.. god of war!

aahh..! I used to love this game on the PS!

What to do?! :cry:

PS: Regarding the pulse latency environment variable: Have you tried the game with pipewire? does the issue persist? It might be something pipewire can fix - it solves a ton of other old pulseaudio issues. In my experience - sound stuttering and audio sync issues were almost always something caused by pulseaudio itself.

Looks like Portal 2 is the first Steam Deck Verified title
12 Jan 2022 at 11:18 am UTC

Well.. I was Q2.. but now "After Q2" so I am not getting too excited just yet.

Despite not being a geek anymore, my plans for the deck are:

Try to install other Linux distros (while keeping a copy of SteamOS handy) I'm curious to see how well a regular distro will work with it. Namely I plan to try Fedora, Tumbleweed, Arch and they don't work, gentoo for latest packages (give it best chance of working).

My guess is that Arch, Tumbleweed and Fedora should just work without needing to go the Gentoo route.

I also want to try to get a completely Free version of GNU/Linux on it like Guix or Trisquel.

If it works well, great I'll probably end up using whichever works best. If not, back SteamOS will go onto it.

I'm also waiting for the dock valve announced for it I'm very interested to see how it adapts for possibly not only being a games console but also partially a work laptop. In theory it could be used for both if it works the way valve says it does.

Now games, mostly regular games like DiRT Rally, Tomb Raider, Valheim and a few other steam titles.

I will also try to get non-steam games running, I want to try PS2 games, PSP games, older sega/nintendo games and my GOG games.

Naturally I'll also be checking games in regular wine (non-proton).

Basically, for now these are just ideas, until I actually have the deck I won't know what can or cannot work.

Either way I'll be waiting until probably November or later for delivery of the deck (I didn't pre-order until Jul 17th so I'm at the back of the queue.)

Humble Bundle decides you need another launcher for parts of Humble Choice
12 Jan 2022 at 12:01 am UTC Likes: 7

Tbh, I've felt for a long time HB moved too far away from what it was originally.

Although, I started moving away when their bundles mostly started being windows-focused and sadly only had one or two Linux games (or sometimes none!).

As for launchers.. nah... we've got more than enough launchers jeez, I have launchers for my launchers launcher that has a launcher.

NVIDIA releases a 12GB GeForce RTX 3080
11 Jan 2022 at 5:27 pm UTC Likes: 6

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis shortage stuff has been lasting rather a long time now. I'm finding myself wondering if it's really about all the original causes any more, or if the situation brought it to the attention of certain corporations that they are an oligopoly and constraining supply some is collectively making them gigabucks in windfall profits.
As a retailer myself, albeit in a different industry (and not USA), I can confirm the shortages are very real.

Most of the manufacturers have been out-of-stock on their most popular products to the point one set of products we ordered back in april last year, that had an estimated delivery of june. We didn't get those products until december when the manufacturer was finally able to import them.

In addition, what hasn't helped is lots of containers all arriving at the same time - and the way the docks work.

As a brief simplified description, imagine you've got stacks of containers lined up in a row of 10 for example, the docks will ship out container stacks #1 to #4 leaving the rest still sitting there, untouched. The next day they'll replace #1 to #4 with new stacks while unloading stack #5. The following day they'll start back at stack #1, leaving stacks #6 through #10 untouched.

What happens in the remaining stacks end up "sitting" until eventually they clear enough that they can get to it, this process simply loops.

It also depends on when the people who are receiving the containers (the manufacturers) are able to pay the fees on the containers and send a truck to go pick it up, if your container is at the bottom and the guys above you haven't picked theirs up yet, you may not be able to get yours yet either.

Then there's the other issue, COVID restrictions. For example US customs holding all inbound deliveries for 25 days minimum, including personal deliveries at the border before releasing it back to couriers etc under a COVID policy.

It's really annoying and stupid, but it is what is happening and as retailers there's nothing we can do.

As for costs, we've seen all our manufacturers/wholesalers bump their prices and the cost to us as a business increased. For now we're still "taking" the hit before pushing it to customers (losing around 35-40% per sale leaving us with almost no profit) but at some point we will have to increase our prices also unfortunately, but I wanted to get xmas out of the way first.

#WelcomeToMyWorld

There it is - Steam breaks 28 million users online
10 Jan 2022 at 8:18 am UTC

Yup mobile games (android/apple) make the majority now, for a lot of people hardcore gaming and AAA titles are games like Gardenscapes or Candy Crush Saga.

There it is - Steam breaks 28 million users online
10 Jan 2022 at 5:26 am UTC Likes: 5

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: BlackBloodRumJust think of all that money rolling in.. :woot:
That's a beautifully appropriate thing for your handle + avatar to say, but shouldn't you have started it with "Arrr, me hearties"?
I do when I've had enough rum :wink:

🤣