Quoting: TheSHEEEPYou are just making stuff up here.
"For a few seconds"? Why would you assume that? Could easily be a lot longer.
I have no clue what time frame is needed for Steam to trigger that popup on your end, or under what conditions it fires, or if it is just random, or...

Could just be a "user X who was selected for survey has come online" trigger, which would be fine with even just some seconds...

The point OP made was "were able to connect for a short time" so I assumed that a short time was in the neighbourhood of seconds. Why? Because I also assume that the PRC keeps a very tight eye on their firewall and that such accidental unblocks are remedied ASAP. My main argument this point is that it sounded more like Steam was able to connect so Steam collected data, when there is a lot more that have to happen for the survey to be both received and sent, which includes the user having to click in a "I agree".

So yes I am making stuff up here, but no more and no less than either OP nor you. None of us sits on any facts, so this is all 100% speculation. I just find this point to be highly improbable.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPYes, absolutely.
You radically overestimate how much people care about stuff like that.
We are not talking about some (rightfully) paranoid dissenters, but just a gamer who wants to play a game.

Granted, I just somehow believe that people living under the watchful eye of their government and society does things with a bit more caution than you and me who lives under more or less total freedom (and even if our freedom isn't total there are a lot of people who live like it is without consequences while people in China most likely can see the consequences of people misbehaving).

In the end only Valve (and the PRC) knows, I just got the feeling from OP that this is telemetry that Valve collects just by being connected while it does require a manual step to send in the survey and one can opt out of it completely as well.

The most likely scenario to me is that it is the very same that happened last time, aka that this is Internet Cafe data, people using a rented machine at such a Cafe would have no problems from any of my above mentioned reasons to just click OK on whatever they get since it is not their machine.

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: 04ELYNo way Valve and Linux scared Microsoft to put effort, we're going good! :grin:

of course we do.
we kicked their butt in the server, super computer and mobile devices.
consoles are able to reach numbers as big as 150 millions devices and we are doing relatively good , especially if we use as reference the first xbox.

if other companies like google (chromebooks), amazon (luna) start beting on linux, then we will have big capital investing on us, so even if valve isnt the one to bring linux to the masses, if they show its possible others may follow and someone finally break windows monopoly.

valve is proving that is possible WITHOUT exclusives to break into that space, nowadays most of the games people want do work and people seems to be willing to compromise on the others or wait for then to work instead of dualboot/changing to windows on their deck.
not to mention the network effect that is starting to get shappe on everything related, all techs related to gaming like wine,dxvk, drivers, anti cheat, lutris are evolving on our ecosystem faster than ever, if microsoft dont manage to desacelerate it, they might get into serious trouble.

imagine an chromebook with full integration with your phone (transfer calls etc), full support for android apps and the same compatibility of windows games/softwares that steamOS have + a few exclusive apps from google.
imagine luna using linux as their main system instead of windows, and maybe even geforce now with nvidia having an reason to put linux as their first class citizen at least on servers.
(amazon already is looking at techs like wine)

on linux already have more games than any console ever had (counting only verified+playble) more than mac (if we include native+verified+playable), the only pc platform with more games is windows, it also still get more games per day than we do, but that can change.
as for mobile, its another niche but some gamers play both including android emulation for pc and if we count mobile games, then the number skyrockt for an ridiculous high number!
even non steam games are becoming easier than ever to install, im starting to get hope again!

Well to be fair they where never big in either servers or supercomputers. So it was not so much us kicking them out as we simply kept them out so to speak. Mobile devices was a whole other story though. AFAIK the Steam Deck have sold about 1M units which is nothing compared with the amount of Xbox series X that MS have sold so I don't think that they actually see it as any form of competition, at least not yet.

And then it also looks like this whole thing was just something that a single MS developer tried to sell in house and failed to do so.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: F.Ultrayou have to agree to send it to Valve once it pops up and I have a hard time seeing anyone performing either of your points as thinking "yeah lets have Valve receive some telemetry".

You seriously think 99% of people care about their data being used?
:grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin::grin:

You start Steam.
The popup about the survey comes up.
You click through it half-blind like you click through most popups of that style.
Done.

Ok so let's go over his 4 points:

#1: Steam proper got temporarily un-blocked by the Great Firewall for whatever reason, and all the people with Steam installed were able to connect for a short time. -- Since the survey have to be sent manually it would not be triggered by their computers accidentally being able to connect to steam for a few seconds.

#2: Some very popular game was released/updated on Steam, so a lot of Chinese people risked using a VPN to connect and download it. -- So people trying to fly under the radar of the Chinese Gouvernment would be perfectly fine with sending telemetry to a western company? and also not being 100% vigilant on what they click and agree to?

#3: Some game was released on Steam which was interpreted to be critical of the CCP, so a bunch of fake accounts got created to review-bomb and report the game for "hate speech". (As has happened before) -- Why would these people (who most likely are bots anyway) bother by also agreeing to the survey? AFAIK new accounts also don't get sent the survey in the first place.

4. Valve accidentally mixed in the stats from the PRC Steam version with the main Steam stats (again?) -- Ok so this one might be true since I don't even know what it would mean, to be completely fair I missed to read this one before my first comment.

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: gradyvuckovicI have some theories and opinions on why Linux isn't particular popular in non-English speaking countries.
.

as someone who the main language inst english , i can tell you why, at least one of the main reasons.

as you said, the documentation for us is lackuster, but there is something even worse.
i have an good english, im good at reading, writing, listening , the only issue i have is speaking, even then, i prefer to use an system on my native language, its more confortable.

if you try to use linux in an non english lang, and got any error message, you cant find almost any help online.

just think about it:
what distro are you using? ubuntu, fine, what version of it? 20.04, fine that is still quite popular, what hardware do you have? x cpu, y gpu, z ram etc... fine, that became quite nicher if its a problem specific to this hardware config, but someone else might have the same problem and posted the solution online, google search the error message in english on google and you will find tons of ansewers online, now, put you system in portuguese and wait for the error message to appear again, control c, control v the error message on google... you will find almost no result! or maybe you find someone that solved it in 2014 in another distro, you try their solution and it may seem to fix the issue but cause another one, and now your system is in an strange niche configuration that its unlikely that anyone else have it.
like you have an ubuntu 20.04 with an package intended for fedora from 2014 installed on it.

honestly,i think we need error codes in our system.
with an message like:
"error code 01 package not found"
you have 2 ways to search for the solution, try to google "package not found" and try to google "ubuntu error code 01"
if its in portuguese, you just have to know that the translation for "código de erro 01" is "error code 01". and you can find results even if they are in english.

if you had to translate "package not found" or any other specific term, then the different ways that an phrase can be translated could result in you searching for an error message that dont exist in english.

for example, recently firefox changed the way he calls the term "save file as" from "salvar arquivo como" to "guardar arquivo como" different translations like that may confuse people who cant find the error message in portuguese and manually try to translate it to english.

(btw: this guardar como is inconsistente, i tried now and it says "salvar" again for some reason)

Something that is of course a problem in any OS and/or application completely dependent upon the size of the community. I mean neither Windows nor macOS have any edge here other than a larger community and thus larger chance of some one else having written about the very same error in your language.

Thankfully it's possible in Linux to change the language temporarily in the console to English by "LANG=C command" and the GUI part can by switched by having English installed as a secondary locale and then at least in Gnome you got that language switcher on the right side of the menu bar.

edit: at least we don't have the same problem as Windows used to have back before Windows 7 (I think it was in 7 they fixed it) where you had C:\Program Files if you had an English locale and e.g C:\Program if you used say the Swedish locale.

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Quoting: RomlokGiven that Steam proper is blocked in mainland China [External Link], but AIUI many people there still use it because the local version of Steam has very few games, here's some hypotheses:

1. Steam proper got temporarily un-blocked by the Great Firewall for whatever reason, and all the people with Steam installed were able to connect for a short time.

2. Some very popular game was released/updated on Steam, so a lot of Chinese people risked using a VPN to connect and download it.

3. Some game was released on Steam which was interpreted to be critical of the CCP, so a bunch of fake accounts got created to review-bomb and report the game for "hate speech". (As has happened before)

4. Valve accidentally mixed in the stats from the PRC Steam version with the main Steam stats (again?)

The main issue with this theory is that the survey isn't automatic, you have to agree to send it to Valve once it pops up and I have a hard time seeing anyone performing either of your points as thinking "yeah lets have Valve receive some telemetry".

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: LEANIJAIt should be noted that this is not actually in development at Microsoft. This was a project at a hackathon by AndrewMT at MS in Sept. 2022 that didnt go anywhere.

"I started this hackathon project and it didn’t go much of anywhere, but this article uses wording to make it seem like it’s something under development. Problem is - We just didn’t have the right engineers to do a lot of what we wanted to do in the short hackathon project timeframe. Maybe this odd article can help me pitch this to Microsoft again. Phil Spencer was very nice and tried to drive me to some people that could help, but everyone was tied-up at the time."

more & source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/12kjgkh/comment/jg3lsvm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 [External Link]

Well, so much for that, then.

I was actually thinking to myself that the main reason not to be too worried about this is that I have doubts about Microsoft's ability to actually do it--not so much lack of technical capacity, although yeah, maybe, as lack of institutional ability to really deliver it. And here we are . . . seems they're not really doing it, because they're institutionally not able to pick up the ball and run with it.

Well the problem with MS is that even when doing it half assed they still are large enough to make changes in the industry, I mean look just at how they managed to completely kill off netbooks and things like the OLPC project just by basically showing up. Basically the only resistance they have faced so far is Android/iPhone and the iPod.

If they just slap a working deck-like UI on top of Windows then some HW manufacturer sure will make the Steam Deck sales look like low volume, bloat can always be countered with beefier hardware and unfortunately marketing and big brand name will always surpass features, capabilities and technological supremacy.

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Quoting: Arten

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Cyril

Quoting: EagleDeltaI disagree. As I work in Software Development you have two competing problems as a company:

1. Make promises to get buy-in ahead of time or the project never gets off the ground.
2. You simply don't know what you don't know until you get to that point. The reality being that UE5 was not available when Everspace 2 started development and they were able to port Everspace 1 to Linux before. Imagine the surprise when you finally get to that work, only to find that the promise you had to make to get funding now no longer is viable from a technical standpoint without starting the entire project over on a new engine.... which is infeasible this late.

This issue doesn't happen as much in Tech due to the fear of customer churn on very expensive services. By comparison, once Game Devs (and Engine Devs) get their money, it's on to the next project since that up-front revenue does nothing but fade off over time. And, sadly, this part of the issue falls squarely on gamers' shoulders. As long as gamers continue to pay for things despite what GameDevs and Engine Devs do, there won't be any incentive to stop.

Sorry but you don't understand, the point isn't only a technical one.
You seem to find excuses where there are none...
When you promise a Linux version (or macOS), you do it from the start to avoid the maximum of issues, that was repeatedly said on this website from many people.
You don't start to "port" your game on Linux 1-2 months before the full release.
They never spoke about their difficulties about the Linux version, and yet they announce on the release day that there won't be Linux native, it's just dishonest.
They lied to us dude, it's simple.

Bonus (as I posted in the forum "Crowdfunding page suggestions"): https://www.youtube.com/live/CxYPVee36sY?feature=share&t=3250 [External Link]
Dare to tell me this guy is honest...

But yeah, this time I learned the lesson: never a trust a dev even if they released their previous game on Linux. I'm tired of it and, UE4 issues or not, I don't think I'm the only one.

Most likely is that doing the port once the game was complete worked for the first game, so they though in error that it would be the same with the new game, especially since they switched to Vulkan which works great on Linux. Of course they should have checked how well UE4 handles Vulkan on Linux before but then there are always lots of things that one could do.

In the end I don't really understand the outrage here. Are you guys on the "I will only buy native games" side arguing that they should have released the native version with horrible performance and have every Linux gamer switch to the proton version anyway due to the performance difference?

exit: of course I understand the outrage, I mean it was a kickstart goal that was met so they didn't deliver what was promised, should have worded that part differently.

Atleast for me, it's not not buy game, but not support them on kickstarter. Is good idea buying game years before release from developer who proved he is not trustworthy?

No argument here, I would never buy something with a faint promise on say Kickstarter.

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Quoting: Cyril

Quoting: EagleDeltaI disagree. As I work in Software Development you have two competing problems as a company:

1. Make promises to get buy-in ahead of time or the project never gets off the ground.
2. You simply don't know what you don't know until you get to that point. The reality being that UE5 was not available when Everspace 2 started development and they were able to port Everspace 1 to Linux before. Imagine the surprise when you finally get to that work, only to find that the promise you had to make to get funding now no longer is viable from a technical standpoint without starting the entire project over on a new engine.... which is infeasible this late.

This issue doesn't happen as much in Tech due to the fear of customer churn on very expensive services. By comparison, once Game Devs (and Engine Devs) get their money, it's on to the next project since that up-front revenue does nothing but fade off over time. And, sadly, this part of the issue falls squarely on gamers' shoulders. As long as gamers continue to pay for things despite what GameDevs and Engine Devs do, there won't be any incentive to stop.

Sorry but you don't understand, the point isn't only a technical one.
You seem to find excuses where there are none...
When you promise a Linux version (or macOS), you do it from the start to avoid the maximum of issues, that was repeatedly said on this website from many people.
You don't start to "port" your game on Linux 1-2 months before the full release.
They never spoke about their difficulties about the Linux version, and yet they announce on the release day that there won't be Linux native, it's just dishonest.
They lied to us dude, it's simple.

Bonus (as I posted in the forum "Crowdfunding page suggestions"): https://www.youtube.com/live/CxYPVee36sY?feature=share&t=3250 [External Link]
Dare to tell me this guy is honest...

But yeah, this time I learned the lesson: never a trust a dev even if they released their previous game on Linux. I'm tired of it and, UE4 issues or not, I don't think I'm the only one.

Most likely is that doing the port once the game was complete worked for the first game, so they though in error that it would be the same with the new game, especially since they switched to Vulkan which works great on Linux. Of course they should have checked how well UE4 handles Vulkan on Linux before but then there are always lots of things that one could do.

In the end I don't really understand the outrage here. Are you guys on the "I will only buy native games" side arguing that they should have released the native version with horrible performance and have every Linux gamer switch to the proton version anyway due to the performance difference?

exit: of course I understand the outrage, I mean it was a kickstart goal that was met so they didn't deliver what was promised, should have worded that part differently.

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Quoting: natis1Per the Linus video it's double the performance at 35W and about 50% more performance at 15W TDP.

No word on lower TDPs but in combination with the much higher screen resolution and 120hz VRR it's probably going to chew through battery.

In other words; the mobility depends on the length of your power cord.

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Quoting: Cyril

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: robvvI completely mis-read the title of this article!

Came here to write the same thing :woot:

I don't get it, what did you read?! :happy:

Stop an orgasm spreading. One of those moments when the first and last letter matches and the length is aprox the same so the brain skips reading every letter and assumes the written word :)

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