Quoting: GuestI am, however, uncertain if it hasn't mind controlled you and that now I should wear special sunglasses and start chewing gum.

What happens when you run out of bubble gum?

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Quoting: AussieEeveeIs it necessary to be a Linux elitist?

Yes, the warning was tiny. Two lines, to be exact... In among a dozen lines of white noise. A novice user is not going to read all that white noise.

Linus being an influencer doesn't make his problem invalid either. This was a legitimate problem, and I'm glad to see they fixed it.

I don't consider myself to be a Linux elitist. However, I do have a problem with characterizing the apt-get installation that Linus encountered this way. When you are using a text based tool, then you have to expect the output to be text. There is not going to be some fancier way of telling you what's going on when you type something in. The warning was repeated. What was going to happen was specifically laid out. Linus had to override a safety protocol to do what he did.

The only part about what happened that gives any excuse to what Linus did is that he had apparently never run apt-get successfully before, so he had little information about what was normal behavior. The odds of this happening to someone the first time they run apt-get are incredibly low, so he got very unlucky.

Of course there were a number of things that he did badly to get to where he ended up.

His first mistake was that when he tried to install Steam from the GUI and it didn't work, he had a choice of coming to the conclusion that either the package was broken or that the system was broken. He decided it must be the system, which is the less logical conclusion.

So once he decided the system was broken, he tried installing the package using the more technical of the command line interfaces. What would apt have done if he had tried to use it? I'm not entirely certain, but he chose apt-get instead, which will tell you very specifically what's going on and then will do exactly what you tell it.

You say there were a dozen lines of "white noise." I entirely disagree. There was no "white noise" whatsoever. apt-get told exactly what was happening. There were lists involved, and you don't have to read every item on a list to get the idea, but that's not the same thing as "white noise."

I can remember when I first started using apt-get in 1999. If I went to install a package, then I didn't expect there to be a list of packages that would be uninstalled. If there was even one package listed to be uninstalled, I wanted to know what it was before I would proceed with the installation. If I saw a list of 88 packages to be uninstalled (it told him how many), there is no way I would just proceed with an installation.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to have to read text when you are using a text-based program. Does that make me elitist?

Now, to someone who was even slightly experienced using apt-get, it would have been painfully obvious that what Linus had to type in to proceed was overriding a safety protocol. Since he had apparently never installed even one package that way, he had some excuse for not realizing this (though to be honest, I can't imagine a time I wouldn't have realized that having to type in a whole sentence with an exclamation point at the end was overriding a safety protocol).

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Marlockwe are around 1% of steam users yet we are making 5,8% of purchases for this game

That either shows that Linuxers are even more interested in this type of games,

or

that there is a world outside steam. You can also buy ΔV on GOG.....

Well, it's not hard to believe that a higher percentage of GOG users than Steam users are on Linux compared to Windows (though neither would I count on this being the case). However, it is hard to believe that more than 5.8% of GOG users are on Linux (which is what would be implied by attributing the difference to GOG sales). My suspicion is that a higher percentage of Linux users pay attention to indie game developers when they support Linux.

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Quoting: elmapulagain, that was an retraction from their first message.

The way I remember their first message was that one hundred percent Steam compatibility* was their eventual goal for the Steam Deck rather than a "promise" of the state of things when the Steam Deck first shipped. Of course they should have known how people tend to hear what they want to hear.

*(Of course this would be with the obvious caveat of the form factor not being appropriate for certain games such as VR titles.)

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Quoting: GuestI have Descent3 from when it was originally ported back in the lokigames [External Link] days. My favorites from their efforts were the Rune games.

I have that too, along with a few other Loki titles.

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Quoting: GuestThat's what has me concerned: Valve aren't going to track all the games and update things themselves. They'll try outsource that to "the community" and basically do a bare minimum themselves (basic business I guess). And realistically, if a game breaks then people are not going to blame Valve.
Then if Valve try any kind of pressure or strong-arming publishers, I don't think that would work either. Epic would be more than willing to give extra incentives to any publisher that happens to. Valve will have to keep publishers on their side in this case.

You do realize that you are making a number of assumptions here. For all we know, the "Verified" tag won't go on anything without publisher approval. Valve sent publishers development kits for a reason. It's quite possible that "Verified" will be a status that is maintained by the publisher, while "Playable" will be maintained by Valve and the community or some other arrangement regarding who has responsibility for each tag will exist that we haven't thought of.

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Quoting: BielFPsYou don't have to opt-in in order to buy the device, so "motivation" doesn't really matter in this case.

Well, that's why I said, "at least in theory."

Quoting: BielFPsMake it clear means easily display this information to general public

True enough, and that is the trick. Valve have to be able to make it clear what currently works well on the Steam Deck without it seeming to mean anything more than that about the game. An Opt-in program may or may not be the best way to accomplish that. I suspect that how well this goes will depend to a large degree on just how quickly they can make the vast majority of games work on the Steam Deck. This is something they've been working on behind the scenes for a while. I expect we'll have to wait and see how it goes.

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Quoting: CatKillerThey're related but separate things. Obviously if a game can't be made to run on Linux, it won't run on the Deck and so won't get the tick, but there are going to be plenty of games that do run on Linux but are bad without KB/M, or are unreadable on a tiny screen, or whatever, and also won't get the tick. But Valve (and hopefully developers) are going to want games to have the runs on Linux part of the "Playable" popup sorted: on Valve's side because games working on Linux is their strategic goal, and on the developer's side in case a customer docks their Deck.

Yes, exactly. I didn't mean to imply that the Steam Deck compatibility status would apply completely to desktop Linux, or even set top box Steam OS devices.

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Quoting: EikeRockPaperShotgun has it. Of course you can check from PC, everything else would be plain stupid. You want to know what runs before buying the Deck, not only afterwards.

Yes, as long as it's clear that being able to check it from a Windows computer does not mean that it will show up by default on a Windows computer. That was Mal's point when he said that he can configure Steam to show him Windows games or not.

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Quoting: BielFPsMostly the same situation:

-Opt-in: The majority of users will never activate it, "defeating" the purpose of putting it in the first place.

-Opt-out: Everyone will see the mark of shame, resulting in possible bad PR

This is not really a proper evaluation of the "Opt-in" situation. If the majority of users don't activate it, it (at least in theory) will be because the majority of users don't care whether it works on the Steam Deck or not. As long as Valve makes it clear enough (by opt-in or another method) that the evaluation is in regards to the Steam Deck and the Steam Deck alone*, it shouldn't be a problem, and calling it a 'mark of shame' would be a fairly substantial exaggeration.

*(I know it would apply to anything that ran Steam OS and generally to Linux, but that wouldn't matter to the general public at first.)

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