Well, assuming you have something vulkan capable, and you can jump through some hoops, enabling crostini, virgl and venus (+zink) is more than enough to play games on steam or otherwise. On aarch64 pair it with box86/64 and you are also good to go. Not everything will work but such is Linux running in a container which is running in a vm which is running in a stripped down hacked gentoo distro with whatever drivers hacked to make it work properly.

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Congratulations Liam on not only surviving as an independent site (i.e. non youtube, instagram, tiktok, etc) but also to be able to do something you like as a full time job and, even better, with the least amount of bias that I've seen in a very long time. You do credit to journalism.

Have a pint ;)

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At the time, the size of the market and the physical item production were completely different from today's "download a file that can be replicated an infinite amount of times basically for free".

Well... it's not that easy, while at the time the cost was mostly upfront, i.e. you developed, marketed, published and distributed X copies of a game, everything was smaller. The dev teams were smaller, the market was smaller, etc, that meant that you couldn't, probably, get discounts on cartridges by quantity and so on. And you had to talk to a lot of distributors for different markets, handle a lot of currencies and so on. The upshot for us was that games didn't need 0-day patches and so on, what you got was what you got and that was it (even if it was bad and you would play it because it was expensive as hell).

Skip forward to today, you have (excluding small indie titles) large teams of everyone and a pair of boots because there's a focus on making that new fancy hardware push pretty pictures to your large 4k screens in HDR and what not. Games ship whenever it fits corporate schedules and not when they are ready (god forbid they have actually passed through QA). As for the download file part, the infrastructure to hold the files (and patches) and specially the bandwidth and CDNs for you to get said files at a pace faster than a snail is not cheap and you will have to maintain it for as long as you want to support the game (or, to put it plain terms, for as long as you require it to recoup the investment). For games that keep on getting updates, you will have to keep on paying those people (devs, support people, qa, marketing, managers, etc). On the past once a game was released that was it, you moved the team to next game.

We have been spoiled with large quantities of games at cheap prices. I have now more games than what is practical for me to actually play them, and I guess most people will be like that.

Anyway just my 2 cents.

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Given the lack of investment from google lately on chromeos and the newish desktop mode of android, my guess is that they will fold chromeos into android and call it a day.

As for steam, the main issue is that other than these new qualcomm chips (and apple's), the rest won't play anything reasonably recent well. FEX and box32/64 can be used to handle stuff, but if you see dev blogs, the good stuff is usually tested (and supported) with desktop cards.
Then there's the issue that the arm instructions to speed up translation and compatibility with x86 are optional, page sizes (x86 is 4k, arm is up to 64k) differ and translation is a pain.
Stores (steam, gog, etc), cloud help with making arm64 viable by offering native builds (thus marking the as such), devs could then just make arm builds available (target would still be a pain). As an example you can play stardew in arm for years just by replacing the c# binaries, for java games the same is also possible (more work but possible).
Right now we can also use box or fex to translate but why leave performance on the table when you are running on an already limited platform if you can avoid it.

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The issue with GOG with respect to Linux and publisher support is mostly down to:

• No galaxy support for Linux, i.e. no cloud saves, no online features. This means two versions or extra code to handle it, which in turn requires validation and what not. Steam at least is consistent in their support of platforms and available features.


• The upload/packaging process for Windows/MacOS and Linux games is/was different and was specially cumbersome


• Linux as a platform is not unified (see https://docs.gog.com/linux-guidelines/ [External Link] for gog's guidelines), the safest bet is to pack everything as a static library (which again is a pain). Steam bypasses some of these with their Steam Runtime


• GOG in general is a small store (10% of PC sales of cyberpunk was from GOG)


• Linux for gaming is still a niche

As for the delisting of games. Happens all the time, I have the original Fallout's on my account (slug id 1) which were delisted, I can download the games any time. Eventually the games got back on GOG and the original ones were renamed to Classic.

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The number of times "playable again" shows up on Proton release changelogs is a bit worrisome..

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Quoting: maddovr

Quoting: alka.setzerI think, and may be wrong, that this only applies to the open source AMD stack, the closed source driver may not be subject to this limitation.

It does, unfortunately. Both mesa (gpu open drivers including amd's) and AMDGPU-PRO (amd's proprietary drivers) rely on the open source AMDGPU (part of the linux kernel), and this implementation was part of the kernel driver (and can't be anywhere but the kernel). So the HDMI forum rejecting this basically closed off hdmi 2.1 on amd for at least the existing gpus. It may yet be possible for next gpus to support hdmi 2.1 on linux by relying on a firmware level driver (like nvidia does) or on an internal chip that converts displayport signal to hdmi signal (like intel does).

Thank you for the insight. VRR on HDMI is an optional feature in any case. Though freesync/adaptivesync over hdmi is still possible with older versions of the spec. I have an Asus ProArt screen that according to the spec sheet is hdmi 1.4 but does support freesync/adaptivesync (and its working). It's only a 1920x1200, 75Hz display but it works. For people that want higher resolutions, refresh rates and bit rates without compression I guess it would not cut it. In any case for me one advantage of hdmi over display port is that audio always works.

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Quoting: finaldestSo I have a fantastic 55 inch gaming capable TV which I paid over £2k for so I could have all the HDMI 2.1 features and £1k for a HDMI 2.1 capable GFX card but the HDMI forum wont allow me to use said hardware because they refuse to allow AMD to release drivers.

If I had the money I would be looking at taking legal action. I am now 3k out of pocket thanks to the HDMI forum.

I use my TV for UHD4k Bluray and Gaming Consoles and all these require HDMI. This is why I chose HDMI for PC also. But now I am forced to buy a new display that used Display Port if I want to use all the HDMI 2.1 features I have already paid for.

I really wish HDMI would just Die. Sick of jumping through hoops.

I think, and may be wrong, that this only applies to the open source AMD stack, the closed source driver may not be subject to this limitation.

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Quoting: PyreticIt's sad to say but, in terms of gaming, Linux's main selling points are its low price and its better performance. We need to focus on both of these if we aim to increase its market share and get developers to start targeting our platform. Thankfully, we are already starting to see that and I can only hope that it's a sign of better things to come.

The Linux (or any other free/gratis OS) pricing advantage is for end users on replacing an OS or installing on a bare bones. For device makers (like OrangePI, Lenovo, Clevo, etc) Linux offers only some relative pricing advantage, as the cost of development and support will have to be paid (instead of for example riding on AMD drivers for the platform), and I think we all have passed through some unbootable distro build or hardware that stopped working for reasons. Large brands like Lenovo, Asus or Valve have support figured out, a small niche company from China and a, flaky, Linux distro not so much.

But if the price is right and the device lasts one year on the wild and is still being supported after that, I'll consider adding it to my list of handhelds :p

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Proton, gave us emulated Windows games (mostly under Steam), took from us Native games (under our distro/platform of choice).

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