I've love to use and advocate for GOG, but they don't offer a Linux client.

I'd love to use and advocate for Itch, but their client still can't even tell me what games I own, so I've largely given up on it.

Origin and uPlay can both get in the sea as attempts by publishers to control their own catalogues. Fair enough, but since it comes at the expense of their customers... not interested.

Epic can get in the sea for two reasons - exclusives and a lack of a Linux client. Nope.

So, yeah, that leaves Valve and the Steam client.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: dubigrasuNot anytime soon, no.
But I think that unless there's a major shift in the way of how society and technology are advancing, eventually everything will move to the cloud, in some centralized form whether we like it or not.

Or maybe it will be something entirely new, who knows, we always like to predict the future based on on what we know about the present, and when the future comes, it comes in unexpected forms.

In any case, I don't think gaming as it stands today with local collections and expensive/bulky personal devices will survive for long. We are the last dinosaurs and we don't realize it yet.

Can't say I entirely disagree. I thought much the same about music streaming when it first landed, but I'm bought into that. But it succeeded for reasons that don't apply to cloud gaming.

And in any case, my main point is really just that trying to convince people that cloud gaming is saving the planet is completely deluded. It might succeed for other reasons, but everyone ditching their gaming rigs to play cloud-based games on chromebooks? This ain't it, chief.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: GuestA (gaming) cloud provider serving 1000 users wastes way less resources than 1000 gaming rigs.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this, for the reasons I've already outlined. Perhaps, as I've already suggested, if some dystopian law outlawed local devices and forced us all to use low-energy laptops/chromebooks for accessing our efficiently-built cloud-gaming services... then sure, yeah, maybe there's a saving to be had (assuming we brush the insane impact on the internet the table).

But real life doesn't work like that. And anyone who dystopian for cloud gaming "because it's better for our environment" is just being disingenuous. Or naive.

Please, read the last part of my post.
Chip shortage is a bonus; if this will continue there would be no need for a dystopian law :)
Maybe, finally, we'll start working and thinking again on efficiency over wastefulness.

I read the last part - it's naive and unrealistic to think that we (gamers) are all going to ditch rigs we've spent thousands of pounds on to game, instead, on a Chromebook.

Not to mention all the other drawbacks of cloud gaming (requirement for large bandwidth, always-on internet connection, lock-in to platform, game availability, lack of mods, and the fact that the service, itself, is a form of DRM).

Just, no. That won't happen. So there's no environment positive that comes out of this service.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestA (gaming) cloud provider serving 1000 users wastes way less resources than 1000 gaming rigs.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this, for the reasons I've already outlined. Perhaps, as I've already suggested, if some dystopian law outlawed local devices and forced us all to use low-energy laptops/chromebooks for accessing our efficiently-built cloud-gaming services... then sure, yeah, maybe there's a saving to be had (assuming we brush the insane impact on the internet the table).

But real life doesn't work like that. And anyone who advocates for cloud gaming "because it's better for our environment" is just being disingenuous. Or naive.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Nah, most of what Arehandoro outlined is the norm. I guess the difference here is that some of those always-on servers won't be spinning up the big GPUs unless they're being used, but the servers definitely need to be always-on in order to deliver scalable performance to their customers.

I guess if we all gave up local PCs completely and just bought cheap-to-run Chromebooks, then possibly the ecological argument could be made for cloud gaming. But I didn't - I used my big PC with its big monitor to play Destiny 2 in the cloud for a few weeks on trial. So that is AT LEAST double the ecological impact, rather than delivering an ecological saving through scale.

To be honest though, this is like arguing about how much fuel an F1 race burns when Jumbo Jets are still flying 300 long haul flights daily - the F1 burns 20K litres of fuel over a weekend, while a single 747 long flight burns 200K litres. A single 747 long haul flight... source: [Williams [External Link]]

There are just better fights to be had and complaining about the ecological impact of cloud gaming while shite like NFTs and Bitcoin mining farms are still a thing? It's just a distraction. Yes, better not to have them at all, fine. But no, not important in the grand scheme of the many, many far greater ecological disasters we face today.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: scaineYep, completely agree. KDE has been extremely reliable for me in this sense. And the menu widget for toggling compositing on/off is superb, as it's not just a visual of the status, but it removes the need to remember a shortcut.

I wasn't aware. Thanks for pointing out!

Do you have reasons to turn compositing on from time to time?

I have a few games I play in a window - Noita, Roguebook, Dreamgate, or StS. When those games play, compositing turns off automatically, and the game is super-smooth, which is what you want. But if I then switch away from the game to Firefox, I notice that smooth scrolling is a bit jumpy. If I'm going to browse for any length of time, it's nice to turn the desktop compositor on. Doing so, however, makes some games a bit jumpy/laggy, so it's just nice to have the option.

Or, I guess, play your games full screen and you'll never have this issue! I just like seeing my clock when I'm playing those games, because they tend to be a bit of a time-sync!!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: elmapulfor example, in my country, if i count air tv and cable tv, we had 100 animes broacasted in total across 3~5 decades, there are 10.000 animes on my anime list alone (not to mention its an incomplete list, it dont have the indie non official touhou animes for instance), crunchroll dont have everything, but at least it has 700 animes any given month.

This is a really good point, tbh, and re-enforces why monopolies are bad - if they control what content you watch, you're severely restricted as a focused client of that service. But while dealing with multiple streaming services feels bad, they're still actually really cheap compared to what we used to pay for scheduled television, and they allow a huge degree of control over what you watch.

My primary gripe is really just finding content sometimes. And a minor gripe about how different services look different. And handle end-of-show credits. And how quickly they stream the next episode before I can find the remote control to turn off auto-stream. So frustrating.

Okay, so a few gripes. Still better than a monopoly though.

In Germany there was Sky for soccer/football. Bundesliga and Champions League... all you needed in one small package if you wanted to watch every game.

Then they had to split up the rights, because it was claimed that competition is good for the customer. Then the rights went to Sky for the Saturday games, but the Friday games were on Eurosport. And some games were exclusive to DAZN/Amazon or whatever. Total clusterfuck and more expensive than before.

Yeah, my point was aimed at scheduled content, but in my head I'd excluded sports for some reason. Sports feels really, REALLY overpriced to me. I pay £21/month for all the tv and movies in the world, but I have to pay nearly £30 a month for the F1??

I suppose it's not targeted. I get all the football, all the golf, all that other stuff I'll never watch. I pay that nearly £30/month for pretty much 2 hours of telly a fortnight, which is a shockingly frustrating model. I guess if they did it any other way, we wouldn't have 22 millionaires kicking a ball around a field.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: aufkrawall

Quoting: FredrikWell it might be a hardware thing, with a Nvidia card kde is way slower when gaming, also on my work computer with an i3 and integrated graphics kde is way slower then gnome for gaming.

No, sorry. There is no performance hit by Plasma with compositing suspended. It is simply ~impossible. It doesn't turn off (reliably and) automatically in some cases, in which you need to do it manually via shift + alt + f12. Sucks (will be better on Wayland), but at least compositing can be forced off and on that way. There haven been cases where fullscreen unredirect was unreliable with Gnome Mutter, be it not turning off in games or not staying on with browser in fullscreen.

Quoting: Fredrikand overall kde with nvidia on wayland is way to buggy, gnome is fine, but I find games to be buggier on wayland so I usually run x11. At work I now use wayland with sway since the computer only have 4gb ram, it works pretty good.

Plasma works fine with Nvidia, I don't find any compositor/DE to work better (only worse, e.g. Mutter when moving multiple windows).
Without Akonadi/Kmail, plasma also consumes only <500MB of RAM. Works fine on my 4GB device.

Yep, completely agree. KDE has been extremely reliable for me in this sense. And the menu widget for toggling compositing on/off is superb, as it's not just a visual of the status, but it removes the need to remember a shortcut. Really handy. KDE has been the most responsive for gaming of all the desktops I've tried (admittedly only Unity, XFCE, Cinnamon, Gnome Shell and KDE - didn't really put Budgie, or any of the tiling options through their paces).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: elmapulfor example, in my country, if i count air tv and cable tv, we had 100 animes broacasted in total across 3~5 decades, there are 10.000 animes on my anime list alone (not to mention its an incomplete list, it dont have the indie non official touhou animes for instance), crunchroll dont have everything, but at least it has 700 animes any given month.

This is a really good point, tbh, and re-enforces why monopolies are bad - if they control what content you watch, you're severely restricted as a focused client of that service. But while dealing with multiple streaming services feels bad, they're still actually really cheap compared to what we used to pay for scheduled television, and they allow a huge degree of control over what you watch.

My primary gripe is really just finding content sometimes. And a minor gripe about how different services look different. And handle end-of-show credits. And how quickly they stream the next episode before I can find the remote control to turn off auto-stream. So frustrating.

Okay, so a few gripes. Still better than a monopoly though.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Whitewolfe80Don't know what you are all on about onlive is where it's at..... Oh wait it died just like all the gaming streaming sites will or it fragment just like streaming TV Netflix used to have everything now there are exclusives and you need multiple subscriptions to see everything

Yeah. On one hand, monopolies are definitely bad. On the other hand, I went from a £6.99 Netflix sub to:

Netflix family: £9.99
NowTV + Sports package: around £25 in total, per month
Disney: £7.99
Prime: £7.99

And of course, my cabled TV connection, which includes my 300mb internet and a landline I never use: £70

Like, yeah, monopolies are really, really bad (just look at Microsoft), but how much would Netflix have had to put up their prices, per month, before people complained? Because even taking out NowTV, if they'd DOUBLED their prices, it would still be cheaper for the consumer than dealing with Netflix+Disney+Prime.

That said, before streaming services existed, I paid Virgin for their "Everything" package and it was just over £100 a month, which included Sky Sport and Sky Movies, and was therefore much cheaper than all this multiple-streaming-service juggling!

And don't even get me started on my £16.99/month spotify family plan.

View this comment - View article - View full comments