Patreon Logo Support us on Patreon to keep GamingOnLinux alive. This ensures all of our main content remains free for everyone. Just good, fresh content! Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal Logo PayPal. You can also buy games using our partner links for GOG and Humble Store.
Latest Comments by scaine
Two years on, Stadia seems to have no direction left
25 Nov 2021 at 2:46 pm UTC Likes: 2

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.

KDE developer thinks they will become the 'Windows or Android' of the FOSS world
24 Nov 2021 at 4:29 pm UTC Likes: 2

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!!

Two years on, Stadia seems to have no direction left
23 Nov 2021 at 9:55 pm UTC

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.

KDE developer thinks they will become the 'Windows or Android' of the FOSS world
23 Nov 2021 at 9:49 pm UTC Likes: 2

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).

Two years on, Stadia seems to have no direction left
23 Nov 2021 at 4:23 pm UTC Likes: 2

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.

Two years on, Stadia seems to have no direction left
23 Nov 2021 at 3:07 pm UTC Likes: 4

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.

Two years on, Stadia seems to have no direction left
23 Nov 2021 at 8:58 am UTC Likes: 5

Quoting: t3gI forgot Stafia existed. There was a real circle jerk from the GOL team that it was Linux gaming but it wasn’t. A locked down server only experience and developers didn’t use that Vulkan experience in being games to Linux.
Either you don't know what a circle jerk is, or you perhaps just don't know what a circle is. The core GOL team is just Liam, who has covered both positive and extremely negative articles on Stadia, around just one a week, throughout its life. That's a pretty small circle.

Even if you include the contributing editors, the only one who has really expressed an opinion on Stadia, is me. And I didn't (and still don't generally) like it.

I guess you just don't like news you don't agree with?

The Humble Choose Wisely Bundle has some adventure treats
22 Nov 2021 at 11:09 pm UTC

Quoting: EhvisBundle contains a "we were here" game. Since humble doesn't offer an option to deny a dev income, I'll have to so no to the whole bundle.
They took that out, but didn't they put it back in again?? But hidden somehow? Or is it gone completely? I've missed quite a few Choice bundles because of Denuvo-encumbered games.

Two years on, Stadia seems to have no direction left
22 Nov 2021 at 5:12 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: GuestI actually think what held it back from attracting game publishers is linux and vulkan. It probably would have had a better time attracting big publishers with a Windows based solution since the effort of putting games on the service would have been lower
Effort may have been lower, but I doubt it would scale in terms of cost. Or, frankly, performance, although that's just me extrapolating from how poorly Citrix and Horizon solutions run Windows desktops at scale on shared hardware (they generally don't).

Indeed, Linux (and the Stadia framework built upon it) might be a contributing factor to how Google get such low latency generally.

Pure guesswork of course, but there must be reasons they went Linux despite most games being focussed on Windows.

Steam Client update adds CEG DRM support for Proton, VA-API hardware encoding
22 Nov 2021 at 2:10 pm UTC Likes: 6

Quoting: questioner9Last month or so Liam did an article on the top 100 most popular Steam games working status on Linux and some games did not work because DRM was not supported on Proton.

Does this news about CEG DRM mean all DRMs used for those games are now working with Proton? Or are there more DRMs still?
Quite a few DRM systems work on Proton - Steam's, obviously, and Denuvo. CEG DRM caused a lot of problems and while I don't think these fixes are a blanket "CEG now works", it's a big step towards that.

Anti-cheat, however, remains a sticking point. While EAC and BattleEye now "officially" support Proton, developers still need to jump through a few hoops to add that support to their titles, and so far, none have bitten that particular bullet. The recent delays to the Steamdeck announced by Valve have probably only made that situation worse. I doubt we'll see proper anti-cheat support until the New Year now (although one title, I forget which, does have it activated in beta already).