Quoting: PatolaI went through the same attempts you made, had an AMD rig and bought the Valve Index, and I strongly disagree with you, my experience on Ubuntu 20.04 was almost completely seamless out of the box, only thing I had to change is the order of DP connections on my GPU otherwise the PC would not boot. Thing is, you are not using the mainstream distro (Ubuntu), although you are using a derivative of one, so you are not telling the testimony of "how poor Valve Index works out of the box on Linux" but instead "how poor Valve Index works out of the box on Linux Mint". I, for one, don't think Valve should be spending money on testing all linux distros (and this it not even self-interest because I'm moving to Arch from Ubuntu). Also, you are using a backlevel Linux Mint (latest is 20), and since latest drivers and software is currently crucial to the linux gaming experience, you would have a poorer experience anyway (and this specially important to the GPU you have, Mint 19.3's default drivers can even make your GPU have a hardware fault and burn for good -- hope you at least use a newer kernel, 5.7+).

Yeah, I should have noted that in the article - because I'm using such new AMD kit, I switched to the mainline kernel [External Link], 5.7. Yesterday, I switched to 5.8. As for Mint, when I wrote this article, Mint 20 was just out and Mint takes a few weeks after release to support in-place upgrades. I was only notified of that being available a few days ago.

Quoting: PatolaWhen I ran SteamVR for the first time, it worked out of the box. Also, it seems earlier versions of SteamVR had a bug where they would not switch the default sink to the VR but in the latest SteamVR beta, it works every time (and I have an indicator app to ease switching sinks anyway, due to the many audio devices I have).

Good to know. The Mint sound chooser is pretty bog standard, so I wonder what's happening here.

Quoting: PatolaAnd last but not least, change to the "SteamVR beta" branch, not linux_temp. SteamVR beta works great, although it had a bug in Fallout 4 VR where it would not show the in-game virtual keyboard (don't know if this bug is still there).

I did, as I noted in the article. So much of this experience is "beta" though, which is kind of my point about VR on Linux generally. Things only "work out the box" if you know what you're doing - changing GPU order, going into the beta tabs, etc.

Quoting: PatolaAh! And from your games: Overload works perfectly here in VR with Proton-5.0-9. Most "VR-supported" games work this way, they only have a VR build for Windows.

I'm not sure why VR-supported games aren't detecting my SteamVR. Again, maybe this is Mint specific. I'll look into, but I have so many Made-For-VR games, that it's not really a problem (yet).

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Quoting: mborse20 hours of fiddling is soul destroying? People have it easy these days.
In my days we had to flip bits by switches manually. On a more serious note, you do have it easy these days, you have the internet, and for sure someone somewhere ran into the same problem before you do.
A luxury we didn't had. On the other side, we didn't had VR or Alyx either, so there's that.
Thanks for the article and for sticking with it, and don't despair. If after 20 days you're still stuck, then there's a problem.

My profile picture was taken about 3 years ago, but I'm nearly 50 now and for precisely the reasons you describe, I have very little patience for fiddling about with stuff. Especially stuff I've paid nearly a thousand pounds for!

I do vividly remember getting my first 14k modem and dialling into Compuserve to see if I could glean an answer to a particularly nasty Netware IPX issue I was experiencing on the company network. The internet changed everything, eh?

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Quoting: elmapulwhats sci-fi about it?

The trailer's music! :grin:

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This looks superb. Reminds me a little of Rochard. Very impressive. God I love Godot.

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Despite the low-res, old-school graphics, this game is such a gem. Better played with friends admittedly, and I recommend turning off the Minotaur, which is like a timed event to push you through the dungeon quickly. Without the Minotaur-timer mechanic, you can really explore each level of the dungeon and enjoy the rooms, their traps, and of course, their treasures! Great fun.

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Quoting: CatKillerI've been playing Dishonored. I got most of the way through it on the PS3 back in the day but got distracted by something else and never went back to it.

That one and the sequel had good reports on protondb so I picked up both of them on Steam, although I've only tried the first one so far. It works perfectly in Proton, although the Xbox button prompts when I'm using a PS3 controller are quite irritating.

Still my number #1 game of all time. Although I played mouse/keyboard, so I didn't have the controller issue you're seeing. Also, if you like the campaign, I HIGHLY (HUGELY, DEFINITELY) recommend the Witches DLC. The play mechanic is even better in the DLC (time freezes when you blink). It's amazingly good fun, and it's a long campaign. Highly recommended.

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Humble Choice is surprisingly AAA this month. Lots of Windows only titles, sadly, but here's a breakdown from ProtonDB. I'll be subscribing this month, so I think I'll help with some of these reports when I get a chance.

Native:
The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters

Platinum:
Vampyr
Genesis Alpha One
Little Big Workshop
Through the Darkest of Times

Gold:
Hello Neighbour (but mostly platinum reports, probably just needs more to push it up)
Automachef (but again, mostly platinum, just needs more reports to push it up)
We Were Here Together (wouldn't touch these devs with a bargepole after they dropped native support for their earlier titles

Silver:
Wargroove (game is platinum, but needs a launch command --skip-intro, or it crashes on start. Also, this has a useless Linux build, so you have to force Proton, or it crashes on start with or without --skip-intro! Such a shame. I'd have bough this at full price months ago if it supported Linux.)
Call of Cthulu (good reports but only if you install media foundations [External Link])
American Fugitive (as above, needs mf-install, then seems to be getting good reports)

Bronze:
A Case of Distrust (3 borked reports, one guy says it works fine...)

As for what I'm playing - well I've been sick the past few days, so not a lot! A little Killing Floor 2 via Proton, but I'm utterly hooked on Core Defence. It's a fantastic old-skool Tower Defence, but with a modern take, and lovely, if simple, graphics. Very, very addictive. Managed my first perfect run, on the fourth attempt. I love the progression in this game - it keeps me coming back for one more try!

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Reminded me to buy this actually. Just done so on Itch - thanks! I love my TDs, so I'm really looking forward to this, having read your earlier review!

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Quoting: Plintslîcho

Quoting: scaineThe exact moment that this game saves when I shut it down (ala Tales of Maj'Eyal), I'll buy it and invest many hours into it. It has huge promise, but if I have hours to invest in gaming on any given day, it's going into "better" games (by which I mean the games I find truly compelling/engrossing - FPS, VR, Co-Op). So when I play games like Stoneshard (and ToME), I need to be able to dip in and out.

Wait, does this mean you can't save at any given time in the game? That would be a huge no-go for me.

I really like the art style of the game. But from what I've seen on YouTube so far, I find the movement quite awkward.

As Liam notes in the article, the biggest gripe about Stoneshard (other than its difficulty) is the lack of a save-anywhere mechanism. You can only save in towns or other obvious checkpoints. The other gripe I hear a lot is that there's no auto-movement, so making your way from the village/town and into dungeons and then back again is apparently pretty boring.

I played the prologue, which is apparently not really amazingly reflective of the "real" experience, but I haven't played the full game itself. If they add save-on-exit, I'll buy this for sure. As it stands, I'd just never play it, so it would be a waste of money.

I'm also heavily invested in Tales of Maj'Eyal, so... it's already got a mountain to climb there. ToME [External Link] is an eight year old masterpiece. I have over 300 hours in that game, and I've only really played one character!

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The exact moment that this game saves when I shut it down (ala Tales of Maj'Eyal), I'll buy it and invest many hours into it. It has huge promise, but if I have hours to invest in gaming on any given day, it's going into "better" games (by which I mean the games I find truly compelling/engrossing - FPS, VR, Co-Op). So when I play games like Stoneshard (and ToME), I need to be able to dip in and out.

It's a weird omission for a turn-based RPG.

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