i really don't understand the appeal for these devices

A highly specific anecdote - but a friend of mine recently had a baby and didn't want to completely abandon pc gaming for months. So for moments where the baby is sleeping on their chest or lap, they grab their Steam Deck, only to put it down again when the baby wakes up. They mostly use it for low- to mid-end indie games (and not too small UI, and OK controls) - but that still includes half their library probably.

And yes, Gameboy or NDS have even better portability (pocket size + battery life, I would guess). But Steam Deck is good enough for moving around the house or on public transport or such (backpack size). At least when compared to a laptop and especially to a desktop or home gaming console.

So yes, it absolutely is not for everyone, but Nintendo Switch has a very similar market niche imo (with some differences on the software side - a more curated & locked ecosystem, exclusive games) and that has been very popular, I gather.

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Not into horror and very likely to regret it - but quite intrigued by the VR version 😀

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Due to the degrading functionality of SteamVR, I've been running open source solutions for the past month. Monado has been running great for OpenXR games with higher framerates and smoother operation than SteamVR ever has. It's using the proprietary drivers from SteamVR for the lighthouses because libsurvive accuracy is just not there yet. Hopefully this move will help.

Running OpenVR games using OpenComposite (to translate OpenVR into OpenXR) is a bit of a hit or miss. Some games work great, but a lot have issues or fail to run entirely.

Looking forward to hearing your updates in the future 😊. And I'm waiting until the switch is more clearly worth it (especially for mental-resources poor people like myself).

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A dream scenario would be to get T90Official from AoE2 into 0AD at some point 🤩. But as I understand Microsoft has been spending quite a lot sponsoring many (if not most) tournaments. So the pro scene can't really flourish to a similar degree. One niche situation where a corporation actually is helping a field. Then again if we had less inequality in society, maybe it would be more viable to crowdfund most tournaments.

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I have the Valve Index, and most games I've tried worked. I have some minor issues with a few, but all my software outside of Steam is horribly outdated and unsupported even - so at this time, I don't blame anyone else 😁.

For my household the novelty was amazing, but a year later - we basically only boot it up for Beat Saber (depending on mood - once a day or once a month). I wish someone made a good AI-level-generator for it though. We tried 1 or 2 roughly a year ago and they were bad.

Also we're using an old Beat Saber release, since at the time the guides suggested it.

Running all of this open-source would be very cool. But I don't have the spare mental resources right now to tinker away with it. So much higher priority tinkering to do 😄.

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Well, they say lots of impressive stuff. But the line between "We did great innovations but kept the good stuff" and "We screwed up the good stuff and kept the bad" is surprisingly fuzzy and difficult to find in this kind of game. We'll see how it actually works out . . . hoping for the best.

Yes, and which stuff is good varies from brain to brain.

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(I tend to have this issue with Linux distributions as well without having the skills to suggest an alternative sadly -- maybe try Inter)

On many distros go to System Settings > Appearance > Fonts to change it. You can also google "how to change the font in my_distro_name". You can simply try out different fonts and see what looks good to you.

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WT is not PayToWin. There is nothing you can buy that will make winning easier for you.

So-so. Bushes [External Link] give a noticeable advantage, as does crew skill [External Link]. It is common that premium vehicles are usually superior to their tech-tree counterparts (especially the first few months after being released).

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I am glad they seem to have fixed the white glare issue [External Link] on Vulkan (and thus Linux) that I was also getting.

On the topic of rug pulling - I feel that like most things in life, this, too, is nuanced - a spectrum of rug pulling, if you'd like 😄.
You can trust a game to not randomly drop Linux support (least to most; overly simplified):

• War Thunder


• Games without anti-cheat


• Games that are not Windows-focused (Linux-only??)


• Games that don't rely on first-party servers


• DRM-free games


• Games that provide you with old versions and/or allow sharing them


• Open-source games

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Okay this is so unlike anything I would normally play and I rarely even try new games, but I am rather curious about getting a bit different cultural angle on gaming. Also I've been very curious about games that don't focus on violence (or spacial movement - racers, platformers). It seems charming.

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