Initial version of a HID-based joystick backend.

So this means what? Is my Thrustmaster Pendular Rudder Pedals finally recognized in Wine games? If so, when will it show up in Proton? Any info on that?
If not... well, hopefully I'll be able to seriously use helicopters in Arma3 with rotolib (or be able to have all my controls available in take on helicopters) before i die.... currently one of the few things remaining not working on linux for me...

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... they confirmed that there will be some new API that developers will be able to hook into that will tell games if they're being run on the Steam Deck ...

So Windows only developers will be able make sure it runs on the SteamDeck with Proton properly but they ignore the Linux desktop or won't recognize problems with it..... Well, this statement is at least a big concern from my side that it might work well for the SteamDeck but may actually be a drawback for Linux desktop gaming.

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Quoting: alex_stargazer

Quoting: MayeulC

Will you be buying one?

I think, yes. I'm in the market for a new laptop since the one I currently have dates back to 2008 (excluding pro. laptop).

Hook up an external keyboard, and this should be enough for doing some sysadmin on the go. Dock it up, and you have a home computer.

I wish they made the form-factor more modular (upgradeable motherboard? Storage?). I might wait for a teardown to see if the nvme drive is user-replaceable. (edit: they explicitly say in a FAQ video that HW will not be upgradeable). I wonder if it will be natively compatible with Steam Controllers and xbox controllers, or require bluetooth (the latter I guess).

Now, I'm a bit disappointed that it's a standard PC. That's fine, mind you, but I would have liked something a bit more battery-optimized, like an ARM+x86 coprocessor (for instance, only half of the cores are 32bit-capable on latest ARM chips), or a big.little x86 like Intel is working on, (while running the kernel on both might be hard, a x86 coprocessor could assist with "emulating" games for x86). Of course, that would require quite a bit of effort and engineering, and maybe revisit FatELF, possibly with some LLVM target to create "battery-optimized" games (that target a more efficient arch)?

Yeah, good luck getting that Frankenstein PC to even boot, much less play Windows games. A more viable approach would be to run a pure ARM system and translate x86 machine code into ARM machine code. Apple does this with Rosetta, and Linux has qemu. If the software improves—it’s quite slow right now, but Valve is a multibillion dollar a year company, so they have the resources to work on it—we could see the Steam Deck 2.0 run on an ARM processor.

Well of course one can put a lot effort in getting the thing to run even 100 hours on a single battery load, but considering the trade off in performance, the games you'd be able to play won't create a relevant demand for the hardware. Or, yes, create a hyper specialized (binary incompatible) hardware which can do phantastic things in some situations... in theory! The probability that it will be 100% compatible (or enough to be relevant to gamers) with a huge amount of games that were written for a different platform is quite low. Optimizing the software has it's limits also.
So going in that direction is more like trying to make sure that thing will fail right from the start.

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Quoting: ShmerlI have Sapphire Pulse RX 6800 XT - it's really quiet in general

What means in general? No GPU, no matter how much power it needs, gets noisy when displaying the desktop, simple applications or Videos. How loud does it get when it's under full load and how annoying is the sound? Like there's graphically demanding games out there that don't have constant action, are rather quiet and then it matters.

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Because of this article i took a look at Radeons after a longer while again... I thought AMD GPUs are cheaper than nvidia, now I look at the 6900XT and it's sold at 1800€ :shock:
and its average consumption is about 300W ... that's a lot (a GPU for cold winter days, OK nvidias top-rtx3 aren't using less); this sounds like it will make a lot of noise... when this power demands increase go on like that at some point i'll have to get an additional powerline just to run the GPU of one computer...

One weird thing: the online shop I buy my stuff at lists Linux as supported system for the 6800XT but not for the 6900XT...

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Quoting: slaapliedjeSDL2 would be more about whether or not your gamepad worked, vs being able to adjust things, I mean that's kind of up to the program to allow any of that.

But for sure, Steam Input is awesome, and I wish more developers would use it.

Well, I had my issues with the steam controller configuration stuff. If you just need your gamepad or something like that working, it's definitely very good. But for more complicated stuff it just doesn't work. For flight stuff in games, where you need multiple devices working (HOTAS: 2 separate devices: joystick + throttle and rudder pedals and maybe additional control panels) it simply doesn't work. At least it didn't when I was testing it with Arma3 and helicopters which only accepted the Steam controller configuration. It's some time ago I tried last though.
Such a configuration only works for me with games that don't rely on Steam controller config, like: X-Plane, War Thunder, Aerofly FS2.

So if things haven't changed to a much more generic solution by now, it will only work for "simple" games. Sure, it's enough for everything you'd want to play on the Steam Deck, but for Desktop this can be a problem, depending on what kind of games you're into.

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Quoting: CatKillerto the Deck's 1280×800 @ 30 fps

Actually the display does 60Hz according to their current specs on its homepage. But still less computation effort due to the reduced resolution which should help for a smooth playing experience. I.e. I played Control Ultimate Edition on my desktop and it had some problems getting 60fps @ 4K in some situations. Now seeing it run smoothly in one of the promo videos on the Steam Deck I'm quite optimistic it will perform very good with many modern AAA-titles (unless they're badly/not optimized in general).

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThat's actually a pretty solid article. It's like the person writing it had some idea what they were talking about. What a weird feeling. Is this normal in German IT news?

I guess we've got our share of bad writers, but the reason they survived to become the biggest (shrinking the least) is quality.

Well c't actually started as more of a magazine for professionals (that has mostly moved to iX now; same publisher). But because of that background it's not surprising that they have a more open mind towards other platforms and are much more neutral.

But those, that started and still care about games only, aren't always so Linux friendly. They mainly care about platforms with high market share and consider others as irrelevant / uncapable.

If Steam Deck has a good start that could change. It all depends on the state at its actual availability, as it's the same here as elsewhere: it's hard to get rid of a bad first impression.

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Quoting: CatKillerIt's already 215 DPI. Higher resolution doesn't make any sense unless you make the screen bigger.

I wouldn't mind having a low-end print quality (300dpi) display. Or one or two inches more. But on the other hand, that takes more power (display itself and especially GPU for the additional pixels), so maybe it's OK in the end to have longer battery life for mobile usage.

Quoting: CatKillerIt seems you haven't tried KDE for a long time. KDE 4 had some severe growing pains, yes, but Plasma 5 is solid. And is one of the lighter desktop environments. It's also the best choice for this kind of device (unless they were rolling their own)

Your right, after having many troubles with KDE4 (especially at work) I gave up dealing with it, switched to XFCE and everything ran fine with it. Many of our Linux developers switched from KDE to XFCE actually, and also the Gnome users after there were also problems with Gnome3. As this runs still fine, there wasn't any need to try anything else again. I don't know which one's the be choice for such devices but I'm sure (rather hope) they took a closer look regarding resource usage as those 16GB can quickly fill up with modern AAA-titles (as I understand it CPU & GPU share their memory?). And regarding "... one of the lighter desktop environments...": if it's not the lightest, why use it? Because the normal user doesn't need a full desktop environment. They will only see steam and won't care about the rest. So even a simple window manager (is fvwm2 still alive? :tongue:) would suffice for the inteded purpose.

Quoting: g000h

Quoting: peta77P.S. I really hope this thing will become very popular. That would at least motivate developers to take care of how their stuff runs inside proton. And I think it will, because one good thing about steam is: you get a huge variety of games from a big amount of developers and they're lots cheaper than those exclusives in other (console) stores.

Actually, as much as every little step forwards is positive (i.e. a better Proton experience) I'd hope that this device encourages developers to actually release their Linux binaries for their games. Quite often, it is just a case of Ticking the Box in Unity (or Unreal Engine) and you have your Linux binaries ready to go.

Most medium-sized games development companies will have access to the Steam Deck in-house for QA testing, and probably find the native compiled version runs better than the Proton version (More FPS on Steam Deck = More desirable gaming experience).

Small steps are good, but big steps are better.

If things were just that simple. It's like with Qt, you're supposed to write code once and then it works on all supported platforms.... But it doesn't. At least not in all cases and then you have to adapt code or even have platform-specific stuff again.

I have been reporting a few bugs to developers that used Unity and the like which then turned out to be a Linux specific issue because some things are interpreted differently on every system and you can't completely abstract that. Especially when people start to integrate their own or third party code.

And you have to do testing on all platforms anyway, no matter if you use proton or native code, to hopefully find those platform specific issues. And for that it's easiest for many, especially the smaller studios, to start with a backend which is almost equivalent to windows. It will be enough additional work for a start to find out installation including all 3rd-party plugins, additional ms-packages, etc. works correctly. Jumpstarting into multi-platform development needs lots of changes in the process which need time. And the people need time to get to know all the peculiarities of a different system before they can generate software with the same features and quality. But talking from experience it's rewarding as you will easily find and fix bugs on one platform which are hard to reproduce on the other one. So at least from a QA perspective it's totally worth it.

I'd also would be very happy if there were big steps in Linux gaming ahead of us in the near future. But I'll stay realistic and think it will be a bit slower with lots of improvements in Proton compatibility as a first step. The rest depends on how popular the device will be long term.

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It all sounds interesting but the pricing is a bit high, considering the display isn't even 2K... And for the storage: the only game I'd need nmve for is X-Plane with additional UHD-meshes, etc. But that's a game far from being something for a mobile, not only because of lacking CPU/GPU ressources. So they should have better used the ressources (projected price) to pick a better display (2K) and a bigger normal SSD. Oh, and rather a normal SD-Card-Slot instead of micro-SD. A replaceable battery would also be fantastic.

But the ability to installing anything else on it makes it very charming. Like replacing KDE. That has become just a giant memory hog from v4 on. And a bit unstable (at least in a 24/7 scenario).
Hopefully there will soon be additional repos (like packman for suse or epel for rhel/centos) available to get all the other goodies which make for a nice linux experience. I think then it will become a very cool mobile Linux experience, and a very compact one too compared to a notebook.

So, I reserved one. Will still be thinking about buying it (projected order time is Q1/2022 atm, so there's a little bit time left), but at least I'll have the chance doing that early.

P.S. I really hope this thing will become very popular. That would at least motivate developers to take care of how their stuff runs inside proton. And I think it will, because one good thing about steam is: you get a huge variety of games from a big amount of developers and they're lots cheaper than those exclusives in other (console) stores.

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