[quote=ShabbyX]

Quoting: slaapliedjeAlso, while some higher end games have problems with proton, I seriously doubt those would be the kind of games people play on this!

I think that's the main point to be made against the possibility of such a scenario: the people who are obsessed with framerates and spend thousands of bucks on overpriced GPUs and watercoolers and are more likely to be powerusers able and willing to install Windows, aka the "Gamers", are usually fond of online competitive games and thus don't belong in the Steam Deck's target group. The rest of us, aka the normal "gamers", IMHO will mostly not even bother to entertain the thought, or at most will try to do it as an experiment for the heck of it.

As @denyasis more or less said above, if the Steam Deck turns out to be good as a product on its own, it has nothing to worry about.

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Quoting: Comandante Ñoñardo

bring more compatibility for Windows games ready for the Steam Deck to release in February.

That wont be achieved if, first, they don't fix the WMF and MP4 problem ASAP... The actual remote transcoding system that Valve use is just... inefficient.

I'm mostly of the same opinion, but the problem with WMF is one of proprietary codecs, and thus is practically unsolvable by just reimplementing WMF in FOSS code like what has been done with the rest of Wine. And since Microsoft won't ever release WMA/WMV/WMP to the world for free, the only effective solution is a) transcoding and b) that game devs do not use proprietary codecs for their videos in the first place.

The only issue with transcoding I can see is that, so far at least, it's been implemented on a need-to-use basis. In other words, a piece of media must first be requested by a Steam client somewhere in the world attempting to play it in its original form, and then Valve will flag it, transcode it, and add it to the bucket of available videos. This means that for new game releases, the first few (?) thousands of players who get to play them on launch day will suffer a less than stellar experience until the transcoded videos are ready. Not to mention the various hidden endings etc, which means that even further down the line there would be the possibility of players "enjoying" a sub-par experience.

But Valve being what they are (that is, both technically adept and NOT stupid) I firmly believe that this situation will have been resolved by the Steam Deck's launch date, by means of Valve preemptively transcoding all the media of every single game on the Steam list (or being very far in the process of doing so, with 100% of the most popular games already done and a lot of less popular games as well) and proceeding to also do that for all new releases from now on, so when players get to play a game on launch day, the transcoded media will have already been delivered along with the rest of the game, and everybody will be happy.

Regarding the need to download more data though (i.e. another form of inefficiency), this is unfortunately something that can't be changed.

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For people switching between Windows and a Steam Deck (Linux) - you want your saves to match. So let this be a reminder to other developers, keep your saves named the same.

Am I really the only one who thinks that no developer worthy of the title "developer" should ever make such a mistake? I mean, no offense to SUPERHOT's devs or the game itself as a whole, but... why did they ever do that in the first place? Even if it were not an issue for cloud syncing, IMHO just doing something like this reeks of sloppy development habits.

And again, I mean no offense, after all it's not like this kind of oversight spells the end of the world as we know it, and their game as a game is great; I'm just being pedantic(ish) for the sake of conversation.

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I've tried pretty much every single "game hub" application for Linux out there and I can positively say that Lutris has always been hands-down the best of them. The only thing it needs imho is a full-scale UX retouch, because honestly its usability sucks - it's full of unintuitive processes and hidden or undocumented options and tweaks (which, if you discover them, make the app even better). If they fix the UI, Lutris will be close to perfect.

P.S. - Even the icon is goddamn ugly :P

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Quoting: furaxhornyxSo, this is an hardware emulator, for people still owning the cartridges, but no longer the console, right ?
What is the difference with simply using emulators and ROM then ?

Well, the obvious difference is that you don't need to download a hard to find (for the layman) and possibly illegal ROM, but can rather use your own collection of physical cartridges instead. The emulator part stays the same, in that either this hardware will be running libretro internally or it will be possible to plug it in via e.g. USB to another device (a PC, a smartphone, etc) and use that to run libretro and boot the game, just like you would do with a ROM.

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Quoting: MnolegMy main issue with KDE is the slowness to boot when compared to any other DE, it is unusable on systems where the home partition is not stored in a local SSD. However, boot times on the Deck will probably be acceptable.

Agreed on principle, KDE is indeed slow to boot from an HDD; but a desktop in 2022 where the main disk is not an SSD is a corner case and IMHO not a system worth developing for as a target, so I'd never condemn KDE for focusing on other more important stuff instead of improving boot times for HDDs.

Also, have you ever tried booting and using the latest Windows 10 from an HDD? Compared to that, KDE is a breeze.

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Quoting: Alm888I fail to see any renovations.

Well, maybe there are some (I honestly can not remember how things were before, mainly because I hardly ever used this store page), but one feature I want is absent.

The ability to filter-out all games lacking Linux support.

I do not want to see any release news of games not relevant to my OS. Not in the release "ribbon" at the bottom of main page, not in my e-mail spa^W "newsletters" and promo-offerings, not in the store library. As far as I know, it is so by default on Steam (do not know for sure due to lack of Steam account), yet GOG keeps feeding me with Windows-exclusive titles forcing myself to manually probe every new release for OS compatibility (a bit of information that is omitted in the release articles and only present on actual game pages). Very tedious.

Sorry GOG, no banana today.

You can't expect them to provide this kind of user-oriented service when they can't even be bothered to provide an official Linux client. I hate to say it but when it comes to DRM and user freedom, GOG seem to be stuck in an anachronistic "Windows freeware" mentality and refuse to accept that this isn't 2010 anymore. They're so boneheaded that they don't even have the mettle to take advantage of their competitors' efforts (i.e. Proton) for their own benefit. And that's why they still remain a Valve wannabe (and are in serious danger of becoming a might-have-been) after all these years.

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Quoting: TrainDocDoes this beta include the root actions in Dolphin? Guessing not since I couldn't find it in the changelog.

AFAIK this has to do not with Plasma or even Dolphin, but with the KDE Frameworks; but anyway, it was merged for 5.90 but was deemed a bit too buggy so it was removed and tentatively postponed for 5.91.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: CatKillerI hope this won't be an issue for the Steam Deck; that they'll have rolled out their re-encoding solution by the time the Deck ships.

I haven't followed too closely; does anyone know the (technical? legal?) issues with the solution used in ProtonGE?

GE just takes the library from Windows to decode those files. That's at least copyright infringement if you don't have a licence for that software on the machine you're running it on. Likely patent infringement, too (since that can be a thing for software despite it making no sense), given that Valve haven't taken the reimplementation approach.

I think it's not so much about copyright infringement as it is about the right to distribute the library on its own, i.e. not as part of a Windows installation. Lots of Windows libraries have this issue, and the solution has always been to find a freely distributable executable somewhere on the internet that already contains the required dll's in a distributable form (which could be anything, from an old Firefox installer to a Microsoft SQL Server trial to an old game's patch file) and use that to obtain the dll's in a legally gray way. That's the reason Winetricks downloads all kinds of weird stuff into its cache folder when doing its thing.

This is a strategy that has worked very well for pretty much everything so far, with the sole exception of Media Foundation: there is simply no freely distributable executable out there that contains the needed dll's (or rather, there exists one for the Windows 7 dll's, but Wine and especially Proton have long since switched to Windows 10 by default for various reasons, one of them being DX12, so that Windows 7 executable is pretty much useless).

Now, Valve has its hands tied because it's a large corporate entity and it would be the target of a lawsuit the moment it tried to illegally distribute any Windows library - but Proton GE doesn't have this issue (or rather, it's a small enough fish that it doesn't care about it) and... that's about it in a nutshell.

P.S. - There's been an ongoing attempt to re-implement WMF in Wine for more than a year now, and large parts of this work have already been merged into Wine Staging, so Valve has definitely considered the re-implementation approach; and it wouldn't surprise me if this re-encoding solution is only meant to be a temporary stopgap until they've finished re-implementing WMF.

But unfortunately, what would be even less of a surprise to me at this point is if it turned out that they've ended up opting for the re-encoding solution due to some kind of headbutting with Wine upstream, just like what has already happened with DXVK and more recently with futex_waitv. Wine upstream is proving to be more than annoying in that regard, to say the least.

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Quoting: [Linuxtayshady]That's the infinite acceleration I'm talking about, any actual AoE2 player who tries to play this game will be at a severe handicap, and simply put you will not be able to play this game competitively (like it's meant to be played) from just this one minor bug that's confirmed through out both positive and negative reviews on ProtonDB.

I'd expect that this kind of bug is distro-agnostic, and thus a very different case from what you initially said about games not installing or running reliably across distros (which is not really a thing unless maybe a specific distro has gone out of its way to do some very specific stupid crap behind the scenes - but then, the only real solution is to give that distro the finger and switch to a better one).

Quoting: [Linuxtayshady]Yet this game carries a 'Gold' rating on it, despite it needing tweaks to play multiplayer, despite Alt-Tab making the game change to a Windowed mode, despite a very crucial input bug.

ProtonDB is an unofficial curating/ranking system based on user reviews - the keyword here being "user", which can mean anything from "experienced dude who'd make an excellent professional QA tester" to "clueless LTT fanboy who can't tell their Windows from their windows" to anything in-between. Steam is going to be using their own curation/ranking system for the Steam Deck which will presumably utilize proper QA procedures, and thus games like AoE2 will never make it into the equivalent of "Gold" until they're properly fixed.

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