My view on the dilemma of "native or Proton?" is this:

In the end, it doesn't matter.

What matters is "support".

When a company makes a software based product, the most important thing for that company, is to ensure their product works on the devices that their users are using.

Because if the customers can't use the product - the company can't make money off it.

Native or Proton doesn't matter - what matters is getting gamers on Linux.

Because once gamers are on Linux, then game developers will do anything necessary to ensure their games run well on Linux. Whether it means porting the game to run natively on Linux, or just testing the game via Proton and ensuring it always works well.

It's the chicken and egg.
Game devs don't support Linux because 'no one games on Linux'.
Players don't game on Linux because 'no games on Linux'.

Proton has always been about short circuiting that feedback loop.
Steam Deck has MASSIVE potential to dramatically improve the situation and get what technically counts as a Linux gaming PC in the hands of MILLIONS of PC gamers. This is potentially very huge and very important.

Will you be buying one?

I live in Australia and it won't be launching in my region.
Yes. By any means necessary.

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Proton running on a handheld device like this has a lot of advantages that Proton doesn't have running on the average Linux desktop.

Every Linux desktop varies wildly and that makes trying to make Windows games run reliably on such wildly varying Linux environments is certainly a challenge. There are so many variables. What Linux kernel is the user running? What GPU? What driver? What driver version? What level of vulkan support is available? The exact fix for some machines may be a few command line options, other PCs might run the game out of the box without any help, other PCs might not be able to run the game at all.

But with the Steam Deck, here you have a rare opportunity: The only 'variable' is the game.

If Valve can get a game to run, via any means, on the Steam Deck, they can put out an update to Proton/SteamOS/etc, that ensures that game runs on every Steam Deck. Even if behind the scenes there are per game tweaks and other stuff happening, all that matters from the end users perspective is that they can hit play and the game runs. No fiddling involved.

This presents an enormous opportunity to increase the Linux player base on Steam, and puts a lot more pressure on game devs to ensure their games at least run well via Proton, if not natively on Linux.

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I've been playing BPM: BULLETS PER MINUTE!

And it's awesome! Love the music, one of the better fps games I've ever played. I just wish there was 'more' in the game.

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As always, amazing update, thankyou everyone who worked on it and thankyou Valve for the continued support.

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Quoting: CatKillerSo, I think the idea is to use the same kind of tech as game streaming; the computer renders the scene based on position information from the headset, and sends essentially a 360° video stream to the headset, which can be freely navigated using the headset. If there's enough bandwidth, that could be quite interesting.

Ya know, if they included depth information per pixel, it would be possible to not only correctly correct the 360 image to adjust for head rotation, but also give proper depth displacement to the 360 video to account for head movement with near zero latency as well. Would hide a lot of latency or frame rate issues in most circumstances.

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5 Essential Successful Ingredients Here:

• 'SteamPal Games' store section on Steam


• 'SteamPal Compatible' label on Steam.


• SteamPal itself and SteamPal games need to be available to buy in both physical and digital retail stores.


• Proper support from game developers ensuring a high quality experience for 'SteamPal Compatible' games.


• Proper support for game developers from Valve, including a SDK.

If SteamPal has all of those things, it could be a huge hit.

Of course under the hood, SteamPal compatible would just mean a Linux game that runs well on SteamPal/Linux, and 'SteamPal' games would just be basically Linux games, and games sold 'in physical stores' would just contain a key to activate on Steam, but there has to be that 'console/handheld like' experience, otherwise you won't get 'normal' people buying it, like mums and dads buying it for their kids for Christmas.

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While the name of GIMP is certainly an issue (and not one that should understated either!), I wouldn't say that it is the issue.

Until it recently shutdown here in Australia for decades one of our biggest retail names in consumer electronics was a company called "Dick Smith", and we have a brand of cheese here called "Coon". 'Difficult' names (putting it politely) can be overcome if there's something strong backing them.

As a qualified professional employed graphic designer, my 'professional' opinion on GIMP is that it's main problem is quite simply it's terrible UX design.

I would be quite happy to accept GIMP with it's current limitations and current features, if the developers would just spend a solid 2 years focusing on nothing but improving GIMP's UX. That's all it comes down to at the end of the day. It just needs a better UX, and simply renaming it and giving it a 'Photoshop-y' looking theme isn't going to achieve that.

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Blender devs still embarrassing the competition with their breakneck pace. It's working too, gone are the days where people would ask me at work what I'm using and sound puzzled when I said Blender. These days when there's a new hire, usually the answer from them is "Oh I use Blender, it's actually really awesome, it's open source too, have you heard of Blender?!".

These performance improvements are really adding up for Cycles, and the geometry nodes are growing with each update, they're going to become a killer feature of Blender.

Blender is OP! [External Link]

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Thankyou Valve! :grin:

And thankyou to every developer working on this project!

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This kind of stuff is the reason why Steam is still the undisputed king of PC gaming and the rivals aren't even in the same league.

Valve will remain the king of it's domain as long as it can keep up such fantastic and useful innovations that genuinely make gaming on PC better.

As for Linux support, I think we have no reason to doubt that Valve is indeed working on that and the only reason why it isn't available at launch is probably because it simply wasn't ready in time. No sweat, I have no doubt it will arrive in good time.

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