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Latest Comments by Marlock
Desktop Steam and Steam Deck Client Beta updates with new launch options UI
11 Dec 2022 at 2:09 pm UTC

Quoting: GuestWarning for everyone who relied on -no-browser and -noreactlogin: these launch options are discontinued in the current beta and will be permanently removed somewhere in January:

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/3/3710433479207750727/ [External Link]

Not like it's really worth dealing with that anyway, considering the launch options UI is also browserified now...
never heard of -noreactlogin... what did it do?

loosing -no-browser is terrible! some users actually needed it due to how horribly buggy and heavy the web UI can behave in some circumstances. A quick search for it in Steam for Linux discussions makes it quite obvious. Valve should up their game, being much more careful with their UI development choices, overall steam stability and resilience to issues before removing this!

I hope they'll at the very least keep the mini-launcher mode available for the forseeable future, as this tends to work too instead of -no-browser in most (though not all) cases where such workarounds are required.

And to be perfectly honest, I'd much rather they stop this nonsense and move to a native UI toolkit instead of webifying it. There are a couple UI toolkits that can offer webhlike css styling flexibility and are crossplatform (win, mac, linux) so UI consistency wouldn't be an issue (the main reasons most devs use web UIs in apps and iirc what Valve claimed they needed it for). Using this they could finally stop being ridiculous and use a normal window instead of a heavily customized one, to finally make the Steam app obbey OS-provided window management features correctly (eg: window snapping, tiling, gridding, decorations, etc).

Heck, even if they go with Flutter, which looks out-of-place on every OS, it's still instantly lighter and better integrated the current mess.

And even if they stay with web-besed UIs (which i'm sure is what they'll really do, they must get much better at it and start being more careful with UI consistency, accessibility, translations, interactivity, responsiveness and above all resource efficiency and stability.

Wine 7.22 out now with more 32bit on 64bit work
9 Dec 2022 at 4:36 pm UTC

Quoting: Big_and_donkey
Quoting: EhvisI'm curious about one thing. Would 32-on-64 increase the usable memory for 32 bit software in Wine? If that is the case, then it would be a benefit for 32bit games that suffer from OOM crashes in proton. Borderlands 2 for instance.
I don't think so because I'm not sure how you would navigate things like pointers taking double the space to account for larger memory addresses. Some very low level logic could break if the program is reliant on certain types taking up a specific amount of memory.
it could become an optional (off-by-default) feature, but games being games, you might suffer the first crash during a final boss fight. shivers!

NVIDIA puts out Security Bulletin for various driver issues
6 Dec 2022 at 10:38 am UTC

Quoting: vengador4201
Quoting: wvstolzingand to cut down the noise in your logs, use a port other than 22 on interfaces connected to the outside world. People are quick to point out that this is not a security measure; & that's true, but it's not meant as such. You just don't want to see 10000 failed attempts per day from probes all over the world on your little home computer.

(Same with opening :80 or :443 to the outside world, regardless whether you're exposing anything of importance. There are a billion probes poking at those ports, no matter what the address might be.)
...assuming they're not just looking at all ports with a tool like masscan (think nmap, but much faster at scanning for open ports).
No. You only need to assume most of them aren't doing full port-range probing, only a few. It's for cutting down on log noise, not for making it safer. It doesn't make it actually safer exactly because of those fewer cases where all ports are targeted instead of just the default ones.

Wine 7.22 out now with more 32bit on 64bit work
28 Nov 2022 at 9:42 pm UTC Likes: 1

can the same sort of thunk be used by Steam Linux Runtimes for native linux 32bit games?

also is there a performance penalty for using this instead of directly engaging the x86 CPU's 32bit mode as is done now?

joke but not joke: I can fully visualize Glorious Eggroll Linux Runtimes being distributed via ProtonUp-QT with extra patches for ancient Linux on modern Linux retrocompatibility, then Bottles, Lutris, etc pick it up as well

Microsoft upgraded Xbox Cloud Gaming for Linux and ChromeOS (so Steam Deck too!)
20 Nov 2022 at 1:05 am UTC

Quoting: Klaas
Quoting: MarlockWeb devs are a bunch of schmuks is why...
Are really lazy and/or forced by clueless superiors believing marketing claims to use an increasingly number of bloated libraries.
Libraries that in turn could totally be browser-agnostic too, waaaaaay leaner, etc

The modern web seems to have become a whole ecossystem built on anti-patterns.

...but honestly in Microsoft's case I put this way more under the "oopsie" factor, because it's just what they do in so many of their other browser-based products.

Microsoft upgraded Xbox Cloud Gaming for Linux and ChromeOS (so Steam Deck too!)
19 Nov 2022 at 8:49 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: mAdCraZyaJ
Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: heidi.wengerSo doesn't work on Firefox huh. No, then.
I've yet to see any cloud game service of any kind support Firefox. Don't entirely know why.
It’s most likely that Chromium browsers have the largest market share. There isn’t much of a reason to develop for Firefox first today.
Web devs are a bunch of schmuks is why...

They should develop according to standards that work fine across all browsers. W3C exists so that a standard exists!

Unfortunately most of them tend to ignore the most important standards in their own field of work and on top of that companies like Microsoft like to "oops" some artificial limits on their products... "oh no, I didn't mean to force you to use MY browser for that, it was TOTALLY by accident..."

When you stop to think about it, why would Microsoft Cloud even work on Google Chrome with a fake browser agent if there was any REAL missing feature on Chrome preventing it from running?

And when it comes to Firefox, I have two initial thoughts:
1) a fake browser agent might also work and Microsoft just gave it a bonus time in the freezer
2) whatever doesn't work is probably not working because it prevents Microsoft from doing anti-privacy stuff that Google Chrome is all too happy to allow... which is exactly what started happening here recently with teams.microsoft.com recently on Firefox on Linux: it stopped working unless you degrade the default privacy settings to a more lax policy... I created a separate firefox user launched by a separate shortcut to let it run wild and still come up empty-handed from the snooping, but who even knows how and bothers to do so?

I would test myself, but I gave all my gaming money to Steam instead of Microsoft, because they actually put money on Linux and things just work.

I'm glad people who already spent money on Microsoft games cloud can use them on linux though! It makes it viable for more people to leave windows when they finally decide it's time to go.

Valve finally clears up Steam game release dates, also adjusts pricing
28 Oct 2022 at 11:59 pm UTC Likes: 7

Quoting: SmeallanNormal price for AAA title in Turkey was 5$ ?! That's insane. Even after the rise its less then half of the USD price. Same for Argentina. I guess it sucks for them, but its still massive discount.
Just to illustrate what @acrophobic, @m@goid and @pb tried to express before:

The yearly minimum wage on Brazil today stands at the equivalent of US$5114,28, whereas USA's own minimum wage stands at US$15080,00... that means if a game costs the same amount in dollars here and in the USA.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/minimum-wage-by-country [External Link]

That's 1/3 the purchasing power after convertion to the same currency, and argentina is even worse off!

If purchase power is 3 times lower while prices are similar, people don't just buy 1/3 the amount of everything... they meet their basic needs first and then hope there is something left for superfluous things.

This sort of exchange-rate price equalization can severely damage Steam's capilarity in less economically favoured countries.

Sure, some rich folk in europe may try to buy games in argentinean pesos using VPNs, but there are ways to minimize this without murdering most the argentinean gaming scene

NVIDIA 520.56.06 driver adds easier NVIDIA NGX updates for Wine / Proton
26 Oct 2022 at 12:50 pm UTC

Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoIt seems my Ubuntu want to download a downgrade...
Versión 515.76+really.515.65.01
Looks like Ubuntu devs packaged 515.65 again and called it 515.76 because they needed to convince the update system to reverse the driver version.

That's not a fluke, that's a deliberate reverse that will be applied for everyone.

Probably related to this, but you should check the package changelog to get a proper explanation:
"Fixed a regression in 515.76 that caused blank screens and hangs when starting an X server on RTX 30 series GPUs in some configurations"

NVIDIA 520.56.06 driver adds easier NVIDIA NGX updates for Wine / Proton
24 Oct 2022 at 1:31 am UTC

That's due to Silverblue's read-only system core + writeable system layer, right? (not sure the proper name for this)

AFAIK this could be used with a non-rolling distro, but I'm not sure how well that would work. Do you have any insight?

Also there are ways to roll-back and pin a package to a specific version until a bug is fixed, then unpin to resume normal updates, in both rolling and non-rolling distros. I gather that Silverblue has a potential advantage here because it's not just replacing a new component for an old one, but actually reverting to the exact way it was before the problematic update hit... in most cases the results would be similar, but there are probably exceptions where this is prefered... and I imagine the classic pinning operation is also available to Silverblue if prefered.

Valve put up a few more fixes in the new Steam Deck Beta
23 Oct 2022 at 5:57 pm UTC Likes: 1

It's interesting to see how the efforts from both GNOME and KDE to support mobile devices end up being relevant on the Steam Deck.

There are certainly differences between them (afaik KDE having started to invest in this earlier, but GNOME having received a strong inflow of contributions from Purism (related to the Librem 5) and PINE64 (mostly but not exclusively related to the PinePhone) which seem to have brought it to a more mature state now...

...yet I wouldn't attribute the Steam Deck's virtual keyboard shortcommings to KDE itself, for a very simple reason. The notoriously effective workaround for those issues on the Steam Deck is installing "CoreKeyboard" from the Discover store:
https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.cubocore.CoreKeyboard [External Link]

To me, while not an expert on DE and Virtual Keyboard development, this shows that the DE isn't to blame (especially because CoreKeyboard's description clearly declares being built using QT), just Valve's implementation (whose UI is html-based afaik)... and I would even go back to older steam deck discussion threads on steam complaining that on early dyas the Steam Deck had 2 different virtual keyboards in the past... the one on Gaming Mode had the exact same shortcomings seen here now... and the one in Desktop Mode (the same used by Steam on normal linux PC/laptop distros) didn't, but had other issues and was ultimately replaced (on the Deck)