Quoting: trumanmothI have successfully transferred save data (at least for Octopath Traveler) by exporting from Google Takeout, downloading to my Steam Deck and renaming the save files to match the local file names. Achievements are lost, but at least 60hrs of progress isn’t.

You can edit steam achievements with this tool:

SAM - Steam Achievement Manager
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/05/steam-achivement-manager-samrewritten-has-a-new-release

Technically cheating, but also technically not since you did earn them somewhere :happy:

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It's not that simple... Nvidia was king of the hill until recently because their paid developers do good work on their proprietary linux drivers, and AMD just couldn't afford so much in-house work on theirs (remember AMD as a whole has hanged by a thread after 2 consecutive cpus and some gpus performed worse or eat more power than their Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU competition).

Then AMD had a hardware comeback with Ryzen and their newer gpu gens, which gave them a little more room to breath in the financial aspect... and meanwhile they opensourced their linux gpu drivers (which took years of hard effort and a new driver, with severe growing pains to get it up to speed)...

...and then 3rd-parties (mainly Valve) got interested in AMD GPUs (because they're now quite capable for their price and power consumption) and their drivers (because they are opensource)...

...and then everything changed!

AMD still has not as much money to put into linux driver development as Nvidia, but any other interested party can put their hands on the driver and help (not just pay AMD some commissioned work, actually look at the code from a fresh perspective and help!)

If you said 5 years ago that from a practical perspective a proprietary driver can be just as good as an opensource driver or better, you'd be mostly right. Now not so much... openess paid off, and AMD has successfully leveraged the rest of the world to make their driver get better faster than their own money could achieve, gaining the upper hand in multiple (un)expected ways and winning the preference of several customers due to those.

Nvidia's move towards an official linux opensource gpu driver (beyond their ARM boards and beyond the quixotesque 3rd-party noveau mesa driver efforts) is IMHO a belated admission that they took the wrong turn over these years and that they know they are at risk of falling behind.

They could just throw even more money at the problem and maybe keep up... but opensourcing just brings more bang for buck than that and keeping their old strategy unchanged would cost them a lot.

Also from a user perspective, there practical negative consequences to dealing with a proprietary driver. Eg: you can't just grab a new kernel and expect their driver to work. The linux kernel APIs for user apps are rock solid stable, but the internal ABI calls between kernel pieces can change pretty quickly. If a driver is part of the mainlined kernel codebase, anyone proposing changes to these internal calls needs to take care of the other parts of the codebase that use it. If the driver is outside that codebase, the driver devs need to do the work themselves... and an old driver needs to be carefully replaced (before rebooting to the new kernel or else it might just crash at boot trying to use the old ABI over a new kernel).

There are also integration issues with linux features but AFAIK that's more due to Nvidia being stubborn and/or not being convincing enough about why doing things their way would be better (hint: their new drivers are meeting linux halfway after being stuck like a mule for ages and earning "the finger")

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cyberpunk 2077 doubled FPS on an Intel GPU... from 2 to 4 FPS maybe? :grin:

I expect this is due to Cyberpunk 2077 being an exceptionally draw-heavy game so it's affected more than others. Games are very diverse in this regard, each relying more or less or not at all on certain GPU features.

The original post by Mike Blumenkrantz in his blog "Super Good Code" is very accessible and hilarious (as usual), so totally worth reading!

He explains that the performance gain is due to fixing a performance regression he inadvertedly introduced during previous work on the intel driver. It was undetected until he started using a vulkan performance profiling tool to analyse the drivers and find optimization opportunities...

His fingers are probably fine now, but i fear for his ego... he was feeling like a king after finding the recent RADV optimization :grin:

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Are those plugins functional on a RaspberryPI or just x86 PCs/laptops?

Last I heard of the Netflix plugin people using ARM devices like the RPi had to grab some widevine .so file from a Google Chrome OS image because only then the RPi would have the required DRM decoding lib (and of course google didn't bother making it available for the Pi officially)

In any case, at least the Steam Deck is a x86 hardware so that's not going to be an issue for the new sheriff ;)

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Quoting: fagnerln

Quoting: mr-victory

Quoting: fagnerlnThis would be awesome if Linux had native apps of streaming services like Netflix and Amazon

What is wrong with browsers or web apps? Are they inferior compared to a native application?

If you use YouTube on a smart tv using the browser and the app you'll notice how much better is to use with the remote controller

Very true!

While there are ways to design web pages to accept keyboard /remote / gamepad input, there are very very very few web developers who do it competently and it's not made easy by the ecossystem like in native apps.

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Quoting: GuestCan one even get decent singleplayer games these days?

Probably not from EA, and it will depend a lot on your personal preferences, but yeah sure, there is a lot of good stuff going around these days in all shapes and sizes!

Not every game developer is a megastudio with greedy shareholders to answer to, and not even all studios went on the microtransaction hype train.

IMHO What riles people up is seeing potentially great games being ruined by poor design choices.

And to be honest I do like some online multiplayer games that do have microtransactions in them, like Fall Guys, on my PS5. It's a casual game and it respects the "pay to look good but not pay to win" rule of thumb and is a casual game where loosing is fun.

I'd love if the megastudios could get better at making those available for linux without doing anything atrocious to the OS security and my privacy, so I don't have to go the console route for those games anymore.

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Finally a multi-purpose DE is paying enough attention and figuring out ways to implement a big screen interface.

The hard part is not the visual design itself, but the interaction. Big screen interface implies a simplified input (eg: a game controller or even a remote - which might boil down to as little as directional arrows+OK+back+menu+volume-up/down buttons).

We have had great designs from LibreELEC/CoreELEC (both through KODI) and OSMC for ages.

We have awful designs from raspbian, near-nill thought about this from normal PC distros and traditional DEs.

And probably the gamechanger is, once more, the advent of Valve's Steam Deck.

Steam's BPM exists for years, but it doesn't fill the role of a DE much like Kodi can't without LibreELEC's distro-specific OS-management plugin. And the Deck's Gaming Mode is to young and incomplete yet (plus it lives in a closed-source app)... and Desktop Mode is KDE, so they are in there already and users could benefit a lot if things on that mode could be more usable on the go.

Anyway, better late than never, and this is the otherend of the"convergence" spectrum along with mobile screens, so in a way linux is once again ahead of the curve getting things in place on a single OS for all those form factors.

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Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: fagnerln

Quoting: WorMzy

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What a nice piece of software! I would love a libadwaita version of it 🤣

(I was thinking, I never saw a progress bar on it)

And for on the go, a mobile app would be nice too!

A new "Hello World" is born!

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Godot devs have recently published an explainer about why publishing to consoles was not viable for the opensource project:
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-know [External Link]

I have a feeling that console support is where W4Games will focus to make steady money, due to the above.

But there is also paid-for support lines and commissioned development of new features for the core opensource project, which works just fine as a business model and as a source of code contribuitions to the main project for QGIS (a geographic informations software)

eg: see North Road's services list (https://north-road.com/ [External Link]) and their feature contribuitions to QGIS changelogs (https://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog326/#feature-select-features-from-expression-based-symbols [External Link])

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Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: dziadulewiczI have been lately seeing this same statement in many places, forums, etc. "I hardly ever use the terminal" or even "I refuse to use the terminal".

It is kinda telling who has gotten to Linux and from where, how far Linux has come in user friendliness, and what is the preference to use a computer (say, after a long days work). Click click and click :happy:

Now that you mention it, I've been noticing that too, and it's nice to see that the options have gotten this good.

For me, it's "It doesn't come up often anymore." [...], though I still use it when it's the right tool for the job [...]

For me it's more like "it doesn't come up often anymore, and then only for things I wouldn't even be able to do without a terminal on windows, like making a script to automate scraping in very very specific websites.

There are already even things I can do via GUI on Linux and can't do without terminal or regedit or other horribly unfriendly methods or plain old voodoo spells and blood sacrifices on windows (eg: not hard-rebooting while applying an update while saving my work, ensuring reasonable privacy, running my collection of 16bit windows games)

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