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/) and their feature contribuitions to QGIS changelogs (https://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog326/#feature-select-features-from-expression-based-symbols)

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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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If Valve themselves build and sell a Steam Console (with desktop-class hardware inside a custom-designed casing and cooling solution, like Sony did with the PS5), paired with a reedition of the Steam Controller, this would be a killer successor to the failed Steam Machine experiment. IMHO everything that went wrong then is now proven mature enough to go right.

It could run the exact same OS as the Steam Deck and even dualboot a traditional desktop linux or windows (give it a 3.5" easy-access sata3 slot for a secondary drive and it's a happiness bomb for cheaper storage expansion and/or dualbooting)

Shipping SteamOS on it means effortless support for the exact same (unbeatable) range of 3rd-party controllers, VR equipment, external storages, exotic peripherals, etc

Because those are PC games, using it as a PC tower paired with kbd+mouse+monitor is a non-issue unlike traditional consoles

Using desktop-class components on it means those are easily replaceable and upgradeable for off-the-shelf standard PC parts and the extra casing space means it can be designed for easy repairability (no glue, no frail plastic clamps, less fragile flat ribbons, all components readily accessible instead of layered on top of each other), even if more compact than a standard PC case.

The OS also confers an openness to modding, 3rd-party game stores and apps, usage beyond playing games, etc that is completely unparalleled in traditional gaming consoles. This had no face outside PC gaming until the Deck appeared and effectively eliminated the division between those two gaming categories.

There will be instant access to a HUGE catalog, costless access to games already purchased on Steam, etc. And this will be even better than what's seen at launch on the Steam Deck, because the Deck-certified effort and the improvements made by game devs to conform to it all will also benefit this new device.

The larger and non-portable form-factor allows for higher-powered CPU, GPU, RAM, etc, paired with bigger active cooling fan(s) (better flow at lower noise).

They can probably even offer it in a cheaper price range than building a custom PC or buying a prebuilt one like ROG, Alienware and other gaming-branded stuff of similar performance, making this a tempting purchase for general purpose PC uses too.

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"more open"
SteamOS 3 working on more devices is a given from its inception, so IMHO this is more to do with how they'll ship it...

On the Steam Deck 1, they made the system partition read-only and set it up for A/B updates. While it's perfectly possible to enable writing to the system partition, all changes done to it are lost after major updates overwrite the system image with a nee one.

My hope is that they start shipping it like a common linux distro, with a single writeable system partition by default, and start relying more on using a Recovery Image from an USB Stick when necessary.

"localized distro websites"
I found a few important localized versions:
https://cn.ubuntu.com/ [External Link]
https://jp.ubuntu.com/ [External Link]
http://manjaro.org.cn/ [External Link]

...but there are indeed several missing localizations and there is much to be said about having no visible language selector on the website at all times even when those are available

I'm disappointed with Linux Mint's page being now exclusively in English now, since the old website at least had French and some other language too. It will probably go back to having them soon, because the page redesign is very recent, but it would be better if those never got taken down until then.
ps: there is a localized brazilian version (https://www.linuxmint.com.br/), but made by a community member, not by the official devs... a bit weird really, but I checked and at least it directs you to the official download page and not to malware.

"what will be different in Steam Deck 2"

this just NEEDS to be addressed: a wifi chip with proper linux support out-of-the-box, even if it costs more than the current unstable pile of junk... Valve has burned through significant user goodwill due to widespread wifi driver issues on the Deck 1... having the same issues on the new edition would be a proper scandal

a new selection of silent coolers... noise also burned through a lot if user goodwill, and they should have sourced enough parts with decent specs... planning for multi-sourcing is probably more effective than finding a new source when the design is finished

newer processor... each new generation makes a small difference in CPU power, but a nice big leap in iGPU power, which for gaming is more important and is a clear bottleneck for the Deck running stuff at better than 30 FPS

faster RAM is unlikely given it already shipped with LPDDR5, but would be a big performance win if possible to use those HBM 3D-stacked RAM chips without a prohibitively cost

having OLED as an option would be awesome too, and maybe it would help power consumption a bit when idle with black screen, etc

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I'd love if all those opensource alternative launchers/updaters/managers would team up and make storefront interfaces modular so all of them can interface with all stores and all future improvements to interfacing with a store on one would be available in all of them at once...

...a bit like Kodi plugins for downloading subtitles, for online video websites, etc

...and a bit like RetroArch and Lutris and Gnome Games all can use libretro emulation engines

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it's still a bit early to say for dure, but I feel this is a strong sign that Valve managed to open Pandora's Linux Gaming Box unto the world, and that it can't be unopened \o/

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Added an option to scale the Steam Deck user interface for external displays

does that mean people will finally be able to actually choose to output 720p to a 4k TV instead of the Deck choking trying to use FSR to upscale 540p/720p to 4k?

along the wifi issues, this is probably THE most requested change on the Steam Deck discussions, almost since day 1

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