Is GamerOS great for someone that has a large GOG/itch.io library?

Itch.io has an opensource store/intaller/launcher/updater app so if you get it installed and added as 3rd-party app to Steam on GamerOS it's probably all gonna work fine afterwards

For GOG there are a couple 3rd-party apps for the same purpose, despite their sad insistency ignoring linux users (eg: MiniGalaxy)

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installed minecraft from flathub (though apparently I need to uninstall and reinstall it after every update)

this is probably solvable by running:
 
flatpak update

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I was under the impression that games implementing nvidia's own RTX raytracing will not work in this way, but only games that support the platform independent standard.

The platform-independant standard is in Vulkan. It was designed by Khronos.org with Nvidia's and AMD's active participation to be as easily compatible as possible with Nvidia's own proprietary RTX raytracing and with DX12 raytracing too.

Once Vulkan specification included a stable form of this for everyone, both Nvidia and AMD got hard at work to finish including it in their drivers and polishing it up for performance, etc.

And now that this is done and software devs can use it, the Wine + DXVK + Proton dev crowd is going crazy wiring it up. Pretty soon we'll know for sure if the effort in Khronos.org was successful making translations from Nvidia RTX and DXR to Vulkan trivial, and what performance we get from this on Linux.

PS: why devs insist in using DX12 instead of Vulkan is beyond me... even for windows-exclusive games. AFAIK the only platform where DX12 is available and Vulkan isn't is the XBOX One, so maybe it's time for a Vulkan >> DX12 translation lib to get this done with... it's one field where Microsoft isn't moving even one inch closer to "loving linux", but hey... hell can't freeze over in a single day, right?

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opensource software that is developed primarily to work with Gnome or KDE doesn't qualify as "exclusives"... because it is opensource to begin with

there is a ton of really cool cooperation efforts going around *between* DEs, distros, etc

they don't always agree and sometimes this leads to parallel efforts, but this isn't a blodshed cutthroat market competition like with competing closed-source software or the way Steve Balmer made MS treat Linux

sure, foss software devs are human, and can have real emotional fallouts depending on the disagreement they have with each other, but it's usually very much a debate and not a war

and source code can be repurposed, etc... Linux Mint's X-Apps is actually a nice example of cross-distro and cross-DE effort, because thoae apps are good for Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE, ... and they are made with the explicit premise to not run only on Mint, but as many DEs as could fit the app's lean requirements

the fallout between LM and Ubuntu's Snaps is very well documwnted by Mint devs, and they don't actually impede Snaps, just ship it behind a simple lock because Ubuntu started turning "apt install xxxxx" into a way to automatically install snaps and the snap version of the app, instead of a normal repo app (eg Chromium)... locking snaps was the only way they could prevent this which for them is a shady harmful practice by Canonical... but the choice to (re)enable snaps is well documented, along with the entire reasoning

that is a strong disagreement, but a well-managed one at that

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"I'm not worried about X cybersecurity threat because I'm nobody important..."

If it's a threat that really requires physical access to exploit, you should be reasonably fine... until you loose a laptop or smartphone and can't remotely ask it to nuke all your personal files like photos, banking, memorized passwords, etc...

If it can be remotely exploited, it just doesn't matter who you are and what you do for a living... there is professional malware floating around that can systematically test every door on every machine on the internet and is automated to exploit known flaws in mostly anyone's machine... at best your computer will just help them attack some other target... at worse you get some WannaCry ransomware, for which anyone is a target, or false banking website to steal access to your money, etc.

The ods that you get hit like this are not too high, and the more exotic exploits are not always in a malware's arsenal... but it's a real issue we shouldn't dismiss lightly.

Finally, if it's a "local" access threat it means someone on the same LAN can hack you... it shouldn't be too bad, except routers are almost all untrustworthy craps. Mirai and other botnets eat them for breakfast... so basically this means barely the same as remotely exploitable.

ps: i'm currently using AMD Phenom II x4, will definitely try AMD Ryzen in the future!

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Hey Liam, this is my first time posting in GoL! :)

I've been an avid reader for a while though, frequently linking GoL articles on Steam for Linux forums, and (as this article shows) I've noticed you have a good know-how on frequent rookie linux game developer mistakes, even if not a dev yourself.

Not long ago this came up in a conversation about a botched linux release:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/platforms/linux [External Link]

Obviously there should be more documentation (this is what is visible for non-devs), but as a public document that newbies might stumble upon, it looks seriously outdated and incomplete...

Is this something you can contact Valve about, and maybe help them include pointers on those frequent mistakes and such?

Off the top of my head I can remember a couple things you usually mention:
- case sensitive (linux) vs case insensitive (windiws) file paths
- actually uploading linux game files to the linux entry instead of a single upload to the windows entry also containing linux files
- long-standing Unity bugs and their workarounds (eg: duplicated input)

Also, maybe you could do more articles focused on such issues and have a dedicated "game development" tag for them?

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