I love this kind of deep dive into customizing the software/OS on a device you own. Glad that "Tivoization" isn't a concern for the steamdeck.
The most interesting part of the article was the mention of a /nix partition, as I didn't realize the steamdeck supports nixpkgs, after researching it more, they do indeed (not installed by default, but at least it is possible without having to fork an entire os to get it on the device).
Not if your / filesystem lacks the /nix directory to use as a mountpoint, and happens to be a read-only image. Something that needs a workaround on macOS.
What a thorough and interesting post. I would personally never do something like this. The most tinkering I've ever done with Linux was in my RaspberryPi era and that's 1% at most. So props to the author
I was in a similar situation as the author: for quite a while I had to build my own Redhat kernel for a very obscure case: by pass RMRR check to pass GPU to a windows VM. (similar to https://github.com/kiler129/relax-intel-rmrr ; not my repo)
The root issue can only be addressed by ROM updates from the manufacturer but I'm running an old DL360 that's no longer supported by HPE.
The patch itself is only one line change but updating the kernel is a pain since I have to :
- get SRPM (there's no git repo)
- unpack SRPM, apply patch
- rebuild and install
There already are distributions based around elements of SteamOS, geared towards PCs and controller-based usage. ChimeraOS works for me quite flawlessly, including Steam Deck add-ons, like EmuDeck.
I actually just ordered a GPU for my unRaid NAS server just to be able to do Steam Headless via a nice docker image(1) and then use Moonlight (for example) as a client on my Windows laptop. If it works, it's much better than buying yet another piece of desktop hardware just to play games when my NAS is just sitting there idle most of the time. Just need to make sure I keep the power level setting on the Nvidia card to idle when not in use (hopefully a nvidia-persistenced call will do it).
I spent some (too much) time trying to get pretty much the same thing running using GOW [1]. Was quite a bit harder than I thought, requiring a hdmi dummy plug to get the xserver config right etc.
Oh nice. I've been day dreaming of setting up a server with turn based, hot seat enabled games (like Civilization) and a browser based way to remote into them so that friends and I can play long turn games from anywhere at any time.
Interesting read! The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong.
I recently moved to Arch after a few years of NixOS (preceded by years of Arch) and I think the fears of the author are misplaced.
Arch is definitely a very serious and mature distro and I'd trust them more than Valve.
The quality of the packages available for Arch is what made me move from NixOS.
The main repos are updated really fast and AUR has a lot of useful packages.
> The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong.
You and I can, the overwhelming majority of computer users cannot. Valve clearly focuses on building for the average person, something that Linux distributions (as much as I love them) still don’t really do (well).
The system automatically recovering from a failed upgrade is essential in a low-maintenance OS at this point.
> The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong.
Could, sure, but we have the technology to make it unnecessary and disk isn't that expensive, so why not?
I recently got my hands on a gaming handheld (the Legion Go) and have used it to get more exposure to Linux. I'd historically avoided it, because it seemed like a perpetual tinker timesink with limited compatibility with things I'd actually want to use. Reading about immutable filesystems and how traditional Linux gives root willy-nilly to all sorts of random software piqued my curiosity.
I'm using NixOS, which can indeed be a tinker timesink, but is good for exploration. You can easily try different components, and then completely remove them (aside from some ~/.config pollution) if you don't want to keep them. It's also trivial to patch things before you install them (such as adding some kernel patches to make Linux usable on esoteric hardware like a gaming handheld).
There's a NixOS community called Jovian that's reconstructing Valve's random SteamOS tarballs into tagged commits on GitHub, which you can browse as if you were a Valve employee. They've made it so you can install your own copy of SteamOS atop NixOS by adding a few lines to your Nix configuration. They're clearly Linux experts, and you can see from the source that you're getting Valve's packages unadulterated, save for simple adaptations like introspecting instead of hardcoding the power button location.
So, if you want a pure SteamOS experience without hosting your own mirror of Valve's update system (or if you want to be able to browse Valve's source without downloading a 3GB tarball), give Jovian a try.
> Bazzite is an OCI image that serves as an alternative operating system for the Steam Deck, and a ready-to-game SteamOS-like for desktop computers, living room home theater PCs, and numerous other handheld PCs.
Worth visiting the readme even if not interested. There's a huge list of included stuff, and a lot of it seems really cool.and helpful (for gamers or streamers mostly).
Bazzite (and Immutable Linux as a whole) is fascinating.
I'm not deep enough in their weeds to perfectly explain it in a concise HN comment, but it's all about having a read-only known-good Linux distro at the root and then layering packages on top, taking much inspiration from server-side containers. It's supposed to be both more secure and more reliable/reproducible/customizable than traditional Linux. You just write in a container manifest which packages you want. When an upgrade comes out, it runs the upgrade, then reinstalls your packages on top.
Even more relevant is that you can "fork" Bazzite relatively simply and add any missing packages or configuration you need to your own custom image and let GitHub actions do most of the infra work for you
2023 was the first year I gamed exclusively on Linux according to Steam's year in review, including some of this year's titles. Most of that was on the Steam Deck or on a virtual machine with GPU passthrough running Bazzite. It is really well made.
Valve might need some not yet upstreamed kernel features for Steam Deck, but what is the ustpream kernel missing otherwise for gaming? I use it without any issues.
As far as I know they also prefer to upstream things in general. I think AMD's amd-pstate / amd-pstate-epp and related work was kicked off becasue of Steam Deck, but it all went upstream.
> No. Not even questionable. If you have an NVIDIA GPU, You're on your own. Latest Valve updates for Steam client including normal and Jupiter bootstraps have broken gamepadui on NVIDIA GPUs, and if so, no support will be provided for you.
Bummer. This rules out 76% of steam users, according to their hardware surveys.
NVidia on Linux is an unholy mess, and always has been (at the very least since 2004, which is my earliest memory of fighting it). It's true even on NVidia's own SoC (Jetson).
It almost feels like they're trying hard to make the experience worse for everyone: users, OS developers, app developers, hardware developers... I don't know what to make of it, if you want NVidia you should pick an OS other than Linux (I've heard FreeBSD actually works fine), if you want Linux pick a GPU other than NVidia.
When projects like Sway only enable NVidia support behind a flag named --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia, I have sincere doubts that a different gift wrapping will change anything.
That description is pretty hyperbolic. The SteamOS UI (eg. the Steam Deck-looking part) is very broken on Nvidia right now, but the actual gaming part (eg Proton and the Steam launcher) works fine. If you just want to play mouse-and-keyboard in desktop mode, recent Nvidia cards are generally pretty cooperative.
Well, I'm not smart enough to know if it's hyperbolic but it's a pretty damning statement right there in the README. Certainly enough to turn me away from ever trying it on one of my machines.
Tangential: anyone have experience with unity and/or unreal on Linux these days? Last I checked (2-3 years ago), they technically worked but we’re janky and buggy. Is it improved?
Unity is only a little more janky and buggy than it is on Windows.
I had a lot of trouble getting the unity editor working on my steam deck, but that may have been due to using an editor version from 2021 (for unrelated reasons). It seems to behave fine on a normal desktop environment though.
Unity has been quite solid for me on Linux lately. It’s mainly just minor annoyances like the project settings window being too small when you open it so you have to resize it, little stuff like that. Nothing that has prevented me from getting the job done. I still prefer to use it on Linux because the glitches annoy me less than, well, using windows.
Unreal works okay for me, but I’ve had to submit a few patches upstream to work out some Wayland issues. Other than that, it’s about as bloated/buggy/slow as it is on windows. Most of the time if I think there’s some Linux-specific issue I’ll open the same project on windows only to discover it was the same.
Quite good actually when you use the forward+ renderer (vulkan) and do the little things properly (using multimeshinstances or shaders heavily instead of tons of direct meshes, using occlusion culling properly, making sure you have multi-threading enabled, run physics on a sep proc, etc). I'm evening running with full dynamic global illum and loving it.
I'm not trying to prematurely optimize but my game worlds are very large, (I have a working to scale earth for example) (oops, forgot to mention, to get good large world behavior, compiling with double precision is a must! (https://godotengine.org/article/emulating-double-precision-g...)) so I've been watching lots of GDC and other talks from AAA titles and how they do their rendering pipelines, and my conclusion is that shaders are really the powerhouse of gamedev these days and anyone interested would do themselves a favor to start learning the quirks of your engines shader language now.
I was totally blown away by how good Proton is in the post Steam Deck world. I now play Steam games on my Linux laptop almost daily because they “just work” even when the only listed supported platform is Windows
After hearing people be ecstatic, I thought I’d go full-in on Linux gaming. I have a pretty bog-standard gaming PC that is very Linux-compatible (Intel i5 + Radeon 6800XT) and on there Apex Legends has horrid frame pacing issues, Mirror’s Edge doesn’t work with wireless Xbox controllers. You lose out on a lot of GPU suite features that Windows has. Gnome doesn’t support VRR. Etc etc.
There’s so many small issues it’s held me back from deleting my Windows partition. Maybe in a year or two?
That said, these things work flawlessly on the Deck.
Yeah, except I prefer the cleanliness of Gnome over how scattershot and buggy KDE feels, so I’m SoL. I’ve even looked into launching games into their own little Gamescope instance, but if you don’t run Gamescope as your main window manager, you lose most of its benefits.
> For Mirror's Edge, were you using Steam Input?
Yes. The problem lies in the fact that only the Xone driver properly supports the Xbox wireless adapter, but it doesn’t play nice with Mirror’s Edge. Xpad and XpadNeo do work, but those require USB or Bluetooth.
And me having to tweak a million things tells why gaming on Linux still sucks, aside from Deck’s blessed config. I don’t want to deal with a thousand papercuts, I want to boot my system and play. Windows is still closer to that experience than Linux.
> Yeah, except I prefer the cleanliness of Gnome over how scattershot and buggy KDE feels
But if it's the difference between gaming working or not for you, wouldn't you rather use it? Surely you barely interact with it anyway while gaming, only to get into Steam?
If this is a machine you use for something else too, you could just have a gaming user that logs in to KDE and your normal user that uses Gnome?
> Surely you barely interact with it anyway while gaming, only to get into Steam?
I'm a Linux desktop user and I drop into a game once in a while while I'm waiting for another meeting or waiting for a build to finish or whatever. My work desktop doesn't use VRR (the just-for-games PC uses Windows), otherwise I'd be in the same boat as 'jorvi because it quite matters to me that games on my desktop integrate into everything else at a passable level. For me, GNOME does a better job of integrating my different activities than KDE (which wasn't always the case! I was a KDE3 user for a long time!), so I use GNOME. And it remains an unsolved pain in the ass that the Linux desktop experience isn't coherent enough to mean that we should only be thinking about desktop environments if we want to.
Coherent, holistic switching between tasks is a thing that people are allowed to want and attempting to convince people that they don't is a bad look.
> If this is a machine you use for something else too, you could just have a gaming user that logs in to KDE and your normal user that uses Gnome?
This is a really sad observation on the state of the Linux desktop. Still.
Honestly it's the reverse for me, but I guess that's down to personal preference. "Gnome" apps keep updating with the "new" GTK style, which means the title bar becomes a conglomeration of a bunch of weird controls, the familiar dropdown menus vanish, everything gets moved into a tiny little hamburger menu and, often, the layout breaks in subtle ways.
The calculator app just recently did this, and now I have to type and enter one line of numbers before the text control realizes it's too small and resizes itself. That first line of numbers is nearly invisible. Happens again every time it's opened.
I'm not sure who decided that desktop apps need to look and feel like touchscreen-first mobile apps, but I don't particularly like it. KDE still feels like a desktop environment, so it's my strong preference. I'll put up with a very slightly less polished experience if it means stuff stops rearranging itself just for the sake of change every couple of weeks.
(Aside from KDE, Cinnamon is pretty solid and less feature packed, maybe give it a whirl?)
Hamburger menus are among my greatest gripes with GNOME. In apps with any functionality at all they end up being poorly organized junk drawers filled with odds and ends, and because they have to be somewhat short to be effective, functions that don’t fit in them either get buried or cut.
What makes this all worse is that GNOME has acres of space reserved at the top of the screen with its statusbar, most of which is empty and doing absolutely nothing. It could house a macOS-style global menubar (as Unity did for fullscreened windows) with room to spare… Though global menubars aren’t everybody’s cup of tea I think many would agree they’re better than the alternative of oversimplified hamburger menus, and they would help achieve the clean look GNOME is going for without so dramatically impeding functionality.
The calculator app just recently did this, and now I have to type and enter one line of numbers before the text control realizes it's too small and resizes itself. That first line of numbers is nearly invisible. Happens again every time it's opened.
OT, but I recently started using a Python REPL as a calculator, leaving it open full time in a window. It's pretty great. Haven't touched an actual calculator, or a calculator app, in weeks.
>Yeah, except I prefer the cleanliness of Gnome over how scattershot and buggy KDE feels, so I’m SoL.
You know that linux distros are multiusers/multiseats systems right? You can perfectly use Gnome as default desktop and live switch to a dedicated gaming user with kde plasma desktop that is only used to launch games.
Kde plasma shoudln't be buggy if only used as a game launcher and disable baloo file indexing if you want to limit kde memory usage to minimum.
Windows users always find a reason not to switch to Linux because some missing feature. In two years? There will be another new feature or game on Windows. I remember people insisting on using Windows because it support their „3D-Shutter glasses“ or their card from Nvidia.
Either you want use Linux or not :)
Why are many features initially only available on Windows?
First. That is wrong. Important features like cgroups, namespace and containers/Flatpak where novelly developed upon Linux.
Second? MBAs only look at past numbers. So Windows often get traditional Windows stuff first. You make guess it, innovative companies care about what will be possible in future. Valve for example.
The MBA style thinking is also in many consumers. Still buying Nvidia? Because they were faster in the paper sheet? I prefer the cards which works well with Linux, so AMD or Intel. Frames actually generated are more worth than problems with proprietary drivers.
PS: Linux has maybe won the war against drives. Seems like Nvidia open most stuff slowly and feature land in the nouveau-module or mesa. A decade to late. I’m already in Team AMD ;)
You're using the phrase "MBA thinking" to mean "making decisions based on your personal use case and identifying solutions which match".
I'm not sure how this is a bad thing. I don't run Linux to run games because Windows is a better supported platform for running games. I'm not "looking at past numbers", I'm looking at the situation in front of me as it exists, setting aside my personal feeling on what might have been and instead focusing on what actually exists, today, for the problem I am looking to solve today.
Why don’t people like Linux? Because it takes 8 bloody commands to do something as simple as add a new drive whereas Windows you can just open disk utility and format. I bounced off Linux a few weeks ago over this. It’s for people who want to tinker more than actually use the system.
>Windows users always find a reason not to switch to Linux because some missing feature.
Because the OS is a tool, not a religious/political statement.
Therefore I'll use it if it works the way I need it and it solves my problem, or not use it if it doesn't work the way I want it and ends up creating more problems for me than it solves. Simple.
>First. That is wrong. Important features like cgroups, namespace and containers/Flatpak where novelly developed upon Linux.
I get your overall point, but the first "process containers" code that later became cgroups was merged to the kernel in 2007. Windows came out with the Job Objects API in Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) in 2000.
IMO, the Job Objects API was not really suitable to use in production settings; it had many weird edge cases, so although it looked similar to cgroups it often broke in strange and unpredictable ways.
Steam Input is rapidly becoming the Google Play Services of the desktop linux world. On Steam Deck for a long time you couldn't even use the touchpads without the Steam client running.
Did you try out 'gamescope'? This is something you find on the Deck but not 'for free' with Steam on other Linux.
I find it helps with pacing. It also supports VRR with a commandline argument, '--adaptive-sync'.
VRR may need support in the environment to work, I'm not sure. Sway/wlroots does it fine. Presumably KDE does/can too since that's what the Deck uses in 'desktop' mode (otherwise, gamescope).
edit: I see in another post - you have! Agreed on KDE being scattershot. I hope the Gnome people clear things up for you. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest i3/Sway, even though I'm happy with them
Could you provide details on how you got gamescope working with sway? What is the full command line you used? I believe I ran into problems with it conflicting with XWayland or something like that.
Cannot relate much. My 5800x3D and 6800XT deliver an outstanding Linux gaming experience. I don't play EA games, though. I do play some fast paced shooters that don't need VRR since you can manually cap fps to your liking.
Also, it was my understanding that gnome has support for adaptive sync.
May i ask what driver features are you missing? I only want some decent fan control instead of relying on random scripts off github. AMD has to release some sort of GUI panel for sure.
> I only want some decent fan control instead of relying on random scripts off github. AMD has to release some sort of GUI panel for sure.
Have you tried CoreCtrl [0]?
> My 5800x3D and 6800XT deliver an outstanding Linux gaming experience.
I have a 7900XTX and performance under Linux has been at least on par with Windows, sometimes better (though not by much).
> May i ask what driver features are you missing?
I'm not GP but I'd love to see frame gen and stuff like anti-lag and upscaling integrated into amdgpu with some sort of official way of setting it (though looking at Adrenaline it might actually be best if it's left up to the community to create the GUIs).
Similar specs but run Windows here, part of the reason being that I noticed that the ray tracing performance is just awful on Linux compared to Windows. I found I get slightly better framerates in most games in Linux, but anything that uses raytracing goes from "just about usable with FSR" on Windows to "totally unplayable" on Linux.
I'm told it's better in Mesa 23.3 though, haven't tested.
> After hearing people be ecstatic, I thought I’d go full-in on Linux gaming. I have a pretty bog-standard gaming PC that is very Linux-compatible (Intel i5 + Radeon 6800XT) and on there Apex Legends has horrid frame pacing issues
Apex Legends run flawlessly for me, but only on KDE/X11 with Nvidia reflex enabled[0].
If you are on Radeon though, I bet the problem is your window manager. I have the frame pacing issues on:
- hyprland/wayland (even with no_direct_scanout = true; and floating game windows)
- KDE/wayland
I also had a weird issue using gamescope as my DM where apex got resized into a tiny frame in the top left that was like 200 pixels or so wide.
> That said, these things work flawlessly on the Deck.
Likely due to running into these graphics driver -> WM and similar compatibility issues and fixing them. The other performance improvements from kernel changes probably don't hurt either.
I’m not sure why people are trying to convince you; Linux is free so there really isn’t any benefit to us Linux users or to the Linux developers if you switch…
Valve should be the only one that is worried about your opinion here. I think they develop SteamOS as a backup plan, though, in case Microsoft ever starts to take their own App Store seriously.
That is surely part of the consideration, but certainly not all. Some engineers at Valve (especially the head honcho Gabe Newell) are legit Linux people (Debian IIRC). They believe in it, and I love them for it
I don't dispute your claims, but I remember very clearly that back then it seemed obvious that SteamOS was a response to the Microsoft Store and a fear that Microsoft would mandate that all software on Windows come from the Microsoft Store.
While that was obviously speculation, at least the dates match up (October 26, 2012 for Microsft Store launch and December 13, 2013 from SteamOS launch according to Wikipedia)
Agree based on my memory. I think the Microsoft store threat is what finally tipped the scale. It took it from "we kind of support linux because we like it" to "we support linux because it's important business insurance for us in case Microsoft goes Apple (or Xbox or whatever example you want) and monopolizes app distribution on Windows.
And it left them well-positioned for the steam deck, I wonder if they were thinking about that when they started steamOS, or if it is just an example of the natural advantage that openness gives you.
Anyway, agree—I wasn’t trying to belittle Valve’s motivations, just wanted to include a thought about why they seem to be happy serving both platforms.
Yep. DRM’d online stuff and VR mainstays (Beat Saber, primarily) are the two sets of games that are keeping me tethered to Windows at the moment. VR games can be played via a Windows VM with GPU passthrough but for DRM’d online games you don’t really have any other option, at least if you don’t want to get banned.
I also run a Windows VM for gaming. One thing to note is that some games have (robust!) VM detection checks on launch, so you can’t even run them in the first place. Valorant is one example.
What do you use for the VM? Last time I checked, I couldn't find any free/FOSS VM tooling that allows me to do GPU pass-through on a Linux Host to Windows Guest.
Do you mean the presence of anti-cheat software makes them anti-player? Because I’d disagree. It’s a lot of work and expense to combat cheats, but is very much appreciated by many players (when it works)
Or they could just not trust the clients, instead of throwing the problem over the wall. A lot of these games with fancy anti cheat protection the cheat tools basically just tell the server "spawn me a vehicle right here" and the server just does it. Garbage.
> A lot of these games with fancy anti cheat protection the cheat tools basically just tell the server "spawn me a vehicle right here" and the server just does it.
Citation needed. I'd be quite surprised if it were common for servers of professional games to trust the client in that sense (i.e. allowing it to decide game logic like what gets spawned where).
As far as I'm aware the most common types of multiplayer cheats are
* wall hacks, which you could probably prevent by not sending the client any information about objects that the player can't see, but that would require the server to calculate the line of sight for every player/object,
* and aim bots, which I don't think you could prevent at all on the server side since they don't rely on the bot having access to any information that the player isn't supposed to have. They just rely on the bot being better at aiming. I suppose if you did all rendering server side and only sent the rendered graphics to the client (i.e. streaming), that would make it harder for the bot because it'd now have to do image recognition to find the target, but that just makes it harder, not impossible. Plus, game streaming wasn't well received for a reason and anyway, I don't think that's what you had in mind when you talked about "not trusting the client".
Wow, it’s awesome you’ve solved the entirety of multiplayer gaming. Here I was thinking anti-cheating measures was a complex topic but it’s great you’ve elucidated me.
"just" is (tongue in cheek) a forbidden word in HN. Next thing you might find yourself claiming is that Dropbox is a worthless idea because it's "just" FTP.
Btw tell me exactly how an aimbot that takes the visuals from the player's screen and tilts the player's cursor so (or not so) slightly towards identified moving targets, are to be avoided from the server. Modern cheating is already a hard-ass problem to solve, much more so if no client-level monitoring is desired.
it's anti-player when it is security theatre, which in 95% of cases it is.
When I start a game and I see an Easy Anti-Cheat banner I think to myself "Great now I can be killed by an aimbot while simultaneously hosting a root-kit voluntarily."
Why do you think these systems are advertised like that, at the forefront of the game load? It's so that the developers create a false trust in the playerbase that they're doing their damnedest to prevent cheaters, when the reality is that they paid a small amount of cash to a third party to use a system that does a piss-poor job at everything aside from being a symbol of effort and adding incompatibilities where there shouldn't be.
eac bypassing is trivial to a laymen, that doesn't bode well as a defense against people that have made cheating their hobby.
and to be clear : I use EAC as the example because to me it symbolizes the 'security theatre' side of the effort. Real anti-cheat efforts exist, and those should be applauded. EAC ain't it, but it's the industry standard... worrisome.
I personally would far rather have the occasional cheater than have the game install literal rootkits. It's absolutely bonkers that people are willing to accept that.
There's nothing "esports" about wanting to avoid wallhacks/aimbots in games like Tarkov, Rust, or Destiny, which completely ruin the entire game for every player in the lobby in an instant. It has nothing to do with "esports" and everything to do with actually being able to play the game. Do you also think it's because of "esports" when you're forbidden from cheating at a game of chess in person? When my friend plays Rust and gets upset because a flying aimbot hacker raids his base, gets banned, and comes back 1 hour later (buying a hot key off some shady 3rd party site), is he thinking "Damn, esports is really ruining this game"? No. The players are expected to fundamentally abide by the same rules. That's what a game is.
Realistically these days with how expensive most of these games are to run and make, if you do not keep cheaters away it can tank the entire project, e.g. Cycle: The Frontier basically had to shut down because they couldn't keep cheaters at bay, in a system that heavily relies on player count to remain healthy and fun. Once the cheating gets bad enough, people stop playing the game, which leads to a death spiral: it starts with bad queue times, which leads to people playing other games, and that spiral further diminishes the playerbase beyond a point of no return. Cycle barely made it 12 months and the result was a multi-million dollar project getting flushed down the drain.
I assumed that cheating is way more widespread amongst multiplayer gamers? There is a lot less anonymity in esports and if you get caught and blacklisted.. well you just wasted thousands or tens of thousands of hours.
It's pretty hard to have fun when the server is full of cheaters.
The Valorant community is incredibly in favor of the Vangard anti-cheat that loads as an early kernel mode driver, and the pro/pro-am Counter-Strike scene plays on FACEIT because they have a strong Kernel-based anticheat. VAC, and server-side VACnet just doesn't cut it.
The only thing incredible is how upset people are for pointing out that it’s hostile to tell someone the game they enjoy playing is garbage and is not worth playing because it has anticheat.
You are conflating ideas. I don’t think it will be a productive discussion to go down the road of anticheat systems and DRM. We can all have opinions that are different.
What is productive is calling out hostile behavior and comments that do nothing but hurt the ecosystem. I see these type of strong negative opinions in a lot of areas of the Linux community. “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that”
The players of the game are willing to put up with DRM and anticheat in order to get the game. By taking a hardline stance against these, the Linux community is being user-hostile.
Well if cheating is going to make the game almost unplayable the outcome is pretty much the same as you deciding to never install it in the first place due to disliking anticheat systems. So I don't really see the problem.
Obviously, you haven't been in a position where you had to patch the anti-cheat solution yourself in order to play the game you paid for.
Well-designed games offer limited potential for cheaters by design. An anti-cheat software can help to eliminate the little potential that is left, but often games are designed without cheating in mind and some anti-cheat software is put in place to solve all the issues that were produced by the bad design.
It varies by game. https://areweanticheatyet.com/ is an interesting resource for that because they also track announcements by developers about whether or not linux support is eventually planned.
You’re missing the bigger picture. Yes, developers really appreciate that their games work seamlessly on the Steam Deck and Linux with no effort on their part. But there are a couple of knock on effects.
One is that developers now a specific hardware + software combo to test their games with. Even if it’s the same build they’re sending out, they’re still testing their game on the Deck and fixing issues, leading to a better (but not perfect) experience for Linux gamers. Here’s a video of Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian studios playing a game released by his studio on the Steam Deck - https://youtu.be/kzfEkSGa45k. He’s very pleased and promises to test future games released by his studio on the Deck. And he stuck to that promise - Larian released several fixes specifically for the Steam Deck to make Baldur’s Gate III run better. Linux gamers benefit from that.
Second, this increases the % of gamers using Linux. After the Deck’s success in the last couple of years Linux is at 1.91% of the respondents of the Steam Hardware Survey for Nov 2023. Linux was at 1.15% 18 months ago. Doesn’t sound impressive, but if that growth continues and it reaches 3-4%, at that point developers will find shipping native Linux builds more attractive.
Valve adocates are the ones failing to learn from OS/2 history, "it does Windows better than Windows".
Studios don't care about native GNU/Linux, despite the games being shipped with Android/NDK, PlayStation POSIX environment, and the available APIs on Switch OS.
All of them much easier than porting from Windows/XBox, almost straight ports if coming from Android/NDK.
Having a desktop OS was a big thing 30 years ago, but now nobody cares anymore. Who interacts with their OS other than launching browsers or apps based on browsers? Not even most coders these days.
OSes are irrelevant these days and having basically libwindows.so these days only underlines that.
Pity that Khronos never got the support they needed to make cross-platform raster APIs a reality. I mean really, what an enormous and crying shame that a successor to a highly-demanded API like OpenGL never emerged. It's really quite sad that users never had a corporate champion to resist the allure of a proprietary graphics API. The stage was set for every modern OS to be unified under a new raster library, but the setting was dashed for a petty buck. Quite a tragedy.
Ah well, it's funny to see people complaining because it really solos out the OS you're using. Windows users have native DirectX, Linux users have near-flawless DXVK, and Mac users... well, Mac users get what Apple gives them, and they have to learn to be happy with it.
Exactly because of my past history with the games industry 20 years ago, and some contacts I still have, I know much better than random HN commenter ranting about why studios don't care.
Food for thought, not even the studios targeting Android/NDK care about GNU/Linux, despite both platforms having the same 3D, audio and device API relevant for games.
It isn't the APIs that make them not care about GNU/Linux.
Valve inventing a portable game runtime that just works on all Linux distros without game studios needing an entire department to handle the dependency hell of Linux NIHisn would solve that issue.
Does it actually work though? Ironically my experience is that windows api + proton are a more stable target than anything linux native. Even valve doesn't get it always right when shipping linux versions of their own games. See https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=30358... for example.
I wanted to do use SteamOS for our LR PC, our kitchen ambiance PC and our MBR PC but instead installed Ubuntu (upgraded to Kubuntu) then disabled Snap because SteamOS which runs KDE and was a great call by Valve, is built on Arch, a bad call IMHO.
I'd be curious to hear why. Arch deserves it's reputation for poor stability, but for Valve's application with OSTree and immutable root should work fine. For users who don't want to tinker, they can receive a quality first-party experience with smooth upgrades. Users that do want to tinker are largely funneled into using Flatpak or AppImage, which are much more stable than AUR packages.
Can we please stop with the FUD around Arch and poor stability? It's an old meme which will never die, but it has no basis in reality. I've been using Arch on my personal and work laptops for probably 7 years now and the only time it had been a problem has been due to layer 8 issues and doing something stupid. I certainly wouldn't be using it for work if it was unstable.
I used to run arch on my desktop for a while because it was the closest to thing to FreeBSD. Didn't use Linux on the desktop before (well, went through a few distros within a month).
Never had any issues with updating or using it, but it's because I have set up everything myself and never touched AUR. Still nuked it favor on FreeBSD and then NixOS eventually tho.
It's not FUD. If you stay very light then it is very stable, but the more stuff you add, the worse it gets (gnome extensions anybody?)
I love Arch, but it is a demanding mistress. If you get behind on updates, you're asking for pain. Also it can be very disruptive to suddenly get a new major version of Gnome that breaks extensions you used, or applications, etc.
What we instead should say is not that Arch is "unstable" because I agree it's not, but rather that Arch requires a lot more care and feeding and if you don't do that, it can lead to instability
I used Arch for years, and left it due to poor stability. Every time I would try to use an AUR app it would be broken and need re-installing. Sure the non-AUR stuff was mostly fine, but a lot of necessary applictions are in AUR, and AUR is touted as a major selling point of Arch. When there was an issue during a system update, recovering the system was a mess. I also cannot call it stable when you can't update one application without updating the rest of the system.
I switched to Gentoo and it fixed all the issues I was encountering with Arch, and was more stable. Now I'm on NixOS, which is far more stable than Arch or Gentoo were.
Now, that said, the way SteamOS uses it, I don't see any issues. With an immutable system, A/B updates, and tested images, the compatibility and update issues are solved. Using flatpak for user applications solves the rest of the noted issues. Would be ideal if I could install with Nix instead of Flatpak, but ran into some trouble there.
Counterpoint to this; I have many packages from the AUR and I've never had any issues like you describe with them. Both of our viewpoints are polar opposites but they are only a single datapoint each.
The most interesting part of the article was the mention of a /nix partition, as I didn't realize the steamdeck supports nixpkgs, after researching it more, they do indeed (not installed by default, but at least it is possible without having to fork an entire os to get it on the device).