sudotstar @ sudotstar @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Unfortunately, I think many of the Asypr/Feral ports from the early 2010s, like Civ V, Borderlands 2, etc. fall victim to this. Those ports were amazing for Linux gaming at the time, but due to the fact that they were held back by their macOS counterparts and Apple's limitations on that platform, as well as the fact that they were third-party ports with far less post-release engagement from the original dev than the Windows versions, have left those versions to languish. It's a huge shame because those companies did, and to a certain extent still do support Linux-native gaming quite well, but their earlier ports have not aged well and there's not much that can be done given the opportunity costs for the many involved parties on those older games.

Civ V is a game I still play regularly to this day, and I basically have to run the Windows version under Proton to avoid crashes on modern hardware, maintain compatibility with popular mods, and play multiplayer with Windows users without terrible game desyncs.

It might be somewhat controversial of a take, but to me an awesome-performing Proton version of a game is far better than a Linux version that may be native, but has severe deficiencies and/or lags behind its Windows version.

To me, my favorite native Linux games would be ones that do things on Linux that are not possible on other platforms. Generally, this would be an "unfair" advantage, as games should strive for feature parity on all platforms within reason, but so often we end up being on the wrong side of that equation that seeing some of the perks of the platform is nice.

To my knowledge, the only major game I can think of that does this to a certain extent is Factorio, which enables non-blocking game saves on Linux and macOS and not Windows. It's not a Linux-exclusive feature, but it's nice that the developers went through the effort to implement the feature on Linux even though it's not possible on Windows.

I wasn't a fan of the built-in weather widget so I immediately replaced it, so I have no experience with it being nonfunctional, sorry.

Yes

It's not like Nova Launcher, but I've been really enjoying Kvaesitso. It does support icon transformations (better than Nova does IMO) but provides a very different interface that's focused on search.

The reality is that the number of games, even AAA ones, that are releasing at that high a "minimum" performance requirement is incredibly small compared to other games that do release with more modest system requirements. Games that are "just good enough" graphically to go along with their gameplay tend to be the norm, I think, with the few games that really go for pushing visual fidelity being respectable in their own right but not frequent enough to fret about. What will matter the most is what games you want to play and what their requirements are, and that's basically impossible to project out 1, 3, 5 years out or however long you expect the hardware to last.

For what it's worth, I have a Steam Deck and spend a lot of time playing on it, but pretty much every "AAA, big budget = big graphics" game I want to play I'd exclusively do so on my gaming desktop (or remote play on Deck if I want to play it there at all), while sticking to 2D and lighter 3D games on the portable device directly. This is mostly due to what kinds of games I enjoy playing on what form factor, as for example my decision on what to play docked vs portable on the Switch is much the same way, and for about a year after buying the Deck, my desktop hardware was so out of date it was getting generally worse performance than the Deck yet I'd still use the desktop for "spectacle" games, but the necessary graphical quality to go along with that tends to correlate well.

Additionally, it's devices like these, that have proven successful in the market, that incentivize Valve to continue Proton's development. It's hard to see given the already insane trajectory Proton's development was on before the Steam Deck, but now that getting games running on Linux (in at least some form) is desirable by many game developers in order to gain Steam Deck support, Proton compatibility guarantees, and the corresponding development to make that happen, have shifted to before the releases of many major AAA games, and that compatibility work has cascading effects for many other games as well.

The reason this is known is because this supposed device is using the same AMD APU used in the Steam Deck. It's unlikely that a standalone controller would have a dedicated APU like that without becoming a full-on portable gaming device of its own.

IMO this isn't a real "solution" to the problem here, but this article states Android 14 also allows Google to manage device CAs remotely and push updates via Google Play, and goes into detail about how that mechanism is poorly documented publicly and is basically only an option for Google themselves, not any third party device administrators.

Google can easily claim that all security concerns are handled by their own management while continuing to deny access to all third parties to actually handle that responsibility themselves if desired.

I think this game definitely has the hardest shinespark "puzzles", but the actual execution of shinespark is much easier than in previous games which balances it out. Super Metroid had items where figuring out what shinespark maneuver to do was easy, but actually executing it was difficult, while Zero Mission and Fusion had easier-to-pull-off shinesparks with harder puzzles.

With Dread, the challenge is almost entirely in figuring out what to do, once you know exactly where/when to shinespark the actual execution is very intuitive and feels amazing when you land a complex sequence of shinesparks/speed booster runs/wall jumps.

Yup, while Denuvo DRM is still an issue for many other reasons, it has been generally very Linux and Wine-friendly, especially in comparison to other popular DRM/anticheat solutions in place that explicitly block LInux users by-design, or at best change their implementation so often that it's a cat-and-mouse game keeping Wine and other layers up to date to support it.

I haven't adopted this kind of setup, mainly because Proton just does such a good job I have almost zero need for Windows, but my plan for eventually doing something like this was to also maintain a passthrough Linux VM for any GPU-intensive work on that side.

When I realized that the practical end-state of my system would mean I'd just be running things from within the Linux VM 98% of the time (games that can run on Linux) I kind of dropped the idea.

For me it's always been after I tried to resize a partition.

I recommend using whatever is the "least hands-on" option for your boot drive, a.k.a your distro default (ext4 for Debian). In my admittedly incompetent experience, the most likely cause for filesystem corruption is trying to mess with things, like resizing partitions. If you use your distro installer to set up your boot drive and then don't mess with it, I think you'll be fine with whatever the default is. You should still take backups through whatever medium(s) and format(s) make sense for your use case, as random mishaps are still a thing no matter what filesystem you use.

Are you planning on dualbooting Windows for games? I use https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs to mount a shared BTRFS drive that contains my Proton-based Steam library in case I need to run one of those games on Windows for whatever reason. I've personally experienced BTRFS corruption a few times due to the aforementioned incompetence, but I try to avoid keeping anything important on my games drive to limit the fallout when that does occur. Additionally if you're looking to keep non-game content on the storage drive (likely if you're doing 3D modeling work) this may not be as safe.

I think moving the folder under ~/.local before splitting the cache folders out is a bad idea. Many people will have specific backup or sync solutions in place that want to include config, recreate data, and exclude cache, so the XDG spec has separate locations for them.

Windows's dedicated Saved Gamed folder is within the same user-specific directories that Documents and AppData are in, and would still allow for game saves to be user-specific.

I have played the original, and will be playing the remaster, though not on Switch, I already own the Japanese version on Steam which will be patched with the localization upon release in the West.

It's quite a fun, fast-paced game, as Falcom action RPGs tend to be. Being a PSP title originally, I think the game format works well for shorter, pick-up-and-play sessions, making it ideal on devices like the Switch and Steam Deck. No context or experience with the wider Trails series necessary, all connections to the mainline series are just simple references and the game has a standalone story (unless you're deep in the rabbit hole of lore crack theories).

Being incredibly car-centric is probably our biggest issue in my opinion. If you're expecting to be able to use public transit or even walk to basic necessities, and are looking to purchase a house, you'd likely be looking at areas outside of your price range, generally within highly urbanized city centers. Owning a car is very much the norm here, even within those urban environments.

Sure, modding the device will always have a niche interest, and people doing it just because they can, but if the price point of such a device is comparable to a Switch (easily hackable) or even a Steam Deck (outright open for you to do whatever with no barriers in place), would this device have any practical benefit for that kind of stuff over the alternatives?

I think it will continue to have some niche benefit, especially if modding the device still retains its presumably "first party, easy" path to streaming games from a local PlayStation, and for people who would want to keep the presumably better-quality and 1080p display over what's found in the Switch and Steam Deck, but I think someone looking to get something to primarily use with Steam Link or other such services have better (incl. first-party) options for that use case.

I was referring to the niche-but-growing segment of handheld game devices primarily designed for cloud/streaming services, like the Logitech G Cloud or more "traditional" handheld gaming devices like the Switch or Steam Deck, not necessarily all generic-tablet Android devices.