The issue is one of licensing, not technology. There's all kinds of patents in the space, and using free codecs could still infringe them. DirectX doesn't have the same patent protection. I believe in theory you could make a fully open source Linux native version of DirectX.
For more info from someone who knows more than me, see here.
Well, sometimes Windows games depend on propietary codecs, and until Valve can get the devs to make adjustments so the codecs aren't needed, the games aren't going to work properly in regular Proton.
If GE received a Cease and Desist, that would be frustrating, but linux gaming would go on. If Proton got a Cease and Desist, that could be catastrophic to linux gaming. Valve could even theoretically get banned from working on linux gaming (like the Yuzu devs got banned from working on emulation). It's just not worth the risk for compatibility/performance for a smaller proportion of games.
Even if it wasn't a gimmick, it still wouldn't be benevolent. Corporations only lower prices when they think the lower price can make them more money overall.
That's fair. It's an all-around sucky situation regardless, and it makes sense why AMD isn't marketing socket longevity quite as much in AM5 as they were with AM4.
I do think losing capabilities for older CPUs in favor of new ones is pretty common for long lived sockets, and is an acceptable tradeoff for longevity imo. The board I was originally using for a 2600X never promised 5000 series support, but almost added it anyways. Unfortunately it never got beyond a beta bios, and I decided that wasn't good enough for me (and I ended up giving the old mobo to my sister in a build for them, so it all worked out anyways).
I need some advice on what to throw on this laptop - and some suggestions on how to squeeze the best performance out of this (Optimus vs. Proprietary NVIDIA vs. Open source drivers).
One thing here, the open source Nvidia drivers still have a lot of performance issues. It's only fairly recently that NVIDIA has opened their drivers up enough to allow any kind of reasonable performance from open source drivers, and getting them up to par is still a work in progress. So stick with the propietary drivers for now, but keep an eye on the new open source driver, NVK.
(As far as distro recs go, I recently started using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and am really liking it, but I don't have enough experience with it yet to make an informed recommendation)
Hm, what didn't you enjoy about Elden Ring? I started with Sekiro, finished it, and have moved on to Elden Ring (in co-op tho). I have very much enjoyed both.
I believe that the custom for a lot of wine patch notes is just to mention the first application reported with the bug even if it affects many applications. So that could be what's happening here.
That said, Valve does not support the official Ubuntu way of installing Steam, which is via snap ('apt install steam' will install the snap). So you have to make sure to install the Steam way (manually via the deb) instead.
Currently yes, tho Wine has gotten pretty far with Wayland support, so it wouldn't be too surprising to see Wine Wayland be useable for gaming in the next year or two.
The issue is one of licensing, not technology. There's all kinds of patents in the space, and using free codecs could still infringe them. DirectX doesn't have the same patent protection. I believe in theory you could make a fully open source Linux native version of DirectX.
For more info from someone who knows more than me, see here.