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this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Steam Deck
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48 users here now
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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Gamepass is still amazing if you are primarily in the MS/Xbox ecosystem. And not all games work in Linux. And, increasingly, modding (for what few games "support" it) is dependent on third party applications that are rather annoying to set up under linux.
Does Windows "fight you on that" either? Also, it has been a minute, but I want to say that some of the better emulators are still "windows only" and best run through proton?
I love my steam deck and it (and the ever increasing stupidity of win10) was a big part of finally migrating my personal (gaming) computers over to fedora. But if I were even ten years younger and still cared about competitive gaming and all the bullshit out of Riot et al? It would still be a no go.
And now it has put me in a REAL weird position with stuff like the Yakuza/LAD games since I got into those on Gamepass but would love to grind on the go and... (although, apparently there are save decrypters for Kiwami 2 and 7... but still no good way to get HDR to my big display from my PC).
Linux gaming is (FINALLY!!!) viable. But it is still not perfect and depends on your interests.
You're right, its not perfect, but the ball is now rolling down the mountain, picking up more and more snow.
The technical foundations are now clearly evidenced to be viable, all problems that remain more or less revolve around whether or not a developer decides to intentionally not support linux via a Windows Only AntiCheat that is actually a RootKit or not.
And thats up to momentum of overall users on linux, which is up to other kinds of games making the platform more relatively popular, which we already see happening but of course cannot predict everything about.
Maybe some kind of game developer who is a bit jaded with MSFT for various reasons will make a significantly popular Linux Exclusive game. Who knows?
But yes uh Windows does often fight you in ways when you try to emulate. Most of these ways can be overcome by reasonably competent Windows users, but its far more straightforward on say, a SteamDeck.
In this case it comes down to the experience of the noob user, who will be scared and confused by the experience of maybe i went to a bad website and downloaded a virus, windows is asking me to make sure i know what i am doing and i dont, wow this sure seems risky!
On SteamDeck and SteamOS its less confusing and scary.
Also, theres the whole Pluton thing which I am still baffled people do not know about. The latest gen of AMD and i believe now also Intel CPUs are designed with a basically below ring 0 bit of always active, network enabled microcode than runs below Windows, even below the BIOS/UEFI, and this is a physically seperate part of the CPU that is not possible to physically remove without destroying the CPU.
The whole point of this is advertised as being necessary for security, but it actually isnt. It interfaces with Windows in a way it /almost/ certainly cannot on Linux, and its capable of accessing literally everything on your computer.
It is highly likely that what it will actually be used for is DRM at a below the OS level.
Oh you wanna install known binary with know signature of latest release of an emulator? Nope, not allowed, no matter what you do.
It hasnt happened yet, but the security minded section of the linux community have basically already worked out that its entirely capable of doing this and its absolutely within MSFTs uh, philosophy or market strategy or whatever to do this.
Its also literally documented to have been developed as a result of MSFT not being able to figure out how stop XBoxes from being hard modded and softmodded to allow it to run emulators, amongst other things.
Anyway in regards to emulators on linux vs windows, so far in my experience ive had great luck using linux native emus, usually work better tham windows ones through proton in most cases for st least me personally.
Do you have any examples of that? The only thing I can think of is the weirdness with permissions and Program Files. And... let's not throw any stones regarding (user friendly) file permissions, where to install an application, etc.
As opposed to the newbie who was told everything works perfectly with no issues and then can't play Valorant or whatever? That has ALWAYS been the problem with linux gaming. The evangelists overhype everything and people very rapidly find the frustration points. If you go in knowing what those are, you can make an assessment. If stuff that "should work" doesn't? You assume even more problems will occur and reinstall windows.
As for the giant wall of speculation on hardware level DRM: Uhm... if anything, that would be an argument to stick to windows if you are "a gamer". Since most people, as has been demonstrated time and time again, don't actually care about that kind of stuff.
Because, you are right, it is about "momentum". And we have decades of "Oh, Linux is amazing and all of your games will work perfectly and fuck Microsoft for these ideological reasons that nobody cares about. Oh, that game doesn't work? You must be wrong or it isn't a good game". And every single time it becomes "Well, I don't particularly care about what a bunch of paste eating children think is the most important issue in the world and I want to play my favorite video games so..."
Honesty is the key. That is WHY the Steam Deck worked so well. Valve basically said "A lot of games, maybe even most games, work but you should check the store page to confirm". And Valve very much under-promise on that. The vast majority of games DO work but even something like "You have to hit steam+x to bring up the keyboard" will prevent it from being Verified.
But we still have the evangelists who vague post and mostly preach ideology who insist on over promising at every step.
Well I was talking specifically about the ease of setting up emulation on in particular SteamOS vs Windows.
Its complex on both compared to say installing a game from Steam on either Windows or SteamOS, but installing Emus is more user friendly on SteamOS than on Windows.
Also its fairly easy to see if a game will work on SteamOS. You look for the little SteamDeck verified icon.
How is it any harder to install an emulator on windows versus linux?
For the latter, most people will just use emudeck and/or retroarch (which is run by a transphobic piece of shit). For Windows it is retroarch and, funny enough, emudeck.
You could make the argument that the various package managers might give linux an edge. But windows has chocolatey (that probably has emulators) and the sort of official windows package manager (that probably does not). But also? You probably don't want to use the version of duckstation or whatever that is in an apt repository because it is going to be out of date. Which gets back to either learning how a flatpak/appimage works or downloading standalones on both sides that will periodically tell you to go back to the site and get an updated version.
Yes I would make the argument that using package managers is vastly more simple than hunting down exes on the internet, yes.
And I do not think that asking someone to learn how package managers work, while using a Linux system, is unreasonable.
Its not very complicated once the basics are learned. And its a fundamental step to understanding how basically any Linux OS works. And once youve got the basics down, its generally far simpler and more convenient to use than the Windows alternative, in many cases.
Handles all the needed libraries, no need to hunt for additional dependencies elsewhere on the internet.
Unless you go hog wild with it and install a bunch of experimental garbage that some random guy told you is really cool and way better for blah blah reasons that blows up and then that same gug goes oh thats because -insanely specific procedure or insanely specific dependency or insanely specific compatibility problem because /actually/ that guy is a maniac who has no idea how to develop qualitt software-, leaving you in dependency conflict hell...
...Unless you do that.
And this is a trap that many Windows power users fall into that many non Windows power users /do not/ fall into, myself included as originally falling into that trap.
The Windows Power User /will almost always/ overestimate both the need to, and their ability to customize and trick out a Linux install, precisely because they are so very used to needing to try every little weird thing to get Windows to do what they want, but they do not usually realize until it is too late that the ways they learned to do this more or less do not really apply to Linux.
Its the whole thing I mentioned earlier.
MSFT PC Gamers, who often by necessity are also Windows Power Users, get frustrated that their expertise of customizing Windows is nearly useless and often counter productive on Linux.
Then they have a bad experience, get mad about it, meanwhile people who come from different backgrounds rarely have this problem.
Finally, on SteamOS, on a SteamDeck, well youve got a matched and static OS and Hardware configuration. So... your emus either will or wont work, just gotta find one solution for one problem, or wait for the emu devs to patch a bug.
No need to figure out a million potential issues caused by a million potential different hardware configs on a Windows DesktopPC.
Kind of sidestepped why you generally don't want to use package managers for a lot of emulators but... okay.
Aside from that: it sounds like I have been speaking to linux as a whole whereas you are very specifically targeting SteamOS as on the Steam Deck. And... I fundamentally disagree with that approach. I love my Steam Deck.
But I very much do not like that we are potentially seeing exactly the same path that is Android on Google Phones. A fixed SKU and a fairly locked down "immutable" OS is user friendly, but it also gives the vendor immense levels of control over your device. And while it might start out nice with "Just install whatever you want on top of the official stuff", we can just look at Google/Android and how there has been an ever increasing push to "strongly discourage" people from using anything but the play store. And, as more and more security concerns arise, there will be an excuse to lock down even more of that.
Or, for that matter, remember when everyone and their mother touted Chrome as the solution to all the problems of Internet Explorer and Netscape (hmm) and so forth? And... yeah.
Because everything else in your post: All of those apply tenfold with Linux. Hell, I am likely going to set aside some time this weekend to fully purge and reinstall everything nvidia related on my desktop because I have had strange behaviors regarding wayland and gaming.
If your answer is that SteamOS specifically is more user friendly than Windows then sure, I'll give you that. But there are a LOT of implications of that. And, as we can see with the handheld that kicked this all off, we are actually looking at a fork of SteamOS that suddenly adds back in all of the "single hardware SKU" related issues. And... looks a lot like the start of the mess that is Android.
Sorry I am unable to reply again in exhaustive detail, but:
I have never had any significant problems using Linux native emulators on debian, set up to use sources and just be updated via sudo apt get update && sudo apt get uprade.
As to your troubles with Nvidia hardware, thats not surprising, they are far more black box with their code than AMD is, which is why Valve partnered with them for the SteamDeck.
As to an Android like situation, well, one, I meant fixed OS as in only one OS on the SteamDeck as opposed to multiple possible OSs, not as in immutable. SteamOS is not immutable. Its largely derived from Arch for Christs sake haha.
But all that aside, yes your Android style situation is possible, but uh to me that seems like a good argument to stick with a SteamDeck?
So, to summarize:
Also "immutable" is generally used to refer to how SteamOS handles package/library versions. Its an increasing push among many "user friendly" distros that I generally like. But it is also why we basically all said "Uhm... da fuq?" when ayaneo talked about running steamos. And is why they are actually running holoos (?).
Also, it predates the vast majority of us but it is worth looking at the actual rise of Windows. A lot of the arguments you are making have direct parallels to why people should use ms-dos and later windows over a lot of the older dos OSes. Or, again, look at the rise of Google Chrome and Android. A company can start off "awesome" but end up becoming the bogeyman we all hate.
Ok so youre being ludicrous now.
Would more accurately be stated as 'there are no problems if you can follow basic instructions and not wildly do things you dont fully understand'
This simply assumes as matter of indisputable fact that Valve having more marketshare is... bad? For... some reason? Is there some inherent reason why an extremely niche handheld basically gaming device with additional capabilities, a thing they pioneered not too long ago, is there some reason this is not entirely to be expected by a manufacturer pioneering a totally new kind of product?
Seriously, what?
Ok so very quickly, yes SteamOS is immutable amd I was unaware of that as I do not have literally all the free time in the world, but thats all irrelevant to the point I was making there?
I am not equipped with enough knowledge or foresight to perfectly predict the evolution of new products markets and technology and never claimed to, and you have suddenly shifted into that frame of reference to respond to me.
If Valve ever reverses course on being, you know, the most effective FOSS advocate in terms of getting members of the general public maybe likely to switch to FOSS to actually do so, then I will be pretty shocked and surprised.
If they suddenly come out with some kind of obvious policy that would be very bad for FOSS in general, then I'd be critical of it.
Companies shittifying is obviously a thing that happens in the tech industry, and I guess you see Valve laying some kind of groundwork for this. I currently disagree, but if it does happen, then everyone in FOSS will do what everyone in FOSS has always done and adapt.
I am sorry, I would think it would make way more sense to be critical of things like what Canonical has been doing for a while now if you want to be worried about the FOSS scene.
And Canonical also used to be everyone's poster child for how to support open source development at an enterprise-ish level... since Red Hat had already passed off the baton on that. Which has led to the hilarity of people arguing in favor of rocky as an alternative to the shitshow that ubuntu is becoming?
This is a cycle that happens time and time again. This is WHY people need to avoid deciding that one company is their friends and another company isn't. Instead, look at what the company is doing but be wary of how everything has repeatedly gone pear shaped in the past.
Because... Microsoft (especially since buying github...) actually do a LOT of really good work for the open source community as a side effect of supporting Windows (and WSL). I can say "Good job Microsfot" while still wanting nothing to do with win 10/11.
Similarly, Valve have and still are doing a LOT of really good stuff for "gaming on linux". I am not going to pretend that is not in their own self interest and largely a way to fend off Microsoft slowly starting to make inroads to PC gaming again. I am also not going to forget the years of stagnation that more or less lasted from the death of Desura up until GoG and EGS started becoming a thing.
Because, again, look at Google. Chrome was an amazing product and the monetary investment google pumped into Chromium made "life" a lot better both for developers and users. And it forced Mozilla to get their shit together. And now Chrome may actively be killing the internet as we know it if not enough people migrate away.
Again, I like Valve. I have since I read interviews with them about Half-Life 1 in various magazines. I had (and still have) concerns over what it meant for Steam to win "the DRM wars" (I think we would all be better off if Brad Wardell got hit by a bus and his successor at Stardock won because GOO was shockingly nice) but I can't at all argue that PC gaming is more alive as a result than it ever had been even before. But that doesn't mean that Valve will always be "good guys". Maybe GabeN dies underneath a collapsing cabinet full of his knife collection. Maybe he decides he wants to own a country and needs more cash.
But I am very cognizant of what can happen if the company that owns a de facto monopoly on an industry goes to the dark side. We have already seen exactly that happen with Microsoft and Google and others. Which is why I will advocate for Linux as a gaming alternative but keep "SteamOS" at arm's reach. Same as I advocate for Linux as a consumer desktop but don't overly recommend Fedora or Mint or whatever else. The beauty of Linux and open source (true FOSS or otherwise) is that it provides alternatives in the event a company or vendor shit the bed. And SteamOS... is very much a step toward a walled garden.