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I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

iliana.fyi

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Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#41
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#42
post #23
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll dissent. 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 sma…

FYI Valve is primarily deploying KDE, which does support VRR. They can't really control what dumb decisions the GNOME folks make. For Mirror's Edge, were you using Steam Input?

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.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#43
post #4

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

I’ll dissent. 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 sma…

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

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#44

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.

> 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.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#45
post #28
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I also run a Windows VM for gaming 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.

It seems like you haven't looked into it much since it's was feasible for last 7-8 years..

Linux hosts had GPU passthrough working well before commercial software had such options. Nowadays it's just work out-of-box with Virt-Manager that just run QEMU under KVM.

It's been working for years for 99.9% of games excluding some invasive anti-cheats that ban you for VMs, but there literally only a few games that have issue with virtualization.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#46
post #5
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome. How does proton treat anti-cheat software or DRM?

Works if the developer enables it. For example: Halo Infinite works fine, but Destiny and Call of Duty don't.

* depending on the anti-cheat or DRM

This is true for at least EAC/EasyAntiCheat. This covers a lot, sure, but not everything!

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#47
post #7
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works if the developer enables it. For example: Halo Infinite works fine, but Destiny and Call of Duty don't.

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.

Beat Saber does work on Linux if you can deal with VR on Linux’s quirks.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#48
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those games with anti-cheats are anti-player garbage anyway. You don't lose much without them.

I wish the Linux/OSS communities were less like this and more welcoming.

Why aren't you saying that the DRM software is the unwelcoming party?

That user would happily play that game, but the game publisher doesn't want them.

Incredible.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#49

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 t…

That is crazy, thanks for sharing!
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