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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

#61
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doing so requires a SteamVR headset, though. I’m using a Quest 2 which only works well with Windows.

Up to date compelling SteamVR options are starting to appear however so I might see if I can move over to one of those in the next year or two.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#62
post #55
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ada…

> 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.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#63
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#64
post #15

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)

Not every gamer wants an esport experience to have fun

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.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#65
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely appreciate you proving my point. I am not here debating DRM or anticheat. Simple pointing out that telling someone the game they play is garbage because it uses anticheat does nothing but hurts the Linux ecosystem. You can come up with another essay but I don’t think it disproves what I am saying. Telling someone the game they play is garbage is not increasing the Linux user base. I am sure there will be…

[flagged]

Sorry I am not going down this low brow path. We can agree to disagree. I just don’t think it helps an ecosystem to tell people the software they want to run is garbage.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#66
post #42
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ada…

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?)

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRM is not the same as anti-cheat.

They are not, but both are symptoms of a consumer-disrespecting mindset. - DRM does not serve the consumer, but the producer. - Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. And if someone cannot design a game, their anti-cheat is often a disservice to the consumer. I don't like either DRM or anti-cheat solutions…

> Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary.

That silly "speed of light" thing? Just design better.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#69
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I think that there are very few tasks in competitive multiplayer games that humans perform better than machines[1], I don't think your statement holds true unless you exclude a huge amount of game genres or you take all the fun out of them. (E.g. no FPSs or ..FPSs with no aiming?)

[1] Unless we're talking about captcha solving competitions, for now, maybe. :)

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#70
post #57
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154 You can install it upon Arch from AUR. Putting that aside: 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…

I don’t want to tweak stuff for a week to get a comparable experience playing games to a fresh W11 install.
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