Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

iliana.fyi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 258 posts

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#81

Post by MrNeon »

kaetemi wrote: post #17
daveidol wrote: post #11

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.

If my cheat puts my crosshair on the opponent's head automatically what about that information is untrustworthy that would make you throw it out?

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#82

Post by Arnavion »

ho_schi wrote: post #57
COGlory wrote: 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…

>First. That is wrong. Important features like cgroups, namespace and containers/Flatpak where novelly developed upon Linux.

I get your overall point, but the first "process containers" code that later became cgroups was merged to the kernel in 2007. Windows came out with the Job Objects API in Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) in 2000.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#83

Post by developerDan »

hhh wrote: post #70
ho_schi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why don’t people like Linux? Because it takes 8 bloody commands to do something as simple as add a new drive whereas Windows you can just open disk utility and format. I bounced off Linux a few weeks ago over this. It’s for people who want to tinker more than actually use the system.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#84

Post by bravetraveler »

colordrops wrote: post #79
bravetraveler wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could you provide details on how you got gamescope working with sway? What is the full command line you used? I believe I ran into problems with it conflicting with XWayland or something like that.

Sure thing! Here's an example command line (from Steam):

    env DXVK_ASYNC=1 SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11 gamemoderun taskset --cpu-list 0-7,16-23 gamescope -W 3840 -H 2160 -r 160 -o 160 --borderless --fullscreen --rt --steam  -- %command%
Gamescope has become odd with the introduction of '--expose-wayland'.

I think the 'SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11' part may be key; I didn't need this before, but now I often do. Not every game requires it. It's weird.

It helps if something crashes because "wayland isn't available". Adding '|& tee /tmp/game.log' is useful for debugging.

Pinning (taskset)/gamemode stuff left for context. This example gives a game the cache-rich threads on a 7950X3D.

Beyond '--adaptive-sync'... I believe VRR calls for the feature to be enabled on the output in Sway.

See 'man 5 sway-output', looking for 'adaptive_sync' for more info on that

edit: One last note. I'm on Fedora - the libraries here are so new that Flatpak-based Steam tends to work best.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#85

Post by IshKebab »

arendtio wrote: post #51
IshKebab wrote: post #21

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…

> However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary.

Nonsense. It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days, but anti-cheat technology definitely raises the bar. It's only "unnecessary" if you're willing to accept a large number of cheaters.

Some anti-cheat stuff definitely goes to far but to dismiss the idea entirely is just naïve.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#86

Post by bee_rider »

eropple wrote: post #62
OJFord wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 every…

>> 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.

It seems like a somewhat odd observation, is it really necessary to have another user to do this? I can easily switch between Gnome, i3, and Sway on my system, I mean that’s going between X and Wayland, no issues… maybe KDE and Gnome have some specific incompatibility though? Odd.

Anyway, at least there’s a workaround. If Gnome is a hard requirement, how is Windows even a candidate?

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#87

Post by kuschku »

j1elo wrote: post #41
kaetemi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, m…

> 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.

The very same way that you'd do it on the client. If I run an aimbot on an nvidia jetson devkit, using HDMI in to get the screen image and USB emulation to send inputs, your anticheat has to do the same work regardless if it's on the client or the server.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#88

Post by dixie_land »

mat0 wrote: post #67

What a thorough and interesting post. I would personally never do something like this. The most tinkering I've ever done with Linux was in my RaspberryPi era and that's 1% at most. So props to the author

I was in a similar situation as the author: for quite a while I had to build my own Redhat kernel for a very obscure case: by pass RMRR check to pass GPU to a windows VM. (similar to https://github.com/kiler129/relax-intel-rmrr ; not my repo)

The root issue can only be addressed by ROM updates from the manufacturer but I'm running an old DL360 that's no longer supported by HPE.

The patch itself is only one line change but updating the kernel is a pain since I have to : - get SRPM (there's no git repo) - unpack SRPM, apply patch - rebuild and install

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#89

Post by bee_rider »

jorvi wrote: post #4
coffeebeqn wrote: post #2

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…

I’m not sure why people are trying to convince you; Linux is free so there really isn’t any benefit to us Linux users or to the Linux developers if you switch…

Valve should be the only one that is worried about your opinion here. I think they develop SteamOS as a backup plan, though, in case Microsoft ever starts to take their own App Store seriously.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#90

Post by kuschku »

mainde wrote: post #69
arendtio wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

You're right in that, if your server rejects inputs that are too fast, too precise, too robotic to be human, bots will emulate the top-playing humans ever more closely.

But the question I want to ask is: Is that a problem?

If all the bots and cheaters are playing indistinguishable from high-level real humans, where's the harm?

Or, to quote Westworld: If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?

Post reply on HN