I forked SteamOS for my living room PC • Hacker News Board

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#111

Post by infecto » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #108

infecto wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are conflating ideas. I don’t think it will be a productive discussion to go down the road of anticheat systems and DRM. We can all have opinions that are different. What is productive is calling out hostile behavior and comments that do nothing but hurt the ecosystem. I see these type of strong negative opinions in a lot of areas of the Linux community. “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the pro…

> What is productive is calling out hostile behavior Okay; anti-cheat is user-hostile. > “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that” Okay, the thing I want is to use a game that I paid for, play it on the machine I own, and run it without giving it any special privileges (certainly not modifying my kernel). I trust that you will support that and not be negative about the way I want to u…

What are you even arguing? I am not here debating if drm/anticheat is good or bad.

I am saying it’s hostile to tell someone who wants to run software but cannot because of a limitation in the OS that it does not matter because it’s garbage anyway.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#112

Post by bsimpson » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 6:17 PM UTC

I recently got my hands on a gaming handheld (the Legion Go) and have used it to get more exposure to Linux. I'd historically avoided it, because it seemed like a perpetual tinker timesink with limited compatibility with things I'd actually want to use. Reading about immutable filesystems and how traditional Linux gives root willy-nilly to all sorts of random software piqued my curiosity.

I'm using NixOS, which can indeed be a tinker timesink, but is good for exploration. You can easily try different components, and then completely remove them (aside from some ~/.config pollution) if you don't want to keep them. It's also trivial to patch things before you install them (such as adding some kernel patches to make Linux usable on esoteric hardware like a gaming handheld).

There's a NixOS community called Jovian that's reconstructing Valve's random SteamOS tarballs into tagged commits on GitHub, which you can browse as if you were a Valve employee. They've made it so you can install your own copy of SteamOS atop NixOS by adding a few lines to your Nix configuration. They're clearly Linux experts, and you can see from the source that you're getting Valve's packages unadulterated, save for simple adaptations like introspecting instead of hardcoding the power button location.

So, if you want a pure SteamOS experience without hosting your own mirror of Valve's update system (or if you want to be able to browse Valve's source without downloading a 3GB tarball), give Jovian a try.

Install instructions: https://jovian-experiments.github.io/Jovian-NixOS/getting-st...

Mirrors of Valve's source: https://github.com/orgs/Jovian-Experiments/repositories?type...

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#113

Post by freedomben » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 6:17 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #89

jorvi wrote: 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…

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.

That is surely part of the consideration, but certainly not all. Some engineers at Valve (especially the head honcho Gabe Newell) are legit Linux people (Debian IIRC). They believe in it, and I love them for it

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#114

Post by FirmwareBurner » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 6:18 PM UTC

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…

>Windows users always find a reason not to switch to Linux because some missing feature.

Because the OS is a tool, not a religious/political statement.

Therefore I'll use it if it works the way I need it and it solves my problem, or not use it if it doesn't work the way I want it and ends up creating more problems for me than it solves. Simple.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#115

Post by 0x457 » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 6:21 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #68

arendtio wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are cheats today that takes your monitor output and act like a hardware mouse. There is nothing you can do with game design about it.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#116

Post by luma » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 6:23 PM UTC

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…

You're using the phrase "MBA thinking" to mean "making decisions based on your personal use case and identifying solutions which match".

I'm not sure how this is a bad thing. I don't run Linux to run games because Windows is a better supported platform for running games. I'm not "looking at past numbers", I'm looking at the situation in front of me as it exists, setting aside my personal feeling on what might have been and instead focusing on what actually exists, today, for the problem I am looking to solve today.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#117

Post by freedomben » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

toxicunderGroov wrote: post #73

bazzite.gg alsof does this very well. On AMD hardware it did 120hz VRR out of the box and u can alpha test HDR support.

I'm shocked that Bazzite isn't more well known. It's exactly what I dreamed about but didn't know existed until recently

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#118

Post by jokethrowaway » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

Interesting read! The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong.

I recently moved to Arch after a few years of NixOS (preceded by years of Arch) and I think the fears of the author are misplaced.

Arch is definitely a very serious and mature distro and I'd trust them more than Valve.

The quality of the packages available for Arch is what made me move from NixOS. The main repos are updated really fast and AUR has a lot of useful packages.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#119

Post by j1elo » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #87

j1elo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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, usin…

I think that makes sense; but doing it on the client means that your computer has to do the work for you, thus distributing the load among all clients. Doing it on the server would mean that their machine has to do the work for all players.

If we complain about companies being too quick closing up their servers when games are not as successful as they hoped... imagine if those servers were x10 or more expensive, due to that kind of analysis for all players. Companies would be much quicker to pull the plug, I guess.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#120

Post by eropple » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 6:32 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #86

eropple wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 W…

> maybe KDE and Gnome have some specific incompatibility though

It's a layer down from the DE itself, it's the window manager beneath it. GNOME ships Mutter and KDE ships KWin. GNOME is pretty tightly tied to Mutter; KDE is less tied to KWin, but KWin also tends to support shinier features than Mutter does anyway so I don't know why you wouldn't use it anyway.

> It seems like a somewhat odd observation, is it really necessary to have another user to do this?

Strictly no, but having to have another login session, period, is bonkers to me. It's reasonable to respond to that suggestion with incredulity.

> If Gnome is a hard requirement, how is Windows even a candidate?

For me, it's not. At the moment it's inertia, because Windows has legit become the best Linux dev environment I know of with WSL2. I originally switched back to a Linux desktop because I was working on some hardware stuff that benefited from being on a Linux platform, but I'm certainly not tied to it past that.