Recall for Linux

You wouldn't rather have only some of your location recorded? I don't understand the appeal of saving all data all the time.

It's akin to going to a concert and recording the whole thing, versus recording a small bit that feels memorable, so you can enjoy the rest of the experience fully present.

> ...I don't use Debian or Ubuntu...

Neither do I.

I've been using Gentoo for twenty-three years (since 2002). I stopped looking for equally-well-managed alternatives somewhere between 2012 and 2015. I have enough local compute that the build times for everything other than Chromium aren't a problem. If I didn't, I could use the official prebuilt binary packages that have been around for a few years.

> ...I don't think it's a good idea to only support [.deb or .rpm packages].

If you can do more, you should, yes. However, -as a hobbyist open-source programmer- I recognize that other hobbyists only have so much time and giveashit available.

The absolute best thing they can do is provide a source tarball that builds and installs correctly with './configure && make && make install' [0] or the language-specific equivalent. Any competent distro package management system will make it somewhere between trivial and pretty easy for others to package projects like this up. [1]

If they have more time and giveashit available, make prebuilt .deb packages so that your software is trivially installable for the most users out there. If you find yourself with more spare resources, then write packages for other OS package managers to get the remaining small fraction of Linux users.

The absolute worst thing to do would be to assume you MUST package your software for every distro out there (lest someone whine at you on the Internet), decide that that's way too much work, and not publish anything. As someone who has many, many unstarted projects because they seem like way too much work, I can tell you that that's a totally real failure mode.

[0] Perhaps with an optional side-trip to 'make test'.

[1] Unless they're using something godawful to package like NodeJS.

> Are you saying I am being unnecessarily cautious?

Yeah, definitely. Given enough time, you absolutely will find games that don't work under Linux, but I expect that such games will be few and far between. Though, games with extremely invasive anticheat (such as Valorant) will almost certainly never, ever work on Linux. Games that use less-invasive anticheat like Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) (such as Elden Ring or Hunt: Showdown) work. [0]

I have just shy of 500 games in my Steam library. Maybe three or five of them have Linux builds. I've run into only a handful of games that don't work correctly on Linux. [1]

As others have said, you can check ProtonDB to get an idea of whether a game will work for you. But:

1) ProtonDB is not always accurate. For instance, sometimes it says that a bunch of workarounds are needed, but everything works just fine with Proton in Steam. Other times, it says a game works, but it doesn't. On my computer, HighFleet is an example of a game that's said to work, but doesn't.

2) In my experience, games just work. For the very rare ones that don't, I go look around to see if there are easy workarounds, and -so far- there always have been.

[0] Though, specifically for EAC, if you have more than something like 28 CPUs, you need to limit the number of CPUs that Proton will tell EAC about, or it will fail with an unhelpful error. You'd do that by setting WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY like this: https://www.protondb.com/app/1245620#4SzWJRl8sv>, altering the string in the obvious way if claiming you only have 28 CPUs doesn't work and you need to claim you have fewer.

[1] I've also run into one (Ruiner) that has a Linux build that's far, far worse than the Windows build. It turns out that you can force a game that has both Windows and Linux builds to run the Windows version by going to the Compatibility tab in the game's properties and force the use of one of the Proton versions. My go-to is 'Proton Experimental', as that seems to be the Steam default.

In the end, age comes for us all. I pay for the Mac version of this software. I bought concert tickets to something, but couldn't find the confirmation email, but did find the credit card charge. So where did the tickets go? Did I hallucinate buying them? In the end, I rewound to the late night buying session to find that I'd misspelled the email address and the platform didn't confirm my email before sending.

Of course, that would never happen to you, but it saved my bacon.

I actually kinda like recall as a feature. I only really use Linux so can't use recall but honestly the only problem with recall is your data being tracked. A big issue, but if it was done with the guarantee that it's all end to end encrypted and whatnot, I don't really see the problem.