You're posting in a thread discussing news of a legal outcome that showed that free market competition did not prevent anti-competitive practices and instead required legal/regulatory intervention to solve.
To say that these are "anti-competitive practices" is stretching the phrase beyond all meaning. If you don't like Deere's policies, you can always buy from Case IH or New Holland. There is plenty of competition in farm equipment.
Most can't "always" immediately replace an incredibly expensive business asset that is only retroactively discovered to have been sold under deceptive terms. The free market works well in many instances, but it needs checks to ensure that it remains truly free and not captured by fraudulent actors that harm consumers and society at large.
SteamOS is Arch with atomic updates and some custom patches here and there. The system stack is pretty standard; Mesa drivers, Steam Linux Runtime, Proton, it's all what ships on every other distro. The only significant difference is that games run in gamescope-session by default, but that isn't exclusive to SteamOS either and doesn't meaningfully affect the execution of software, it's just a different window manager.
In all your posts I haven't seen you actually explain what it is that's so different about it.
Let me take the game developer lens. You love Linux and want to support Linux. What is the cost to you?
SteamDeck is a very specific set of hardware running a very specific OS with a specific runtime. This is very easy. The fact that it is Linux is almost immaterial. If it were not Linux at all it would require a similar amount of effort. Might as well be a Nintendo Switch.
Now let’s imagine you want to support generic Linux desktop with a native Linux exe. May God have mercy on your soul. Deploying pre-compiled binaries that run on an infinite number of hardware variations running an infinite number of local variables env permutations is an unfathomable nightmare.
Once upon a time I shipped a native Linux binary (Planetary Annihilation). Somewhat infamously our Linux users were less than 1% of users but ~50% of bug reports. And no it wasn’t because Linux users simply report more general gameplay bugs.
These days you can support Linux by just giving them a Win32 binary. Which is objectively hilarious.
In any case. It would be profoundly fascinating to know the number of gameplay hours played across OSs. And I would imagine that SteamDeck accounts for over 90% of Linux gaming hours.
The Year of the Linux Desktop is still not here. Not yet. IMHO. YMMV.
Steam Deck is an x64-based PC running Arch Linux with FOSS Mesa drivers, which are shared among all modern AMD GPUs. There's extra wrinkles with Nvidia GPUs, but their proprietary driver is the Windows driver with a bunch of kludges to get it to work on Linux and if you're using Vulkan then it's mostly the same code paths. It's also improved greatly in the past couple years.
You're right about native Linux binaries, but the rub is that you don't need to create generic binaries, there's a bunch of options that use containers to deal with environmental permutations and given the Linux version of Planetary Annihilation uses the Steam Linux Runtime environment, you know this.
It is funny that supporting Linux is as easy as providing a win32 binary, but it's not a joke. This is the case because it works.
I think your experience is a little out of date, or you've somehow been missing what's been happening over the last half decade, because in practice gaming on Linux is now absolutely fantastic. Not just on Steam Deck, as since Valve is using the same general software stack that every other distro uses, all the improvements they've made have permeated out to the rest of the ecosystem. On my CachyOS PC with an RTX 3090, the only games that consistently give me problems anymore are titles that ship with kernel-level anti-cheat. Otherwise when I buy something from Steam I simply assume that it'll work.
Steam Deck sales have actually softened quite a bit over the last couple of years, all this recent explosive growth has been driven by desktop users.
I've been following this all pretty closely, it's been exciting. The year of the linux desktop is kind of a punchline, but it's sort of a misnomer anyway. It was never going to happen in the span of a year. But it has been happening; when online discussion spaces can never seem to shut the hell up about all these new idiot users asking all these stupid questions, that's when you know you're seeing a lot of growth.
PA Titans is pretty good! Definitely niche. In hindsight the whole spherical planets thing is definitely bad. Vanilla flat rectangular maps would have been better.
One of the interesting consequences of Kickstarter is you get hard locked into “promises” even if those ideas turn out to be bad. Naval was so bad but it was a stretch goal so had to ship it. Lesson learned!
I wasnt wrong. It took them 17 years to come to an agreement. Just because they “just decided” this year or last year or whatever doesn’t make me wrong. And my point about them not caring about timely decisions was in my original comment so I didn’t write some garbage hopping from one idea to another.
The cadence of decisions being made and problems being solved on Wayland has massively increased over the last 5 years and being ignorant to that and implying that the project is still spinning it's wheels is delusional.
Calling your posts garbage isn't an expression of anger. You should try being a little less sensitive when people mock you for saying dumb shit.
The cadence is still too slow and pathetic but clearly your dip shit brain is involved with Wayland as you’re getting defensive about it. These things should have been established 10 years ago at the very least, as the article says, computers and display servers aren’t a new puzzle to figure out. You should lay yourself down on some railroad tracks so you can remove your dumb shit self from this world.
The irony of telling someone they have anger issues because they were told something they said was garbage, then literally responding later in the thread with a "kill yourself". A reminder, doing this is a criminal offense in many jurisdictions, something you're liable to forget if you have anger issues that prevent you from thinking about what you say.
You're the one who needs help, bucko. That, or the people in your social circle (if there are any).
Wayland is why Steam Deck is a product. Gamescope, the compositor it uses for all the features that makes it compelling to buy, uses it and it's features heavily.
Desktop Linux was never going to go anywhere stuck on X. Wayland is happening, it's currently going through it's trial by fire and in the end (and for a lot of people, right now) it'll be better for it.
It's easy to say Wayland has been around forever and barely progressed, but for me it's pretty easy to see, based on the massive amount of fixed issues and new features being added to Wayland, that we're no longer on the horizontal part of the curve. It seems a lot of people have become blind to it's exponential growth. Also the growth of desktop Linux adoption, which is real and happening, in spite of 'Wayland setting Linux Desktop back by 10 years'.
Gamescope is custom sw built by Valve, and all the games run under X (via Xwayland). I'd suspect you could build similar functionality without Wayland (for example a custom X server talking to directly to the kernel DRM).
I'd wager in a alternate universe where Wayland didn't have all the mindshare, Steam Deck would still be a product (unless some butterfly effect nixed it).
Better than trying to make a point and failing to make it. And if I didn't, at least I tried to be funny as that counts for something, your comment is just noise.
My comment is a fact, without the Windows games ecosystem, by developers living and breathing on Windows, with Windows development tools, Proton has nothing to play, even if many of Windows games are developed on top of cross-platform engines.
Unfortunely Valve failed to make native Linux gaming a reality, not even game studios targeting Android NDK bother, which has the same 3D and audio APIs as GNU/Linux.
> Unfortunely Valve failed to make native Linux gaming a reality
Who cares? What would that actually achieve and how would they have practically achieved it anyway? Use their store platform to force or coerce developers? Hold a gun to developers heads?
Valve don't owe anyone shit, neither did PC compatible BIOS manufacturers, nor anyone else who creates a clean room implementation of a pre-existing API. Getting Windows software working outside of Windows is a net good for consumers and developers.
Is anything around forever? What kind of argument is this?
Proton works by wrapping Windows calls to Linux equivalents, which have been improving and becoming more robust as a result of this work. If the Windows game ecosystem collapses (How? When? It's literally never been more popular) then those equivalent APIs can be targeted instead. Meanwhile, the absolutely massive PC back catalogue, the platform's greatest strength, remains playable.
> There are multiple cases of this: OBS can't screen record (it segfaults instead), I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol.
Yeah. And? They did that. On my Wayland desktop, copy and paste works fine, window previews work fine, OBS screen capture works fine.
> The actual "threat model" here is baffling and doesn't seem to reflect a need for users. Applications are not able to see each other's windows, but they're not able to interact in any other way that could potentially cause problems?
In any other way? The last paragraph just explained the other way.
That's when I stopped reading. If they can't even make a coherent, reasonable argument from the start and instead just blast out a bunch of bullshit, no one should be listening.
They actually wouldn't, since they'd be sampling the new arrangement. They could reconstruct a new, similar sounding arrangement based on the original samples, but it'd be have to be different enough to that new arrangement so as not to be considered derivative of it.
That also applies to generative AI, pure output may not be copyrightable but as soon as you do something beyond type some words and press a button, like doing area-specific infills and paintovers, which involve direct and deliberate choices by a human, the copyrighted human-driven arrangement becomes so deeply intertwined with the generative work that it's effectively inseperable.
You might be thinking of fair use, but that's an affirmative defence. Every time someone has copied someone elses artwork and modified it into a meme, that's copyright infringement and remains so even if is eventually ruled as fair use. If you make a fair use claim, you don't deny infringement, you make the claim that you were allowed to infringe.
Nintendo have done anticompetitive things before and were legally punished for it. Just because something is video games doesn't make it's business decisions unserious and unworthy of regulatory enforcement.
Steam Deck is a gaming-focused handheld PC. It has a software certification system similar in function to what you see on console. If a user sticks within that environment, they essentially have the "console experience". There could be less friction with stronger certification enforcement, but Valve are consciously less strict for ideological and practical reasons. Is Steam Deck fixed function? Valve seems to intend it to be so, they just provide options for those who want to break free of the default gaming-centric environment.
Sony could provide an optionally accessible VM running a Linux distro, providing access to an open environment to install and run the stores that they want. Would it break their business model? Maybe, but no one is entitled to business models that are blatantly anti-competitive. It also wouldn't prevent it from being a fixed function console for those who want that, given that engagement with those features would remain a choice.
"Fixed function" isn't an excuse to build a vertical monopoly. It's been a long time coming for the console razor blade marketing model to come under scrutiny and Sony meets the criteria of being a gatekeeper under EU's DMA. When I look at what Microsoft is doing with Helix (which everyone else seems to be confused by) I get the feeling that Microsoft is anticipating exactly that outcome and getting out ahead of it.
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