Want to learn more about Arch Linux? In October they've confirmed Arch Conf 2020 is happening and there's going to be plenty of interesting talks. All of which will be online of course, especially with COVID19 still raging on.
The dates set for it are between October 10-11 and the talks will be quite varied starting with a talk about the past, present and future of Arch Linux as the first which starts on October 10, 10:00am UTC.
For Linux gaming enthusiasts, a lot of this won't be all that interesting unless you really want to know the ins and outs of Arch Linux and the ecosystem surrounding it. However, one talk in particular did manage to catch my eye and it could prove to be interesting. On October 11, 15:00 UTC there's a talk from Alesh Slovak, the founder of the Arch-based and SteamOS-like distribution GamerOS which we've written about a few times. This talk will cover:
An overview of GamerOS, an Arch Linux based distro that provides an out of the box couch gaming experience. Find out what GamerOS is, how it came to be, and what makes it unique.
Since currently GamerOS is probably the best out of the box experience for a big-screen console-like setup, especially as Valve aren't currently doing anything with SteamOS (they may return to it though), GamerOS is a Linux distribution that's certainly worth keeping an eye on.
We'll be watching it and highlighting anything interesting.
You can find the full event info here. The first revision of the talk schedule can be found here.
The problem is that this is tied to Steam. I'd love a more store agnostic experience - something like a big screen Lutris that can also work with Epic, Uplay, Origin (I think they are renaming that to EA Play) and GOG. Because, otherwise, what is the fundamental difference with setting Steam to start in Big Picture Mode at boot?Just setting something to start at boot involves plenty of manual work behind the scenes to get everything setup, and to keep it working properly. GamerOS, like SteamOS, takes away all the manual work and just lets you focus on the games. That's the point.
Speaking of Valve, I'm worried at how long it's been since the last Proton update. This is leaps and bounds the longest I can remember them going without an update. Even glorious eggroll has only had 1 update in months, and that's mostly a maintenance release. I wonder what the hold up is?
I suspect they they might be waiting for better DX12 support, or something else big, to be well on the way before the next update. Early on we were getting frequent updates because DXVK was changing fast, which isn't the case any more. Wine has been concentrating on long-term plumbing recently, too, so there's not been anything must-have from that side, either, at the moment. I don't think there's any cause for concern just yet.
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