Latest 30 Comments

Quoting: Tethys84Except nobody will be able to afford the Steam Machine. I would be surprised if Valve didn't indefinitely delay or even eventually cancel it because of the skyrocketing prices on RAM alone.

It depends. If they made a fixed price contract early enough, they might be able to offer their boxes cheap.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Except nobody will be able to afford the Steam Machine. I would be surprised if Valve didn't indefinitely delay or even eventually cancel it because of the skyrocketing prices on RAM alone.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: posthum4nI made a chick crusher 2000 and now I feel bad.

With the bounding box changes do automated cooked chicken contraptions work anymore, I wonder. I'm curious if it didn't IMPROVE the rates actually.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: ArehandoroWhat about banking apps? Is the camera quality good? Does it have NFC? What's the battery duration?

I have it on my radar, but I'm still sceptical, and after having tried the PinePhone and the Librem 5 I'm also more conservative on money spending for phones.

Banking apps tend to be a no-go due to the Integrity API. Some do work though according to reports in the Telegram channel. I've never done banking on a phone. Camera is decent and will be improved in time with post processing. Battery is excellent for me, for example overnight it loses about 5%. I'm not a heavy user and could go a few days without charging but tend to top it up everyday to about 80%. The PinePhone lasted a few hours, doing nothing!

Read the reviews and check the Telegram, it's all there 😀

Edit: my FLX1 has NFC (never used!) but the new FLX1s does not.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: The_Real_BittermanI'm interested in whether if or when Valve will adopt Flatpak itself as their primary distribution format for the Steam Client.

Ngl Steam with flatpak might not be perfect especially if you have to grand it directory access to anything outside home. But for me personally Steam flatpak has been overall the best experience compared to their own dep package or any repack for any other distribution in their respective native packaging format.

TBH, I feel like I've had issues myself with some flatpak stuff. For Steam I always prefer to install it natively. I'm fine with flatpak getting more support but I would always prefer going through the official package manager for my distro.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Love the anti ai stance!

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

On the other side, as a solo game developer being able to generate some assets for your game can mean your project is now feasible.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I made a chick crusher 2000 and now I feel bad.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: vertigo

Quoting: The_Real_Bitterman

Quoting: vertigoMakes sense, it's feature complete and superseded by RTX Remix.

There is a RTX Remix? Always thought this only works on DirectX 9 titles as this is what nvidia made the remix studio for. Since OG Quake uses OpenGL as it's default engine I never expected a RTX Remix here.

Oh yeah, that's a very good point. Remix works with DX8 and DX9 games so maybe a source port would work?

Probably. I mean there was WinQuake of the first Quake which uses DirectX instead. And also made John Carmack not like DX over all 😅

I am very much certain someone will have made a DirectX port of Quake 2 over the years.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: RedjeI consider myself a casual user.
And I don’t really get the hype for flatpak. Me and friend of mine had several big annoying bugs. For example; in the steam flatplat my nvidia 3080 mobile was not working in games. And games installed outside flatpak worked just fine. And also apps just not working with flatpak, and local app just working as expected.

Flatpak is out there for 10years+ or so? And still such big issues…

This is a distribution or user issue not flatpak I'd assume.

Flatpak will install the required flatpak Nvidia driver runtimes automatically.

If you disable auto update in Gnome-Software or KDE Discover these runtimes will not be updated, apparently. As soon as your host system installs a new Nvidia driver package. Hence, the Nvidia driver is not "properly" installed for your flats.

Same happens with Mesa. Except that Mesa on the host can work with out-of-date Mesa in flatpak and does not require both to match the exact same version.

Simply run flatpak update and all your flats will work on your Nvidia GPU. Edit: Unless you have unloaded the Nvidia driver somehow by using things like prime-select. Which is unlikely as RTX 30 series do not require it anymore due to proper power management and offloading support since GTX 16 series and newer.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I'm interested in whether if or when Valve will adopt Flatpak itself as their primary distribution format for the Steam Client.

Ngl Steam with flatpak might not be perfect especially if you have to grand it directory access to anything outside home. But for me personally Steam flatpak has been overall the best experience compared to their own dep package or any repack for any other distribution in their respective native packaging format.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: RedjeI consider myself a casual user.
And I don’t really get the hype for flatpak. Me and friend of mine had several big annoying bugs. For example; in the steam flatplat my nvidia 3080 mobile was not working in games. And games installed outside flatpak worked just fine. And also apps just not working with flatpak, and local app just working as expected.

Flatpak is out there for 10years+ or so? And still such big issues…

Steam is a terrible example of flatpak - it's not created, or recommended by Valve. I'm actually not sure who created it, tbh, but it's a constant source of issues on our Discord support channel when people use it.

The "hype" for flatpak is two-fold. First, it's not distro-specific, so any Linux distro can install a flatpak and it'll generally give you the same experience regardless of what libraries you, personally, have installed, either manually, or through your distro. Second, it's containerised, which means that it has far less access to your PC than normally-installed software, hence less ability to negatively impact your system (e.g. through malware).

That second point is the cause of so many of the Steam issues. Games often need quite a lot of access - screen recording for Steam Replay, access to microphones, access to gamepads, sometimes even access to external filesystems (if you have a "Games" drive, for example). So a Steam flatpak was always going to be challenging. You can use flatseal to manage these permissions, or if you're on a recent version of KDE Plasma, you can manage them directly from within System Settings.

I kind of wonder if Valve will ever fully embrace flatpak and create an official version (and make it the recommended install). Might solve a few issues!

The limited access is nice on paper. I do agree, but it gives me so much extra work for some apps.
And from casual perspective, that is not a good experience.
I hope they can improve the flatpak experience in the future.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: RedjeI consider myself a casual user.
And I don’t really get the hype for flatpak. Me and friend of mine had several big annoying bugs. For example; in the steam flatplat my nvidia 3080 mobile was not working in games. And games installed outside flatpak worked just fine. And also apps just not working with flatpak, and local app just working as expected.

Flatpak is out there for 10years+ or so? And still such big issues…

Steam is a terrible example of flatpak - it's not created, or recommended by Valve. I'm actually not sure who created it, tbh, but it's a constant source of issues on our Discord support channel when people use it.

The "hype" for flatpak is two-fold. First, it's not distro-specific, so any Linux distro can install a flatpak and it'll generally give you the same experience regardless of what libraries you, personally, have installed, either manually, or through your distro. Second, it's containerised, which means that it has far less access to your PC than normally-installed software, hence less ability to negatively impact your system (e.g. through malware).

That second point is the cause of so many of the Steam issues. Games often need quite a lot of access - screen recording for Steam Replay, access to microphones, access to gamepads, sometimes even access to external filesystems (if you have a "Games" drive, for example). So a Steam flatpak was always going to be challenging. You can use flatseal to manage these permissions, or if you're on a recent version of KDE Plasma, you can manage them directly from within System Settings.

I kind of wonder if Valve will ever fully embrace flatpak and create an official version (and make it the recommended install). Might solve a few issues!

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: fabertaweThat's already available, it's called the FuriPhone <https://furilabs.com/>. I've been daily driving the FLX1 for almost a year and it's fantastic. Don't really game on it though, apart from chess and the like.

What about banking apps? Is the camera quality good? Does it have NFC? What's the battery duration?

I have it on my radar, but I'm still sceptical, and after having tried the PinePhone and the Librem 5 I'm also more conservative on money spending for phones.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

You'll even get to craft nametags so you know who is who.

To be clear, you could already use name tags to name animals, but you could only acquire name tags (fishing, loot or trading). It's being able to craft the name tags yourself that's new.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: datablobThat's cool, I think. Heh. I still don't entirely understand what ntsync does in practice, I saw that CachyOS also adopted it a while ago and read something about timing consistency. Can anyone elaborate?

Liam did a bit of an overview when it was about to land in Linux 6.14.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/01/ntsync-driver-for-improving-windows-games-on-linux-with-wine-proton-should-finally-land-in-linux-kernel-614/

The gist is that Windows has a function for a program to wait for multiple conditions and Linux doesn't. Wine first emulated that function in user space with the waits that Linux did have, but that wasn't great. But putting Windows in the kernel isn't great, either. So there have been progressing attempts to have the function working with proper performance whilst minimising the amount that having Windows games running bothers the kernel devs. ntsync is the third attempt, I think, with the first two approaches improving performance and the third improving correctness.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I consider myself a casual user.
And I don’t really get the hype for flatpak. Me and friend of mine had several big annoying bugs. For example; in the steam flatplat my nvidia 3080 mobile was not working in games. And games installed outside flatpak worked just fine. And also apps just not working with flatpak, and local app just working as expected.

Flatpak is out there for 10years+ or so? And still such big issues…

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I wish KoTor 1&2 supported workshop, I can't currently make mods work on Steam is :(

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Still Valve not providing price of those devises is very disturbing with RAM prices still skyrocketing up...

I have some bad feelings about this. At this point $1,000 price for Steam Machine is becoming rather most optimistic scenario.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Windows went 64bit, but there was work on the Steam Linux Runtime for 64bit. We'll see it one day...

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Not perfectly on topic, but wasn't there chat recently about Steam going 64bit? Or was that Windows only?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: LoudTechieYeah, there're actually several.
The problem is just as always third party software compatibility(and this time also less expensive competition).

There are people in the Telegram support channel that have tried every Linux phone and reckon this is the only one which is truly daily drivable. I've only had a Pine Phone, which was not and there's just no comparison to my FLX1. You can read the reviews on their web site or join the Telegram channel. Support is first class.

It's running Debian so either install from the command line or Gnome "Software", including Flatpaks. The Android container (Andromeda) runs F-Droid, Aurora Store, whatever and compatibility's pretty good (Integrity API is a no go, obviously). The Wife's due a new phone so I tried Whatsapp for her and that worked, so I may get her a new FLX1s and she can ditch Google as well.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

The ARM SteamOS project runs so deep huh, I honestly have been less apprehensive about the adoption towards this architecture as of late since so much work is being put into compatibility for it. Hopefully this can help keep hardware budgets at least a bit somewhat in check.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: fabertawe

Quoting: dannielloAnd in the near future - Steam Pocket. The first true Linux phone with decent performance! (of course advertised as only for gaming, so Google should be OK with it... In the same sense like Steam Machine is just Linux PC so Sony and Microsoft also should be OK with it;)

That's already available, it's called the FuriPhone <https://furilabs.com/>. I've been daily driving the FLX1 for almost a year and it's fantastic. Don't really game on it though, apart from chess and the like.

It's incredibly liberating to be free of Google, using Linux 😀

As for the Frame, really looking forward to getting one.

Yeah, there're actually several.
The problem is just as always third party software compatibility(and this time also less expensive competition).

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: dannielloAnd in the near future - Steam Pocket. The first true Linux phone with decent performance! (of course advertised as only for gaming, so Google should be OK with it... In the same sense like Steam Machine is just Linux PC so Sony and Microsoft also should be OK with it;)

That's already available, it's called the FuriPhone <https://furilabs.com/>. I've been daily driving the FLX1 for almost a year and it's fantastic. Don't really game on it though, apart from chess and the like.

It's incredibly liberating to be free of Google, using Linux 😀

As for the Frame, really looking forward to getting one.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

That's cool, I think. Heh. I still don't entirely understand what ntsync does in practice, I saw that CachyOS also adopted it a while ago and read something about timing consistency. Can anyone elaborate?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

While it's nice to see the support coming, for most games it won't make much difference compared to fsync which is already pretty good (as you note in your article).

Still, in the future, ntsync might become the default, so the sooner it's supported the better, I'd say.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

As a retro game enthusiast, I really like what MicroProse is doing.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Waiting for this too. This would make my setup 100% Linux ready. Only VR was an issue as support for the Sony PSVR2 isn't there yet. And the Frane is native. Very cool.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Hhmmm.... Why does this look exactly like an extension gameplay to Carrier Command 2? 😅

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment