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@vertigo which GPU and cable.? I'm on a 7800XT running CachyOS and Bazzite (both on KDE), using a DisplayPort 2.1 connected to an AOC monitor, and have zero issues with VRR.

@Lofty Bazzite and CachyOS are both good options. Expect CachyOS to get 6.5 soon (available already in the Arch testing repo if you want to try it now), Bazzite will be a bit later but still will get it sooner than most other distros. I'd recommend CachyOS only if you're a bit technical and don't mind ocassionally getting your hands dirty (aka using the terminal, maybe to fix something). Bazzite on the other hand is a great option if you want something that "just works™".

Avoid Ubuntu-based distros like the plague, they're always outdated and tend to break when you do upgrades.

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I really don't get why people use wordpress for static webpage content...

It's a huge attack surface to keep secure with all its features.

What's also a bit embarassing is this happening to a server managed by Canonical, as far as I understand. Linux Mint went through a similar issue years ago, but their team is really tiny.

I hope they're as swift and transparent as the Mint team on how it happened, who may have been affected, what they did to prevent new issues, etc

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The only thing that puts me off is the small screen. My eyes aren't getting any younger.

Most text in most games is around the size of text on a phone or a paperback, or bigger. The OLED screen is marginally bigger than the LCD screen.

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But i don't really know of a stable distro with an upto date version of KDE?

Kubuntu has Plasma 6.5.0 in the backports PPA.

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im using KDE 5.27.12 in Linux mint, its been almost entirely bug free and recovered from most if not all crashes. I can't imagine how good it would be on 6.5 ! But i don't really know of a stable distro with an upto date version of KDE?

Manjaro was my goto for ages, loved it. But then they were adding the 'opt-out' data collection and refused to change it. Im also wasn't keen on the arrogant denial'ist approach of some of their dev's when the community speaks out. Other flavors of Arch are pretty cool but i usually at most manage around 6-8 months (if that) before im fixing something fundamental and less than that for general hiccups.

Perhaps i should try Bazzite or CachyOS ? maybe chimeraOS ?


i do have a iso ready of Debian Siduction but i couldnt find GPG keys for verifying the iso on their website like most other distros.

the search continues.

*edit KDE is genuinely great. i was one of the love/hate users previously. Not much hate for it now. Would be nice if the themes style and transparency/blur applied to Dolphin too though

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I'm not opposed of AI gen being used for voice acting (when done right and not stealing VA)

define stealing. Outright plagiarism is perhaps easy to spot but hard to prove let alone raise an expensive legal challenge.But taking a VA and modifying it is even more deceptive. The voice isn't just an audio signature , it's the soul & passion of the artist.

back to first point .. this is how i see what's happening.

They know there stealing
We know there stealing
They know we know there stealing

But what is a poorly paid struggling artist going to do against an army of billionaire back lawyers ?

as @Nezchan put it there probably vacillating between litigating for billions themselves or working out how many billions they can save by wiping out large portions of 'useless' humanity using Ai

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I'm not opposed of AI gen being used for voice acting (when done right and not stealing VA) if it means indie games can get full voice going vs just text scroll. However the use of it in art work is very questionable as it tends to spit out the same crap and really isn't needed.

I guess if it was used for texture creation it can also be quite good.

People need to remember that games have been doing procedural generation for a long time before this AI craze and it is very similar sort of thing.

Wish we could identify AI slop more accurately rather then just labelling everything that uses AI in some way somewhere being bad, because it won't be long before all games made use it in some form!

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The trouble is, they're conflicted. On the one side is copyright and their ability to squeeze all the money out of intellectual property forever.

On the other, they might get to use the technology to replace all the artists, writers, actors, etc. with free robot slaves. Or worse, someone else might get robot slaves first.

It's a tough call.

ah, the old shall i be evil or even more evil thought process.

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The only thing that puts me off is the small screen. My eyes aren't getting any younger.

I'm in the same boat, unfortunately. While glasses obviously help, I've actually started using XR glasses more and more with the Deck and it's quite enjoyable and even helps avoid shoulder/neck pains from looking down as well!

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It's true that it is, in theory, possible to build good products with AI assistance. And a few people will do it. And those few people will be absolutely upset that, just because 95% of what's built with AI assistance is crap, everyone will insist that things built with AI be identified as such, and most will just use that to completely ignore AI stuff. It won't be very fair to that 5%, but that is not "the consumer"s problem.

So no, I don't think we are going to see lots of "good enough" AI projects finding their way to our wallets, because they will be tarred with the brush of all the lazy grifters making the "not good enough" AI projects, which will be the vast majority, and so nobody will even bother to find out that those particular ones are actually OK.

As to whether (generative, large language model) AI is here to stay, and whether (generative, large language model) AI is going to get better . . . It's here to stay, sort of, but it will get FAR less common for a while after the bubble bursts. All the companies making it . . . in the West, at least . . . are losing money on it at high speed. Bubble's gonna burst. And, it doesn't seem to be getting much better; in some ways it's getting worse. There isn't much larger to go in terms of the training; to get something really better they're going to need some different basis for AI, a new kind of model. That could happen, but it would be a whole different thing, at some unknown time in the future--it's vanishingly unlikely to come along in time to save the current crop of AI-related companies. And they wouldn't have the rights anyway.

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This update has been long awaited, I'm so thankful that it is finally here and excited for the changes in 2.0!

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I need this but for Unreal Engine 5

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Thanks. Installed it immediately.

Took me four guesses on the Steam front page to get a game with that warning.

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Are you really going to reject good games just because they dared to use AI in some irrelevant corner? You're in for a rough time as its use becomes the norm.

I absolutely will. If they use that garbage on something, I will just skip it. I can basically play any game up to the PS2 emulated on a PC (many PS3 Xbox 360 games too) not including the countless games already ported that run natively or though proton that don't use the buzzletters at all. I can always play something else because there will always be a market for games without AI trash in it.

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The changes are great and all but my only concern is VRR. It's been annoyingly broken since I've started using Linux a few years ago. If I have 'Adaptive Sync' enabled and I turn one of my monitors off and back on it doesn't display anything at all. I have to restart, change VRR or logout and back in to fix it. It's frustrating to have to enable and disable VRR manually depending on which game I'm playing.

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What i don't understand is where the lawyers at ?

The trouble is, they're conflicted. On the one side is copyright and their ability to squeeze all the money out of intellectual property forever.

On the other, they might get to use the technology to replace all the artists, writers, actors, etc. with free robot slaves. Or worse, someone else might get robot slaves first.

It's a tough call.

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This game is right up my alley! It's a love letter to certain FPS games and cribs a lot of their mechanics and tropes. I expected it be more like Wolf3D but it's far more like RTCW. As soon as I saw the hud with the stamina bar I recognized it as being from RTCW.

The maps themselves are what are inspired by Wolf3D. They look to be built on a [block/grid system much like Wolf3D](https://hwolf3d.dugtrio17.com/projects/hwe3.gif). The Unity shaders and block geometry make the game look very much like Nightmare Reaper in some ways.

The combat feels really satisfying, I'm a big fan of precise aim based games and the headshot and crouch aim mechanics work great. I mean, if a game offers a dot crosshair and has headshot hitsounds I presume the dev knows what's up. If I could specify custom hitsounds or even just choose the Quake 3 or CPMA hitsounds I'd be stoked.

The world has a surprising amount of depth and effort put into it. The fact that there are notes to read (more RTCW) with flavour text is an appreciated touch.

I can't say much for the story so far but it seems largely perfunctory but again, I'm still very early in the game. I love the voice acting of the hobo - his lines are funny and he delivers them well. I wonder if the VA for the hobo is the dev? I feel like this is a single dev game and you can clearly feel his proverbial voice throughout the game.

I'm genuinely surprised that this game is free. If you like FPS games you should try it out. If you like 2000s FPS games you should definitely check it out.

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The only thing that puts me off is the small screen. My eyes aren't getting any younger.

I still wish Valve would adapt the Deck technology to a laptop form-factor. A 14" or 15" screen would be great. Economically priced like the Deck, of course.

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Mike from the THRASHER dev team here - I can confirm Native Linux support! We have testers enjoying the game with ultra wide monitors on Linux :) One caveat is that Proton is required for the VR version to function on Linux, but the 2D version (with mouse or gamepad) works natively!

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FPS games aren't my thing but the premise of searching for your kidnapped dog supported by a rat companion kinda tickles my fancy.

Blimey, 18 GB install.

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@Calinou

This is possible because Windows ran on top of DOS until 98/Me.

Yea, I knew that. Just couldn't remember if the cutoff was 95 or 98/Me. Thanks for clarifying.

@d3Xt3r

Even the original DOSBox supported running Windows btw

I didn't know that ...

I get your point about the differences between it and a modern VM. Although, with the 3DFX emulation, at least it has some 3D acceleration support. I guess I should have referred to it as a limited VM or perhaps a proto-VM?

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Blimey, 18 GB install. I thought this was going to be 1 GB tops.

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Tempting. [b]Very[/b] tempting. But I'm determined to move away from Plasma (Kinoite) and return to Budgie (Atomic) with the release of Fedora 43. The only reason that I didn't stick with Budgie before was that it was still based on Xorg. Budgie 10.10 is based on Wayland. I prefer Budgie's elegant simplicity and performance edge. For now, I'm still using Plasma with its installation defaults. So obviously, Plasm's configuration genius is lost on me.

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Caution is always advised when downloading anything from the internet.

While true, this won't help most users one bit. Verifying each and every package in a supply chain is prohibitive for most users, either because they don't possess the necessary tech literacy levels, or simply don't have the time to check fingerprints for each and every package. Not that even that would mean 100% safety, because attackers could also place fingerprints matching their compromised packages while they're in control of the site anyway.

In the end the operators of major, otherwise trustworthy sites really need to treat their resources as what they are: Critical infrastructure.

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What i don't understand is where the lawyers at ?

Ai is hoovering up the entire digital works of human kind & being used by LLM to produce mostly slop. Why not request the learned data sets and sift through it to see if the machines are using copyrighted content ? It's computers .. there is an audit trail by the nature of computers.

your average person can't even download a 20+ year old video game ROM for an ancient console without fear of repercussions or share footage of a game being emulated without receiving a DMCA . What happened to those aggressive litigators ? Did they give up, Do they not understand their content is being used to train models too.

you would think lawyers should be making some serious BANK right now..

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While I often hear people saying they don't want AI, at the end of the day if the game (or whatever) is good enough, the consumer will buy it.

Then let "the consumer" buy it. The rest of us can be a bit more thoughtful about how we spend our money. No reason for you to get all indignant about it.

How many people don't have a phone because of some exploitation used to mine or manufacture it?

And whatabout this whataboutism?

AI is here to stay, and there certainly are productive and non-exploitative uses for LLMs, some possibly even worth the ecological impact, but that's neither here nor there. We are allowed to "vote with our wallets" and play games that were made by humans instead.


In any case, I'm anxiously waiting for the bubble to burst in the hopes it might restore some sanity to my day job. It's not a good time to be working in software development if you're at all concerned with code quality and information security. This trend has clueless business people forcing bad technical decisions on us based on hype and empty promises, and it's not going to be them who pay the price.

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I think the anti-AI crowd is in for a rude awakening. While I often hear people saying they don't want AI, at the end of the day if the game (or whatever) is good enough, the consumer will buy it.

How many people don't have a phone because of some exploitation used to mine or manufacture it? Almost none. And this is rationally WAY worse than some AI slop. People like to virtue signal they care, but if the product is good enough, the consumer will buy it.

AI will be the same. If (and I think this is a when even though I am no fanboy) AI gets "good enough" people will slowly stop complaining and buy the fruit. Will there be the odd holdout? Sure. But, and I can't hammer this enough, if the product is good enough, the consumer will buy it.

I hate how AI is being shoehorned into everything these days as much as anyone, but I'm also sure there is a way to make products people actually want with AI.

For me, the issue is not so much AI use in and out of itself. I mean it's a tool, and it's legit to use it (same as using pre bought assets). The problem is more the amount of slop that will storm the stores because of this. But I guess it will self regulate after a while, like for ebooks.

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If they release a cat version, I'll play it, lol. I'm not a dog person. But it's cool that this is free (well, the base game, anyway).

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I do still plan on getting a steam deck, I mostly play indie or older titles so I know it'll run most of what I want

Love how much developers seem to be embracing the deck eco-system

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Thanks lilovent, I couldn't remember if it was optional or mandatory.

Even if they ignore the link that lilovent posted, they risk absolutely insane backlash if they use it and are caught doing so by gamers, let alone Valve. Not sure what Valve's response would be, but the gamer response is brutal.

On high-profile games, sure, but I don't think it would bother serial shovelware makers if a few of their games got review bombed. They're already making trash as it is. As such, if it had been optional, I would have been surprised that so many chose to do it.

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