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Quoting: Alia5

Quoting: JarmerI'm not a huge controller user (only on deck) so I'm wondering: isn't this just recreating the steam community layouts feature? Why not just utilize that?

Author of SteamInputDB here

Well, the community features of Steam are not really that great - And have been not that great for ~10 years...
The filter and sorting options especially.

Additionally, it's not really that obvious to some people when it comes to sharing specific configs on third party platforms like Reddit / Discord, etc.

The website is at the current stage what I would consider the absolute bare minimum viable product.
Just imagine what it could be in a few months from now with proper and more direct SteamClient integration and community features Steam lacks

As someone who plays only on my Steam Deck, this tool is a godsend already. Just being able to filter by the controller I'm using RIGHT NOW rather than "any controller that's attached to my Steam account" is immense. It's so frustrating to go to the Steam Community layout for controller configs and the first 7 entries are for an Xbox controller, a Dualsense controller, and a Dualshock 4, before finally finding Steam Deck, WHILE ON MY STEAM DECK.

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Taiwan Province gets an increase, but not Hong Kong (and Macau)? I wonder what makes them less impacted. Maybe direct from the mainland parts?

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I've actually sent them an email since I was also interested in the official answer for it, hope its not an issue. (Their answer is the unquoted > part)

1) They say the keys expire 90 days after the bundle starts. So if you have not redeemed, gifted, or exchanged when the expiration is getting close, do they warn you in any way? Or do they just silently expire?

> 1. We will have reminder emails in place for soon-to-expire keys in your library, at least a week in advance. We're discussing partial credit for the Exchange if we've verified you own the game, but this is still a work in progress, and not something I can speak to definitively before the current collections will expire.

2) If you have not synced your Steam library, and redeem, you can get a Steam key for something you already own. Do unused keys expire after the 90 days, or just keys that have not been redeemed/gifted?

> 2. All unredeemed keys expire at 90 days after a collection has launched. It's important to redeem keys ASAP, and not just reveal them. However, while revealing the key will help avoid them from expiring immediately at the 90-day mark, we cannot guarantee they will be redeemable past that point, and cannot offer replacements if our partners disable unredeemed batches of keys.

3) If you choose to gift a key, it prompts for an email address, which seems reasonable. Does the recipient get a key, or do they need to have/create a digiphile account first (like humblebundle requires for using gift links)? Has anyone sent a "gift" to themselves? I've seen random grumblings that gifting wasn't working, but I took it with a grain of salt.

> 3. The recipient of a gift will need to create a Digiphile account in order to receive it. Gifting works without any issues, but we do sometimes see people not receive the gift email; however, this mostly appears to boil down to email domain issues, or emails being marked as spam. We can reverse gifts if you experience any issues, or they time out and are returned automatically after 7 days. Self-gifting isn't possible at this time. Alternatively, you can click the "Redeem on Steam" option to reveal a key and manually send it to the recipient.

4) [ADDED BY ME] Concerning this is the Steam account link mandatory or just for to activate the exchange/gifting ability

> 4. Having a linked Steam account is mandatory for purchasing Game Collections, as well as a one-time sync to verify your Steam level (bot and fraud protection). You do not have to sync you Steam library, as this is only used for the Exchange feature.

EDIT: Added missing emphasis in bold from the original email response

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Or they updated:
Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit 6.62% +4.29%
Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 2.59% -3.98%

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California, über alles
California, über alles
Über alles, California
Über alles, California

That song is just as relevant today as it was back in the day. Now it's just Gavin Newsom instead of Jerry Brown and Trump instead of Carter. While Jerry Brown would've been better than Reagan (or either Bush) and Gavin Newsom is better than Trump (or Ron DeSantis). He's not the savior that petty liberals make him out to be. If this bill makes it to his desk and he signs it into law, it's just as bad as him not granting Sirhan Sirhan (an innocent man) parole. That's on top of him annoying California progressives on other issues too.

If Trump power does actually go 'way, my probable vote for Gavin Newsom in 2028 will be only as an anti-right vote. Not any actual support for him. Leftists can't abstain and only vote on proposals anymore, I fear. It's become just like 1932 Germany where abstaining was as bad as apathy.

Also, age verification on an OS level is stupid. It's annoying period, but if it's gonna be required, then it should just be an online only thing.

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So technically anything with an operating system - your console, smartwatch, television and even fridge or modem / router for example - needs you to verify your age? What a silly concept!

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Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: JarmerIf all they're doing by this idiotic law is making a new checkbox that says "are you over 18?" then 🤣

Even that would be a risk. It would signal to law makers that the idea works and that they just need to change the requirements for how age is checked.

signal what? If you are American the government already knows 100% about you thanks to Palantir so whatever this is, I highly doubt that it is some nefarious scheme. It is dump and idiotic and it should be abolished, but IMHO not some shadow tactic, that game we already lost.

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Quoting: eggrole

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe modern "free market" is a market that actively promotes rentiers. Smith would have hated it.

Yes, that is what I was saying. I don't like to argue semantics as people call things capitalist and socialist (or any other -ism or -ists these days) when they have little understanding of the roots of the words. I argue that we don't have capitalism today in the USA (or the west in general) and we have a system much closer to socialism.

Well, I feel I can't avoid semantics here. I've seen a lot of claims that what we have today is bad, but that's because it's somehow not capitalism, or not "real" capitalism, and if only we had the real thing all would be well. The addition that, since it's not capitalism, and some of the redistribution upwards is aided by government action, that must make it socialism is not something I've seen before but given the basic rationale it sort of follows. But the whole idea is very much a "no true Scotsman" argument. There has never been capitalism that didn't involve government action to privatize profits and socialize loss, so if we're going to say that kind of thing disqualifies a system as capitalism then there has never been any such thing as capitalism and we should never bother using the word again. Capitalism involved major government intervention from its very beginnings in England--the very workforce for capitalists was provided by the Enclosure movement, which drove masses of small farmers off their land, and passed a lot of draconian laws making it illegal for the resulting masses of poor people to either hunt or gather ("poaching") or hang around doing nothing ("loitering"); thus, they had to take paid employment. It was the first major wage work force. Government action has been a big part of capitalism ever since. ECON 101 and so on generally pretend, or at least talk as if, capitalist economics was just something that happened naturally by some sort of laws of nature, but it's a socially created thing like any other part of society--no more and no less than socialism or feudalism or whatever.

So I really think that calling what we have not capitalism because big boys get bailouts is a pretty strained bit of semantics, which leads to problems in calling anything capitalism. Big boys have almost always gotten bailouts throughout the history of capitalism.

As to socialism, the US has a really weird bit of semantics around that. For decades, anyone calling for government action of any kind in the US has been called a socialist, even though they clearly weren't. This would put them on the defensive, claiming not to be one and often backtracking from their positions. Then Bernie Sanders, doing some brilliant semantics, decided to just short-circuit the process and just own the label; he agreed to the US creeping redefinition of socialism as any kind of government action for the benefit of the people and just claimed to be one and challenged anyone to say why that was bad. So now in the US, the word "socialism" is used to describe what everyone else calls "social democracy" and the US used to call "New Deal liberalism". But that isn't what socialism actually is, certainly not what it's rooted in. And just "any use of government to benefit anybody" most definitely isn't socialism.

Socialism is a system in which the workers, either directly or through the government, own and control the means of production, rather than it being owned by private individuals. In theory, but not necessarily in practice, the goal of production under socialism is to improve the common good rather than to create profit. That's it, that's historically what socialism is that makes it not capitalism. The current system shows no trace of anything like that--to the contrary, stuff that used to be public keeps getting privatized.

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Further supporting my theory

Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 2.59% -3.98%

Linux Mint, the newbie distro that all those starry-eyed Windows migrants were told to try out -3.98%.

They got frustrated or disappointed and promptly reinstalled Windows because the anticheat in their favorite Furry hero shooter refuses to support Linux.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismThis issue is about Internet Censorship.

The mechanisms are being laid down to track and eliminate anyone who criticises a unpopular nation state. And to eliminate people's ability to share "upsetting footage" of things happening in the world.

This is also a war on the younger generation to raise them "jacked-in" to sharing everythign with "The Cloud" stored at your local AI Data Center and to fix Microsoft, pentagon contractor, loosing their grip on customers as their popularity has declined in the last decade.

Notice how various states across the globe are moving on this in lockstep.

Exactly. It doesn't matter if this law has no teeth and it's easily fooled. The law makers don't care and they never would care. What they care about, is getting the law on the books. After the law is on the books, that's when they start adding teeth.

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I was kind of right:

I'll be the one to say it:

Consider all those who got gassed up on the cyclical $NEW_WINDOWS bad streak who tried out Linux on their gaming computers, only to feel overwhelmed or burned or whatever by the differences (of which newbies will always make mountains out of mole hills) who then promptly return to the familiarity of Windows.

I suspect we'll see another small decrease next month too.

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Not quite as bad as their new government-approved 3D printer bill but hey, it's nice they're trying to give it competition.

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What system is it emulating?

Are they, again, abusing the world 'emulator' when in fact DREAMM is an engine reimplementation.

Genuine question. They don't really detail much on their site.

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A group of people who wouldn't be able to articulate what an operating system is attempt to legislate an anti-feature into operating systems.

We may find that this push only effectuates change in big vendor commercial operating systems, in part because those pushing it are only aware of the cattle feed they eat i.e. iOS Android Windows Mac.

Still, I would hold on to all those old Linux distro installation ISOs just in case.

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^ Welcome! So glad you are here and thank you for that info!

That's a good explanation, and yeah I guess I have very little experience doing anything with any controller configs, so I am just unaware of the steam issues. I know now though. I think the only custom controller config I ever did was with Dave the Diver on the deck to remove the QTE's.

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Quoting: voytrekkAre there any changes for English only clients? This has been used in the past to avoid bias from Chinese Steam clients.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/#engsplitanchor

8.29% for Linux on English only.

pretty wild.

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Quoting: eggrole

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: eggroleI DO blame over consumption.

Sure. Why blame the system when you can blame the ones with no power. You're blaming the addicts, not the pushers. You're blaming the players, not the ones writing and enforcing the rules.

Quoting: eggroleIf you're interested check out Propganda by Bernays for a really easy read and a good look at how this works.

As long as you keep in mind that it's not an objective, much less a critical look. It's written by one of America's leading advocates of propaganda.

The first point is a perspective. You say the consumer has no power while I say they have 99% of the power. If people stop buying, the corpos go broke. If corpos stop selling... the people don't get trinkets?

Unless you are wealthier than most of your peers, you spend most of your income on basic expenses and necessities from retailers you can afford, and maybe spend a relatively tiny amount on a "trinket" only rarely. Not the other way around. You can and should vote with your wallet (I sure do, all the time), but your impact is limited. Actual voting is more effective.

Quoting: eggroleOn the second point, of course it advocates for propaganda.

I simply brought some much needed context. You say "of course", but there's no reason to expect this to be obvious to people on a Linux gaming site. What you wrote, "a really easy read and a good look", comes off as a positive recommendation. The caveat is worth pointing out.

Quoting: eggroleI argue that we don't have capitalism today in the USA (or the west in general) and we have a system much closer to socialism.

No, the USA is undeniably capitalist by any real measure. Your economic system is fundamentally based on private ownership. And more to the point, virtually all of the "means of production" are privately owned. Even most of the ones fully paid for by your taxes. There are regulations, but there's also regulatory capture. Your government sets some limits to the ways a business can harm the people or the environment, but I'd argue not nearly enough, and less than it used to.

No country in the so-called western world is truly socialist, either side of the big pond. But this is one of the subjects where American scholars and analysts tend to disagree with the rest of the world to some extent, simply because your political spectrum is so skewed to the right, especially around economic policy.

Quoting: eggroleAll that said, I feel like we are nearing a period when the "free market" (lol) is going to seize up.

That's the vicious cycle of modern global economics. From one crisis to the next. As someone born to the tail end of Gen X, I've been through a few already. And it's not market regulation that perpetuates this wheel of misery.

Quoting: eggroleP.S. I really enjoyed this exchange. I like seeing rational opinions that differ from my own without all the name calling and echo chambering I see elsewhere. Cheers!

I can't say I've ever actually enjoyed debating politics and/or economics, but you're right; this is a much better forum for civil discussion than most. One of the reasons GOL gets a small amount of cash from me every month.

See? I'm voting with my wallet! 😁

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^ also tie that directly into how the current US republican gov wants to utterly destroy all trans people. It makes me want to vomit.

If a young person interested in transitioning were allowed to use a computer to access a website that might help them learn about that process in a healthy way, then how else could the republicans destroy their entire life starting right then and there unless they had lockdown access and tracking on everything all the time! WONT SOMEBODY THINK OF THE RICH OLD STRAIGHT WHITE CHRISTIAN MALES IN THE GOP. HORRORS.

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This issue is about Internet Censorship.

The mechanisms are being laid down to track and eliminate anyone who criticises a unpopular nation state. And to eliminate people's ability to share "upsetting footage" of things happening in the world.

This is also a war on the younger generation to raise them "jacked-in" to sharing everythign with "The Cloud" stored at your local AI Data Center and to fix Microsoft, pentagon contractor, loosing their grip on customers as their popularity has declined in the last decade.

Notice how various states across the globe are moving on this in lockstep.

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Quoting: Chrisznixwhat's stopping the urge to buy multiple guitars?

Fair point. I have a few that are entirely different. i.e. an 12-string electro-acoustic, bass, fretless bass. I suppose there would be some difference in character between some strat pickup sounds and humbuckers but, as far as recording goes, the biggest difference is EQ. Ignoring the speakers and mics + mic placements because that's all virtualized.

So, I guess my point is the thing stopping the urge is realizing that having multiple instruments is mostly for convience and aesthetics. Thus unnecessary. It's a bigger boast saying you got 95% of the way to another instrument/pup config and in the final mix, those differences were lost.

And while I really enjoy (re-)learning this skill, I don't have the time or desire to do all the things you do in this game. They're very different things, this game isn't even about playing music and more about the life of a musician.

fair enough. For me, it's more of a matter of time to get some of these things done IRL. I've done plenty in the past already. I also don't necessarily want some of the presumed endgoals -- signing to a big label and being frontloaded with very large sums of money.

So, as much as I enjoy playing (video) games, I have to ensure to keep a balance between those and everything else I would like to get done. Games can very easily become a huge time sink and distraction beyond being a way to relax and hone some B055 5ki11z.

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Holy mackerel! Support for Star Wars: Pit Droids!

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Lots of alarmed comments in here. I agree that it's a slippery slope, but in practice this seems like a good idea to ask OSes to provide an API for this, especially for age brackets (prevents tracking if any user worth tracking is "over 18" -- this may make for a neat tracker blocker if you just need to input a lower age).

Now, the title make it sound like the "verification" is privacy invasive, but if it's just a mechanism to store the age in account data, provided at account creation time, there are many ways to implement this: new field in /etc/passwd, or new config file. Provide /proc/is_user_over18 or some D-Bus API provided by the DE. Could be a new "portal".

I don't see any "official / secure verification service" being enforced, so if it's just another picker besides "time zone" or "keyboard layout", fine by me. If they start mandating something else though... Slippery slope, as I said (though we could use key-signing parties for that).

This could make it trivial for parents to setup a very basic parental control system, and could avoid all these popups about "are you 18+" on Steam and other websites.

Thank you Liam for your accurate reporting, though the headline is still a bit click baity. I would say "require OSes to provide|share your age".

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This is punishing businesses / OSes with bullshit work and potential fines. The only way this law works is if someone actually checks you put in the right info (people lie; shocker right???) and fines you / throws you in jail and it can't get anymore 1984 than that.

This really smells like the old DRM days with CDs and export restrictions on encryption. Honestly, I'd just switch to a distro that has a "non-US" version download and get on my with my day. Fuck California and any politician who uses "think of the children" for this sort of invasive bullshit.

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Brotato has been where most of my time is spent.

My son is deep into Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered.

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There is the danger that this will stop the possibility of disabling secure boot. I'm not happy about that.

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played a round of Lexispell (fun, but lacking depth and variety in demo form), Scope Creep to the demo's end (simple incremental game with a good theme IMO), and EvoCreo 2 until 3 evolutions and completion of the available quests (twist on classic pokemon games with a slightly more involved energy/ability system). I'll have to check out some of these other popular demos.

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It's funny that almost every article on this has focused on it including Linux but it's clearly aimed at Windows and MacOS. The bill doesn't actually define what an "operating system" actually means. It specifies that this applies to "account holders" but what does that actually mean? It's fairly obvious what it means in desktop environments, but TTYs? Is root an account holder? How old is root, the number of days since you installed your distro?

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Quoting: Jarmer[…] I may or may not have to look up if there's a way to hack or mod these into new chars without ever getting them to begin with!

Why the hassle? Didn’t you say you played through the game 4 or 5 times already?
If you have the Forgotten Gods expansion it is a matter of buying the merit from the NPC in the Conclave of the Three and throwing it into your stash. No internet required.
SSF means you delete your savefile (or move it to a different directory) every time before you create a new character, it has nothing to do with multiplayer.

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Quoting: Jarmerjust curious: what was the scam?

It was me being silly on a secondhand platform (kleinanzeigen in germany), transferring funds via paypal family&friends. I've had just good experience with these in the past, buying lots of things with this method. Well, one should not do that anymore...

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As someone who lives in the US, this is one of those issues that would be bipartisan. Make no mistake, I expect legislation like this to pop up in "red states" like Texas, Florida or Tennessee; if they haven't already.

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