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Not to be confused with Whisker Squadron.

This looks great. Nintendo is too busy litigating and patent trolling, otherwise they would have already pumped out this exact title under a different name and with a more familiar set of characters.

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Between this and Valve's interest in ARM translation, we can see that Valve are looking far ahead at preserving their business into a possible era where desktops[+laptops] have fallen by the wayside.

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Quoting: EikeDebian is back in town!

I'd been wondering how one of the most well established distros had even disappeared from the stats at all.

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Quoting: tohur

Quoting: torkel104Can you toggle vsync yet?

For gaming on KDE that LONG been fixed and as far as the desktop if you have VRR it uses that if you have it turned on and if not it uses Vsync.. I don't understand though why on Earth you would want to turn that off on the desktop itself... would be a screen tearing mess

Yeah, I have a... 'FreeSync Premium' monitor and I just set the 'Adaptive sync' setting to Automatic and honestly kind of just forgot about it. Games and such tend to just work with their Vsync settings 'on', and I can see in my monitor's overlay the refresh bouncing around as needed, no visible tearing I can see.

Even watching videos in Firefox (LibreWolf), VLC, or mpv, no tearing, even for stuff shot at 24/25fps, provided it's full screen. I haven't paid close enough attention to see how it handles smaller windows and which takes priority.

The big caveat here though, of course, is: AMD GPU.

I've heard nVidia has gotten better but it sounds like here that it's not quite caught up.

Personal nVidia-versus-AMD anecdote time:

Spoiler, click me

AMD sucked on Linux back in the bad old days of fglrx, but since the newer 'radeon' and 'amdgpu' drivers, it's worlds better.

I got burned owning a GTX 980 back in the day (still no firmware for reclocking under Nouveau!), swore I'd never buy anything nVidia ever again, and while laptop shopping was a royal pain (ended up with an Asus 'AMD Advantage Edition' G513QY that's now my wife's... and has [the terrible ACPI implementation-slash-bug](https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive), that at least is much less noticeable under Linux than the Windows it came with), and there were some initial firmware/DisplayCore related bugs with my RX 9070 XT and launching SteamVR, for the most part, new-ish AMD GPUs and Plasma 6 on Wayland have been awesome, and actually feel a lot more responsive than the exact same system logged into an Xorg session (again - was my workaround for the now-fixed SteamVR bug )

I suspect that might have been the 60Hz vs. 165Hz + VRR thing, now, come to think of it.

Quoting: ShmerlFor lulz, people are suggesting CDE for those who want to be stuck with X11: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

You joke, but CDE's one heck of an aesthetic.

Quoting: syylk

Quoting: MayeulC

Quoting: syylkviewport/video memory sharing

Now I don't understand this. We already have dma-buf.

Screensharing / screencasting still don't work natively in Wayland, while it works on X11.

Examples:
- Discord streaming your game screen to the other people in your voice call;
- Teams sharing your screen or a window it doesn't "own" while in a videocall;
- OBS capturing stuff from other program's GUIs and casting in Twitch or other streaming service.

I'm sure there are not the only edge cases. And I'm equally sure there are workarounds. But this is the behavior out of the box for me (Nobara 43, Plasma 6.5.2 on Wayland, ofc).

I understand program isolation and sandboxing. But if the walls of the sandbox are too tall, then one program cannot grab what another is showing, and redirect the stream appropriately.

And this is what I mean for lack of feature parity with X11. X11 can do all of the above by letting one software somehow peek at the private graphic structures of another.

Now, I understand this isn't the raw dmabuf sharing you get from X11, but functionally this... hasn't really been an issue for me for at least a couple years I feel, now - the catch is that you need the corresponding XDG Desktop Portal (the little pop-up that lets you pick what monitor or window to share) installed as well - e.g., on Arch with Plasma 6 (and in fact, comes with both the full-fat 'plasma' group and 'plasma-meta'), it's:
extra/xdg-desktop-portal-kde 6.5.3-1 (566.9 KiB 2.2 MiB) [plasma] (Installed)
    A backend implementation for xdg-desktop-portal using Qt/KF5

• Discord was a bit of an issue for a while - [Vesktop (Vencord)](https://vesktop.dev/) worked around that for a bit until they updated the official app.


• Teams, mostly the official Linux build was abandoned - [Teams-for-Linux](https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux) wraps the webapp in Electron, I believe, and was my go-to for the last ~2-3 years I needed it for work, though loading the web version in a WebKit / Chromium-based browser also worked in a pinch.


• OBS works great now, but there's one more layer in between: Pipewire, which I can also wholeheartedly recommend now as a Pulseaudio replacement (and honestly, it replaces JACK pretty well, too!). You can add whole-screen or specific window captures to your scene - the ones that have '(Pipewire)' in the name - and Pipewire then calls the xdg-desktop-portal picker. It even remembers what you picked for next time, usually, and at least for my setup, doesn't prompt again on subsequent launches for at least the full screen capture I have set up.

You used to need [obs-vkcapture](https://github.com/nowrep/obs-vkcapture) before they got the Pipewire + xdg-desktop-portal combo supported, and that did work for me as well, but it's definitely a little clunkier in having to prefix your game/app with it.

Not being too familiar with Nobara personally, it looks like something downstream from Fedora, but [their install wiki](https://wiki.nobaraproject.org/en/new-user-guide-general-guidelines) here says this for OBS (including vkcpature!):

OBS Studio specifically from Nobara also comes with several plugins pre-installed that standard OBS from flatpak does not:

obs-studio-plugin-browser (Browser Source)
obs-studio-plugin-backgroundremoval (Camera Background Removal)
obs-studio-plugin-media-playlist-source (video/audio playlist aka VLC Playlist)
obs-studio-plugin-distroav (NDI)
obs-studio-plugin-vkcapture (Vulkan Capture for both 64 and 32 bit)

Additionally, Nobara comes with the OBS Gamecapture vulkan environment variable enabled globally, meaning you dont have to set any environment variables when capturing Vulkan game footage.
To install the Nobara native version of OBS and its plugins you can do so via the 'Recommended Additions' section of the Nobara Welcome app, or search for obs-studio in the Nobara Package Manager under the 'Packages' tab.

...and [their plasma-workspace spec](https://github.com/Nobara-Project/rpm-sources/blob/43/baseos/plasma-workspace/plasma-workspace.spec#L289) includes xdg-desktop-portal-kde, so it sounds like it was supposed to all work for you out-of-the-box?

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anyone knows the name for the steamdeck GPU and steam deck oled gpu on the hardware survey?

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: kuhpunktI saw one comment... it could be a great way to bring a lot of streaming apps like Netflix to the Steam Machine as well. People might want that.

nah, netflix issue is more likely DRM related than anything, i doubt it will help.

Does Netflix have a Windows app? Thought PC's just viewed via browser.

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Quoting: kuhpunktI saw one comment... it could be a great way to bring a lot of streaming apps like Netflix to the Steam Machine as well. People might want that.

nah, netflix issue is more likely DRM related than anything, i doubt it will help.

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cute logo!

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Its related to the fact that Fresh Supply was literally a worse product than free source ports that came out months before it.

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Quoting: Mountain ManI think game developers, filmmakers, music artists, and others should go the other way and make a point of trumpeting when their product doesn't use any kind of generative AI. The following disclaimer could become the mark of quality and artistic integrity:

"No generative artificial intelligence was used for the creation of this work."

There is talk and efforts being made that I've seen to do something like this in developer circles. At the moment there is a lot of push back or apathy but wheels turn slowly sometimes.

Personally, I'm a fan of the concept. Depending on the interest and customer push back to non-AI games I could see something being added to help. Even if it is as simple as attaching a static-badge or something.[Static Badge](https://shields.io/badges)

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It seems they forgot the information about Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta based GPUs now being supported only on 580 series.
https://negativo17.org/nvidia-driver-580-lts-repository/

And wouldn't 590 series be the one with many new things, and wayland related optimizations etc?

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Quoting: ramieraI'm one of the "newcomers". (I had used BSD/Linux for a long time, just kept a Windows machine for gaming.)
Windows 10 decided to give me a reason to fully switch, when on the last day of support, it switched off my screen during use. 2 days later I had a Void Linux gaming machine setup, and using it ever since.

Like Windows winking good bye... :D

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No problems, so nothing in the changelog for me and nothing to really wait in the future except once the vulkan extension for descriptor_heap thing gets actually released and the driver with it comes out. DX12(vkd3d-proton) perf improvement thingy

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Quoting: scaineYeah, I should have said, I actually got into Arch because of Endeavour. It's a great O/S. I mentioned CachyOS here because it attempts to fix the issue of non-GUI software-centres by including Octopi, which isn't ditro-specific, but is pretty limited in what it can do address this lack.

Octopi gets the job done, but OH BOY is it clunky and difficult to learn / use for a new user. I've been on linux for decades at this point, and the first few times I used it I was so confused. I like that there's a GUI front end to manage all the packages, but man alive it could use some work. Oh well, if that's about the only thing I have to complain about with Cachy, then I think it's doing a damn good job!

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I always like reading these articles. Thank you for the series Hamish!

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You can always install `pamac` for an app store-like experience. There are different versions depending on how much you want to give users. The "full meal deal" includes Arch, AUR, Flatpak, and Snap.

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I was a bit "meh" on VR until the Steam Frame announcement but this is such an interesting and open device that I now can't wait to get one! It goes beyond just VR. Exciting times.

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Either they're still going to support them this time, or they completely forgot to update their own documentation on it for Linux.

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I loved my StrongArm Risc PC, overclocked to 287 MHz, if memory serves me right. It was so much better than Win95 which I had running on the PC card inside! I first saw Quake 1 running on that card. Never had this game though, so off topic really

It was fab growing up through the early days of home computing. Those were great times

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This driver won't support 10 series and earlier any more, correct? Then why are they still listed in the 'supported products' section on the Nvidia website?

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I don't see a code repo mentioned, and haven't found anything myself. If someone has a link, I'd love to see it.

Maybe they haven't open-sourced this yet because they don't consider it ready, but I hope they do open-source it like the other work they've been doing. Especially since it's based on Waydroid.

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Interesting stuff indeed. I'm very curious what the goals for the project end up being.

Running Quest games on the Frame? Reverse FEX (running ARM applications on x86)? Getting Android applications like YouTube or Netflix on Linux to make SteamOS more comparable to consoles?

So many potential use cases but only time will tell.

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This is the closest I've seen someone get to Starfox 64 superficially, but a core part of a rail-shooter is scripting out cool cinematic sequences and it seems like its lacking strong direction in that regard. It's coming across a lot more arcadey and silly. 😅

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I'm one of the "newcomers". (I had used BSD/Linux for a long time, just kept a Windows machine for gaming.)
Windows 10 decided to give me a reason to fully switch, when on the last day of support, it switched off my screen during use. 2 days later I had a Void Linux gaming machine setup, and using it ever since.

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Quoting: PyrateIs there any indication of this working differently than Waydroid when it comes to ARM-only APKs ? Currently on Waydroid, only x64 APKs work, ARM ones work only after installing an inadequate emulator.

Given that the target platform seems to be the Planck, which uses an ARM CPU, I doubt it. In practice, a tool similar to FEX could work.

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The avalanche is building very slowly it seems.
Wish it would be faster, but i have no idea if it is just the BF6 community that can't switch or if there is another big obstacle to solve.

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Quoting: scaineI'd LOVE to see an Arch-based distro that give us a store-like experience for updates and software installs. It's frustrating that Arch is so obtuse that even tools like Discover (KDE's appstore) is "not recommended for use with Arch-based distros".

Not exactly a solution but rather a workaround: you can install flatpak backend of Discover and use that. Discover will ignore host OS repositories and install software from Flathub only. Discover not being recommended (what's not recommended is PackageKit's Arch Linux backend, PackageKit handles host package manager interactions for GUI app stores) becomes irrelevant, you can use it safely.

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No, you'll need Proton.

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Oh for the good old days of community-ran servers with local admins and kick-votes.
Sure, there were still dodgy players and servers out there, but you'd just flag them as such in your server browser software (<3 All-Seeing Eye.)
Over time, you'd build up a list of trusted community servers with great and reactive local admins.

This is what we've sacrificed by allowing publishers to take the server executables out of our hands, all for "convenience", "persistence", "leaderboards" and "achievements."

I'll stop yelling at clouds now.

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So... It will be a native Linux version?

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