Quoting: SupayWould a device with swappable controller bits work? Like a way to have the section where a D pad/stick would go instead be able to have it unclipped and fitted with a physical D pad or stick or the touchpad like the Steam controller or potentially even something else. Customise the controller setup to your preference.

Valve do hold a patent on doing exactly that.

Edit: found the patent.

As well as having an ecosystem of widgets so that people can customise the controls how they want, that would also make replacing them easy if they got faulty or gunged up or whatever.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: kokoko3kSo you don't think all the investments valve put on Linux gaming were finalized to this (still hypothetical) handheld console?
Microsoft store thing never convinced me too much.

Not really, no. A decade of investment predicated on things that didn't exist at the time, for a product that we don't really know anything about, isn't out yet, and might still be a flop, isn't a great plan.

Microsoft muscling them out of Windows would be an existential threat to them, even if the probability is low; having an escape plan, and visibly having an escape plan as leverage, is in Valve's interest. It doesn't cost much, and their work on it is probably sufficiently supported by Linux sales even with our small market share (if not, they're getting money elsewhere); open source development is incremental, so they can add bits as and when, so they don't have to go all in at once, and it lets them do things that they couldn't do otherwise (they can't change Windows' shader compiler, for example); and I expect that the work is interesting in itself for their engineers.

I'd imagine that they thought they'd come up with something, and success of a handheld console and success of desktop Linux would be mutually reinforcing if it happens, but I don't think they were driven by this as a Grand Plan, no.

Small improvements to help more people buy more games is entirely how they approach things. This could be one of them. Or it could be a massive hit, or it could be a massive flop. Whatever happens, Steam is trucking on with minimal risk. And they'd still need to support existing Linux customers, which is easier if Linux customers keep giving you money than if they don't.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: kokoko3kIf this is the final Valve bet on Linux, what will happen to Linux gaming if this will not succeed7

They still need to support their existing Linux customers; it's easier to do that if you have future sales to fund it. The risk of Microsoft cutting them off from Windows customers is still there, and Linux support is something that their competitors don't offer.

So if their new project is a success it might have a virtuous cycle relationship with desktop Linux gaming, but if it's a flop I don't expect anything to get worse on that front.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Luke_NukemLast I heard was that DLSS was built in to the Windows driver and may not ever come to Linux. Anyone confirm?

DLSS support has been included with their Linux driver for about a year.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Northgard still has me in its icy grip, since before the last of these articles. Some of the challenges are really hard.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: einherjar

Quoting: kaimanAs long as GOG remains the underdog, my support goes (mostly) to them. ...

What "underdog" are you talking about? The "underdog" with these billionaires at the top?

CDPR is Europe's largest game company; they aren't really the underdog any more than Ubisoft is.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: denyasisSomething, I do find interesting, although a bit tangential to this topic is what we as a community are willing to sacrifice for our comfort or easiness, myself included.

I saw a few posts above lamenting how it's not easy to play a Linux game from GOG and how antiquated the concept of downloading the game off the website is. Yet, we spend a lot of effort adding PPAs, learning the CLI (talk about something actually from before 1998), ldd, protontricks, winecfg, mesa, kernel stuff, tinkering, hacking, sometimes just to get mostly functional desktops.

I wonder how many of us really want to "play on Linux" (sorry for the pun)? The more I think of it, the more I wonder if I really do. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and I like Tinkering with it in ways that I could never do with windows or Mac. I'll never go back! And haven't in over a decade.

But when I want to play a game, I find it really frustrating when I'm missing a library that I have to hunt down or a new kernel doesn't play nice with my graphics drivers or have to tweak wine/proton with my limited game time. It's like I'm frustrated because I'm reminded I'm on Linux with it's flaws and complexities. I just wanted the game to work without problems and relax!

Maybe for us the problem isn't GOG's Linux support. Maybe the problem is more that GOG reminds us we're still on Linux when we'd rather not be reminded of such.

Perhaps that's part of the allure of Steam. It's makes effort to make the Linux-ness of the system not apparent. With proton in the background, many things just work, like on Windows or Mac.


I find this an interesting contradiction and by looking at the comments, I think it's one many of us, myself included, are comfortable with having.

When I started PC gaming, configuration was done with DIP switches and jumpers, and one could overclock one's computer with a pencil. Often getting a game to work involved a custom config.sys and making sure that just the right things loaded in just the right order. Tinkering was absolutely part-and-parcel of being a PC gamer. The past (more than) 15 years I've done my PC gaming on Linux, and it's easy. I'd be comfortable tinkering, but I just don't have to.

My gaming desktop just worked as soon as I put it together. My laptop came with Gnome, which worked out of the box. I swapped it out for Cinnamon, which worked out of the box. I swapped that out for KDE, which worked out of the box. My HTPC/TV gaming/Minecraft server NUC worked out of the box. My controllers worked out of the box. The NUC I administer, to the extent that it needs it, from my phone. If there are updates, I get a notification about them, can apply them when I fancy, and (should it be required, although it rarely is) I can restart the machine when I'm good and ready. It's just all entirely painless.

At the time that I switched, I didn't mind Windows, I just preferred Linux as soon as I'd tried it. After a while I realised that I was doing all my gaming in Linux and only booting Windows for email and web browsing, which seemed silly. So I dumped it. These days I find Gnome too overbearing and controlling; there's no way that I'd be happy putting up with Windows' shenanigans.

I've got more great games available than I'll ever have time to play. No muss, no fuss. To bring us back to GOG, if they had a compelling offering, I'd give them money. If GOG's service was better than Steam, I'd spend more there than I do on Steam. Valve do masses for the Linux ecosystem, even outside of just making it all really convenient to buy and play games, and GOG just DGAF. So Valve gets my money, and GOG doesn't.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: CatKillerIf that's so now, then it's a recent change.

In the last year or two the API became available for Linux builds, I remember developers widely complaining about it for a long time then eventually saw a developer mention it was finally available. I imagine this was back in late 2019.

Cool, thanks.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: poiuzGOG's developer documentation disagrees with you. They have released their Build Creator application for Linux so that the build is the same as on the other systems. The version numbers for Linux releases match if the developers set it correctly.

If that's so now, then it's a recent change.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

QuoteHopefully they will eventually port over GOG Galaxy to Linux, as it's the big missing piece of the pie for Linux users

It's not just the users that are affected, it's the game devs, too. For the other platforms Galaxy provides a patching infrastructure, but for Linux (because there's no Galaxy) devs have to upload a binary to an ftp site like it's 1996, and then wait for GOG to get around to making it live on the store page. With a random build number that doesn't relate at all to the version number that the devs or users might be familiar with.

View this comment - View article - View full comments