Quoting: amvmonkeyValve didn't upstream the controller drivers to the kernel? I'm disappointed to hear that.

They've upstreamed the Steam Deck drivers but 5.18 isn't out yet.

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Quoting: sarmadYou forgot the most important point, which is that Valve's business model depends on selling games through Steam, not selling the hardware. So, it's in their best interest that the games that work on Steam Deck also works on regular Linux as that simply means more market for them. This is why Valve is trying to support as much platforms as possible just as we recently saw with ChromeOS.

Not just "more market," but survival. They can't make hardware for every single Steam customer, but they need the means to continue to sell to all those customers when using not-Windows in case Microsoft ever goes nuclear. That's what Linux means to them, and it needs to all be available on the computers their customers already have because Valve can't replace all those computers on their own.

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QuoteQuake II RTX for example runs on the Steam Deck but as you can tell from the screenshot — not well.

Even with the Windows ray tracing that DF were so excited about in the video, they needed to turn the resolution way way down to get any performance at all.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: setzer22Valve is selling the deck at a loss because they can afford it,

I honestly doubt that.
This isn't a console that can make up for selling at a loss with absurd stuff like costs-to-play-online or generally overpriced games.
Nor is it going to bring it tons of new customers - I'd bet that 99% of buyers are Steam customers anyway.

I suspect that at the scale they're seeing, it probably isn't selling at a loss now because of economies of scale, but if demand had been more tepid (which it absolutely could have been) and they were only making them on the scale of any other niche small-run PC hardware then they'd have been selling at a loss - the cost of all of those is much higher than that of the Deck. But the product is a demonstration device of Linux gaming ("new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements" as Valve described it) for strategic purposes - it doesn't have to make any money.

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Quoting: damarrindo you know what I think about snaps and Canonical's decision to make FF one?

Mozilla's decision.

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QuoteVulkan and Linux support was also added to their "GameplayMediaEncoder"

It'd be nice if Unity got around to this, too.

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Quoting: randylDoes Canonical have their employees host official/paid company projects on their personal github repos? That seems strange doesn't it?

He no longer works for Canonical.

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It's on my wishlist, but even my six year old has a Steam backlog now.

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Quoting: ExpandingManI guess I haven't been paying attention. The filesystem on SteamOS is read only by default? Why in the world would anyone do that? It seems so insane to me I'm not sure I'm reading it right.

So that it doesn't break.

The OS is on one (read-only) partition. When the OS gets updated, the new image goes to a second (read-only) partition. Next time you boot, you boot into that second partition; unless it doesn't work for whatever reason, in which case you boot into the first partition.

It's not a new idea - there have been several Linux distros (and other appliances) that work the same (or similar) way, as well as dual-BIOS motherboards and the like.

You can turn it off if you want to break things or just like to fiddle, but your changes will not be in the new OS image when you update.

Your games & settings, and anything you've installed through flatpak, are stored in your writable home partition.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy2000 is a nice big number. But I still think they need to speed it up a tad, because it's still a drop in the bucket of all the Steam games, and it's still barely keeping up with the new games being released.
Plus I still think we need a fourth category, for games that actually, you know, don't work at all. One third of the games checked are listed as "unsupported", which looks kind of bad and as Liam notes probably doesn't reflect the reality of a lot of games--people will mostly look at "Unsupported" and assume it's not even worth trying.

It would be positive if they made games compatible even faster. But I believe that their current speed is already very impressive. I'd rather have the quality of their evaluations high than have them hurry up quickly.

Both things are true: they need to increase the quality of their testing, and they need to increase the rate of their testing. And the former is the more important of the two, as you say. Luckily, game testing is very parallelisable with sufficient funding.

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