Latest Comments by STiAT
Easy Anti-Cheat gets much simpler for Proton and Steam Deck
22 January 2022 at 12:28 pm UTC Likes: 2

I can see where titles which are still in active development/patch cycles are not adding it. It's additional Q&A, it's additional support they have to do.

And those are the ones who mostly have EAC still active.

If it's a finished product and they just have to do that once the incentive may be high enough to do that, and to support the Steam Deck.

For stuff like New World... I don't know, the handheld market is for sure not their target audience, and which each release they'd have to verify the steam deck build, and who ever has done some Q&A work in the past ... another platform is testing everything over twice.

Flathub to verify first-party apps and allow developers to collect monies
21 January 2022 at 8:33 pm UTC Likes: 5

I think for binary distributions/commercial apps, AppImages actually the better choice.

But that's my opinion, I'd love a spotify AppImage...

KDE begin the 15-Minute Bug Initiative to make Plasma great
20 January 2022 at 8:24 pm UTC Likes: 1

And there it is, the dark theme not recognized by GTK apps until session restart which annoys me every time.

I hit a few of those in the past. It's a good initiative, and I think if those bugs which are easy to encounter are fixed that's a huge benefit for a lot of users.

I really like it, and KDE will be a lot better off quality whise if they keep this effort up.

Now "all" they need to do is actually fix them, and some of those are not trivial. But I am glad they started the effort.

Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard
19 January 2022 at 8:17 pm UTC

Quoting: Mal
Quoting: kaktuspalmeAt first I was shocked but a second later, I don't care. Haven't played any of their games the last couple of years. Indies amaze me much more atm.

For me we should be happy. Activision had no budget for games with less than a 10 billion revenues potential. Bobby wanted to absorb Blizzard to save his dieing company... but for wow, not the rest.

You know that Blizzard is not even close to the revenue of King owned by Activision? They aquired Blizzard to milk their games with micro transactions, since the player base was big.

But Activision was nowhere close to die. They did not need Blizzard, they wanted it for revenues sake.

But I think Microsoft as a platform owner has a lot more interest in long term customer binding than Activision ever had due to the need to create short term profits for shareholders.

So I think this could actually help the games under the banner of Activision/Blizzard, while all the microtransactions will stay, the focus will change from short term profit and especially "engagement" to long term sustainability.

Mocrosoft does not care if you play something else, as long as you are on the game pass service and pay.

And Microsoft certainly has the infrastructure to make it even more cost effective to run servers. They do not need to rent datacenters or backbones - they own them.

They have a history of attractive workplace and adequate payment.

All that will help if it gets through to the actual staff employed, and they'd be able to hire and keep talents.

Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard
18 January 2022 at 11:38 pm UTC

It's not a bad move. Microsoft has no history of aggressive sourcing, and a quite high standard for Employees.

With what Activision/Blizzard produced the past years, completely failing their audience, it hardly could get worse.

I actually do not mind that particular takeover, since they were in the shits management wise and producing games which are good.

I see an issue with Microsoft to buy up so much in the gaming market. Not because it's Microsoft, but it's concentrating the market too much under a single banner and within that management and direction.

I hope though that Microsoft can find talent and accordingly skilled management to pull the cart out of the shits. My guess is that Blizzard would pretty much struggle in future if nothing happened, the current course just was a downward spiral.

Microsoft is not in the game for short term profits, they are a platform holder who are into long term profits. That usually is better for games.

We will see.

Proton Experimental pulls in newer DXVK to help God of War on Linux
16 January 2022 at 6:10 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: GuestThat was a quick update from the Proton team. :)
Certainly skilled developers at DXVK who know what they're doing. Profiling a game recognizing the pitfalls for them is as easy as it comes. I think Valve to hire those skilled people did us as people playing games on Linux really well, and I thank them for that, and ofc the developers for their hard work.

I've worked with those developers in the past, especially on D9VK before Joshua went to work for Valve, doing API captures to help solving issues - and it probably was the smoothest experience I ever had reporting issues in an open source project.

I actually only once had a run-in with Philip in a bug report, and it was constructive and solution-focused as it possibly could get.

Valve seems to have skilled and enthusiastic developers on their hand there. Even with the ground work laid, I hope they don't loose them, with all their passion for what they're doing they're an asset.

Proton Experimental pulls in newer DXVK to help God of War on Linux
16 January 2022 at 2:27 am UTC

On my PC it runs somewhat fin with async option on.

Of course it had to build a shader cache to get rid of stuttering, but it really got better over time by that.

I am actually not yet that excited, story telling is rather weak at the point where I am at.

God of War is now on Steam and runs out of the box on Linux with Proton
15 January 2022 at 2:38 am UTC

Damn, I had my eyes on that in the past - but lacking a playstation...

That's a must buy. Though, still involved in some other game(s), in a month or so I'll certainly buy and try it.

Trouble in Solus Linux land as their Experience Lead quits
10 January 2022 at 5:38 pm UTC

Quoting: 14
Quoting: STiATWe'll see where this leads, but I do not have another disro providing an experience even close to Solus, so I'll stick with it (and I used Arch 2004-2017, tried it over the holidays again and it's just a mess).

I do not want to manually search for depends when things don't work I do not want to fiddle around, I want a system/Desktop that just works.
Sounds like the AUR is not for you. But I'm curious: why did you try Arch again over the holidays? And what's a mess anyways, the fact that you have to make more decisions as to what to install?

The mess is that it does not come with sane defaults, as with dependencies.

For me, if an application requires dependencies to make functionalities work which otherwhise simply throw errors and nobody knows why - that's a bad decision not to have it as a dependency. Even if it does not require it at compile time. Arch disagrees on that opinion.

It's not about decisions to make, it's about if you install a package it will actually work properly or not. And in that regard, Arch is a hot mess.

I do use Arch installations from time to time to reproduce bugs, especially in the graphics stack (kernel, mesa, dxvk) and KDE since they're very close to vanilla packages and pretty up to date compared to alternatives.

I have never used AUR, most things are in the repos, if I require anything not in repos it's mostly for development, and I can manage those depends properly without messing with the system. So no, I never had a single AUR package installed - I am talking about core and extra packages. Not even community ones.

An example would be: KDE, Dolphin requires kio-extras to be able to get android phones working. But wait, installing kio-extras it does not. Since you require an optional mtp lib. That done, on some devices, it will still not work. You need some udev rules package.

Otherwhise Dolphin will give some cryptic error. That's not exactly what I expect, if I install the kde meta package, that stuff should be included. Ye, there may be udev rules I do not need. But that's the point, Arch has the minimalistic approach making it basically a bad experience even if you use meta packages. Though, I think kio-extras by now made it into the meta depends.

Linux Kernel 5.16 is out now bringing the futex2 work to help Linux Gaming
10 January 2022 at 5:30 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: mrdeathjraccording wine devs for now fsync dont be approved

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50281

Doesn't stop any of the various Wine builds like Wine-GE, Staging, Tkg and so on using it.

Staging won't implement it either. TkG and Proton & GE very likely will.