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Latest Comments by Brokatt
HELLDIVERS 2 is out - here's how to run it on Steam Deck / Linux
19 February 2024 at 10:34 pm UTC

Quoting: sarmad
Quoting: Brokatt
Quoting: sarmadWhy would a game with no online competitive mode need an anti-cheat? Sounds dumb to me.

Your statement is a little naive. The first Helldivers had no anti-cheat and they had huge problems with cheaters. People unlocking infinite resources for themselves and also everyone they played with, thus ruining the progression for a lot of people.

Can you clarify? How would unlocking infinite resources for yourself affect someone else? If they are not playing in your game they shouldn't be affected, and if they are playing with you they should already know you and they can simply not play with you if you are a loser who can't play without cheats. It's not like you are playing competitive and your rating would be affected by losing to someone who is cheating. Am I missing something?

Why do you think cheating only affects competitive games and why do you think cheat makers are competent? A co-op experience will be totally ruined in one player is on the power-level of a god and the others are like ants. Cheats can also lead to unforeseen bugs and instability. It's not like a mod done with official tools.

Anyway you can read a full statement from the devs regarding anti-cheat.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/19dp2qw/helldivers_2_nprotect_gameguard_anticheat/

HELLDIVERS 2 is out - here's how to run it on Steam Deck / Linux
19 February 2024 at 10:39 am UTC

Quoting: sarmadWhy would a game with no online competitive mode need an anti-cheat? Sounds dumb to me.

Your statement is a little naive. The first Helldivers had no anti-cheat and they had huge problems with cheaters. People unlocking infinite resources for themselves and also everyone they played with, thus ruining the progression for a lot of people.

Helldivers 2 rated Playable for Steam Deck by Valve
19 February 2024 at 10:04 am UTC

Player count reach 409k yesterday on Steam. Arrowhead have a hectic week a head of them.

Dead Cells will be finished with the upcoming Update 35
12 February 2024 at 10:11 pm UTC Likes: 3

This just came out of the blue. I was looking forward to more Dead Cells this year :( It wasn't that long ago that they posted their long-term plan for DC. Now that's not happening all of a sudden. It's a shame because the DLC's went from strength to strength. The Castlevania DLC really raised the bar and almost became something else other than the base game. I wish Evil Empire the best and are excised for their next game.

Valve seeing increasing bug reports due to Steam Snap - other methods recommended
19 January 2024 at 8:12 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: CatKiller
Quoting: BrokattValve officially only supports one distro and that is the latest Ubuntu LTS - with either Gnome or KDE desktop.
They don't support Gnome any more - well, specifically Wayland Gnome; X11 Gnome is OK - because it breaks SteamVR. I can't remember which widget it is that Gnome doesn't provide (I don't use VR and I don't use Gnome) but ISTR that the Gnome devs specifically refuse to support that widget. Someone with more familiarity with the details can fill in the gaps.

Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: BrokattValve officially only supports one distro and that is the latest Ubuntu LTS - with either Gnome or KDE desktop.
Source? Their initial run of SteamOS was debian based, and not Ubuntu based. They include some ubuntu name libraries, and that's about it.

I've literally been installing steam on all my debian systems since it was first added to the repos... about 14 years ago. Never had any issues with it at all. Ubuntu LTS itself only supports their modified gnome install, so there is that.

By the way, Debian's package is now called 'steam-installer' and you can install it with three commands.
 
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install steam-installer steam-devices

And guess what? The /usr/games/steam file is a script that downloads the very official debian Steam package and installs it.

Funny enough, the Arch version likely does the exact same thing. Which basically means it doesn't really matter what Valve officially supports, people will get it installed, and currently the correct way to get the right dependencies, etc is to NOT use the .deb from their website, but to use your package manager on whichever distribution you choose.

Neither SteamOS 2.0 nor 3.0 was/is meant as a desktop replacement. If you look at the recommended specs on the Steam page for any Valve game they only ever recommend an Ubuntu LTS release.

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1114-3F74-0B8A-B784

Quoting: mattaraxia
Quoting: CatKiller
Quoting: BrokattValve officially only supports one distro and that is the latest Ubuntu LTS - with either Gnome or KDE desktop.
They don't support Gnome any more - well, specifically Wayland Gnome; X11 Gnome is OK - because it breaks SteamVR. I can't remember which widget it is that Gnome doesn't provide (I don't use VR and I don't use Gnome) but ISTR that the Gnome devs specifically refuse to support that widget. Someone with more familiarity with the details can fill in the gaps.

I would be really interested to know that too. I was kind of surprised the deck doesn't at least support GNOME. I get KDE is more accommodating to Windows users and being friendly to them is obviously a high priority for the deck, but GNOME is so good on a hybrid/tablet style device like that. VR being a priority makes a lot of sense.

Edit: it appears to be this: DRM leasing. They don't refuse, it's just never been complete enough to be merged:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2759

As far as I can see Gnome is supported on Steam for Linux. Why would they put resources into supporting Gnome on Steam Deck? I would guess a majority of the Steam Deck users don't ever use Desktop Mode. Other features like HDR support have higher priority than adding another DE to Desktop Mode.

Valve seeing increasing bug reports due to Steam Snap - other methods recommended
18 January 2024 at 10:57 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: Brokatt
Quoting: Eike
QuoteValve posted asking people to consider using the official Valve .deb package

Please, please, please, please not!
I'm raeding nearly every thread in the Steam for Linux forum, and we hear problems from people having used the downloadable deb for over a decade now! People should use what their distribution made of it, adding their dependencies and such. I cannot believe Valve proposes to actually use that!

What problems? I have been using the official .deb for over a year and it has worked fine. It's not flawless but there are issues with the Flatpak version as well.

As said: dependencies. And I'm not promoting Flatpak either, I prefer the "native" package (deb or whatever your system uses) of your distribution. The distribution makers download the same deb you can download (so they'll hardly make it worse), and they can add to it what the distribution needs to run it. I'm not saying the Steam deb does not work at all, it just might miss dependencies. Of course, if you know what to do, you can install them manually.

People keep coming in the forum with "Steam does not work on Linux", and when you make them show the terminal output, it's missing (32 bit) libraries. And people post "Steam for Linux cannot use games on my hard drive", and when you dig into it, they're using Snap or Flatpak, didn't even know they do, and thus wouldn't know why Steam cannot access other drives.

What's almost never brought up is that if a user is using Ubuntu LTS, and the official Steam package then they can get support directly from Valve. They don't need to go forum hunting, pasting commands lines into their terminal that they have no idea what its doing etc. They can just contact the Steam support and get help from a real company. This alone should make Ubuntu the recommendation for all beginners who, judging by the numbers, are growing. But many active Linux forum users are so proud in their specific choice of distro, package format, display server etc. that they don't take this simple fact into account. I am not surprised Valve is getting bug reports for Steam Snap. I'm sure they get bug reports for Steam Flatpak and all the other packages as well. Heck I'm sure they get support cases for Hannah Montana Linux.

When I time and time again see posts like "Hi I am a Linux noob. What distro should I use" and the top response is Manjaro, I sigh and shake my head. It's no wonder Linux have a reputation for being complex. We don't ease new user in.

Valve seeing increasing bug reports due to Steam Snap - other methods recommended
18 January 2024 at 8:30 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: kerossinI've been running Steam Flatpak on openSUSE Tumbleweed for over a year (maybe 2 years, can't remember) and had no problems.

Would be great if Valve would officially support Steam Flatpak, it would cover a lot more distros than just the Debian family but I believe it wouldn't be that much more work since it uses specific versions of Flatpak runtimes.

Edit: Also, funny how they hired more devs to work on Snap support in other distros while their own doesn't work properly yet.
Don't they already support flatpak version of Steam? Isn't that what the Steamdeck uses? (Maybe not, I'd have to look).

Valve officially only supports one distro and that is the latest Ubuntu LTS - with either Gnome or KDE desktop. They also only officially support one way one installing the client and that is the official .deb. SteamOS is using Arch so the client is packaged by Valve themselves but no other devices that Steam Decks are officially supported - yet.

Even though Valve is doing a lot of cool things they are still a small company (by headcount). I think the chances of Valve dedicating resources to support more than one distro, or more than one way of installing Steam, are slim. Maybe Flatpak could replace deb and SteamOS replace Ubuntu LTS in the future.

Quoting: Eike
QuoteValve posted asking people to consider using the official Valve .deb package

Please, please, please, please not!
I'm raeding nearly every thread in the Steam for Linux forum, and we hear problems from people having used the downloadable deb for over a decade now! People should use what their distribution made of it, adding their dependencies and such. I cannot believe Valve proposes to actually use that!

What problems? I have been using the official .deb for over a year and it has worked fine. It's not flawless but there are issues with the Flatpak version as well.

Unity cutting 25% of staff (about 1,800 people) as part of restructuring
9 January 2024 at 2:35 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: TheSHEEEPI don't have an objection to companies downsizing for cost reasons.
Just makes business sense in some situations.

What makes this so crazy is that they didn't lose profitability due to "the market changing" or inflation or anything.
Their leadership made absolutely insane decisions that cost them dearly, but the ones to pay the consequences of that are the normal staff, while the leadership remains absurdly overpaid.

That's the part that's just really grinding my gears.

I fully agree with you. Just to illustrate how much of a disaster in leadership this is. Unity went from 4000 employees in 2020 to 7700 in 2022. That's almost doubling in size in two years. Now in an even shorter time span they have cut one third of the work force. They are essential back to a headcount they had in 2021. What a roller coaster in all the wrong possible ways.

Quoting: ZlopezI'm surprised to see Jim Whitehurst as Interim CEO for Unity. I thought that he currently has some top management function in IBM after being CEO of Red Hat.

Interesting choice. Hopefully he can bring some of that Open Source and Open Organization thinking to Unity. Maybe he can transform Unity into the game engine equivalent to Red Hat.

MSI officially announced the Claw A1M handheld with Intel
9 January 2024 at 2:19 pm UTC Likes: 6

New devices are cool but I don't like the design. Too many sharp edges and all the RGB makes it look like something for the Fortnite generation. Maybe that's the target audience, in which case best of luck to them, or maybe I'm just old.

In any case the specs look good and it will be interesting to see how the Intel chip performs. But I can't find any info on price. Like the old saying goes: "There are no bad products only badly priced products."

KDE Plasma 6 hits initial funding goal
3 January 2024 at 2:39 pm UTC Likes: 5

Hope they have the resources to get it nice and stable in time for release. And if not they have some extra time until Kubuntu 24.04 LTS which is probably when I will get my hands on it :)