Quoting: redneckdrowThe thing is, I don't think Nintendo was going after it as an emulator. Sony v. Bleem (a PSX emulator) set a precedent ~24 years ago. Emulation of older systems is not only permissible, it's vital. Even the IRS uses emulators of 60's-era computers, such as the Martinsburg Monster, that still accept their wildly out-of-date programs written mostly in COBOL.

The way they went after Yuzu was by arguing that it is not just an emulator, that it is a tool used primarily for piracy. Because they're still selling the Switch. Cracking encryption on proprietary hardware that is still on the market is legally dubious at best. I believe Nintendo to be incorrect in assuming that the majority pirated games, but the burden of proof against that would be too great, even in civil court.

Just look at what happened to the guy that cracked the Switch firmware in the first place. Modern Vintage Gamer did a whole video series about why he gives the emulation community a bad name.

Things like this are why I only use emulators for discontinued platforms. In that case, it's much harder for a company to say that it affects their bottom line.

Ripping my own cartridges requires a lot of pain on my part (there are a few different pi-based solutions that lessen that pain today), but it's better than risking a $500,000 dollar fine or five years in prison. Ripping floppies or discs is considerably easier in most cases. I tend to use cdrdao or ddrescue.

Outright piracy of a game still commercially available is theft, no matter how you slice it. Backing up your existing games for a discontinued platform isn't.

I have a couple of 90's-00s games that would be expensive as heck to replace, so I keep the physical copies locked up in a fire-resistant safe and play them via emulation.

If you're interested in Sony v. Bleem, Gaming Historian did a video on the whole debacle. Bleem may have run like a piece of garbage, but every emulation project today owes it a debt.

Manufacturing of Nintendo 3DS stopped over 4 years ago. After last year the Nintendo eShop is completely shut down so even customers who have original hardware cannot purchase digital games. So Nintendo makes no money from neither hardware nor software but they still went after Citra. This is a serious blow to game preservation.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Looking seriously good! Great job all involved in KDE. Hopefully it will we even greater when I get around to running it. Probably on Kubuntu 24.10 :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: telemachuszero

Quoting: GuestI have multiple issues with helldivers 2:

I get the same white pixel border as you, but otherwise it's been solid for me for my 18 hours play so far using the default Proton Hotfix. I'm on AMD hardware (Ryzen 5600X, Radeon 6700XT), running Fedora Silverblue 39 w/ GNOME 45 & Flatpak Steam. A friend using an nVidia GPU (and running Windows) has had a lot of crashes though.

I think everyone on Linux have that pixel border. I suspect that could be "solved" by using Fullscreen instead of Borderless Fullscreen? But I haven't bothered to try as I'm too busy blasting myself and my friends with all manner of ordinances :)

Otherwise my experience have been pretty good. Very stable on Proto-GE but I suspect Proton Experimental would work just as fine. Looking forward to trying it now that it's updated. Experimental moved to Proton 9 pretty fast didn't it?

I'm also on AMD hardware (Ryzen 5800X, Radeon 6800, Kubuntu 23.10).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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/

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments