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Latest Comments by dibz
Turok: Origins announced and it's now a third-person shooter with co-op
13 December 2024 at 3:20 pm UTC

Agreed with the live service concerns. Absolutely gives those vibes.

Never really thought about it before, but rather then whatever this is, a full AAA narrative single-player FPS for Turok might've been really cool (with no live service elements WHATSOEVER).

Epic Games update the Unreal Tournament website linking to the free downloads from OldUnreal
11 December 2024 at 9:06 pm UTC Likes: 2

Nice that they did this, just setting aside my personal opinions on Epic.

Honestly, I'd almost rather they didn't revive Unreal Tournament so I can just keep my fond memories of it rather then be upset by whatever modern garbage take they'd come up with that I'd never play anyway.

NVIDIA 565.77 stable driver for Linux released
5 December 2024 at 7:55 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: legluondunetWhat is the added value today for Linux users to buy a Nvidia?
To my point of view and Linux gamer experience, it appears to me today more comfortable to use a AMD GPU, because of his better integration with Linux Mesa/Kernel.

DLSS, reflex, nvenc, cuda like Xpander mentioned, along with still being overall better cards then AMD, although this is mainly at the high end if you ignore/don't need the mentioned features. Desktops using non-Wayland distros have absolutely no problems. However, I believe anyone with two GPUs such as AMD on-board and an nvidia card do have issues in general.

The best Linux distribution for gaming in 2025
3 December 2024 at 10:58 pm UTC

Quoting: WMan22
Quoting: dibz
Quoting: WMan22I'm on Nvidia, so I basically have to use a rolling release distro if I want a good experience. Hence why I'm almost always using either CachyOS or Nobara Project. I'm sure Kubuntu is a great experience for AMD users though. Snaps are a problem though, Valve themselves say not to use the steam snap for example.

Are you just using Wayland based distros or something? There is no reason to use a rolling release distro for a good nvidia experience. This belief is typically propagated by users of those distributions.

I know this is kind of a controversial thing to say but like, I have legitimate reasons to kinda need wayland, due to every one of my computer setups having mixed refresh rate multi monitor setups, something that X11 hates.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that Wayland needs a lot more work, it needs screen reader capabilities, it needs color management, it needs multi-window management for stuff like PCSX2, etc. but at its core, even with all the annoying missing stuff, the upside of having multiple monitor setups with different screen refresh rates that simply work with barely any issues negates the downsides of Wayland right now for me.

I play a lot of Warframe, and on X11, it spawns the game window in the middle of my main monitor and my portrait mode monitor no matter what desktop environment I am using, and dragging the window to my main monitor technically works but then the in game cursor can only access 40% of my screen before acting like it's hit my right primary monitor's screen bezel. Wayland does not have this issue. Gamescope fixes this issue in X11, but then I can't open the steam overlay which I make heavy use of for tracking my ducat farming in the notes function and chatting with friends.

tl;dr I understand where you are coming from, however, X11 is not suiting my needs at the moment.

I feel the mixed refresh rates. In more recent drivers, nvidia-settings has an option under display configuration (advanced) for "Force Full Composition Pipeline" which helps quite a bit. Although while it helps (substantially) the only issue-free screen is going to be your Primary, which you can also select in nvidia settings. I too have triple monitors. The full comp thing is relatively newer (last couple/few years?).

Your Warframe issue sounds downright bizarre. For giggles'n's**ts I went ahead and installed Warframe for the first time via Steam, and gave it a shot. It did initially start in a window, but setting it to full screen was no problem and it stuck. I had no issues with it displaying on my main monitor, and only there. Perhaps your main screen wasn't set as the primary in nvidia settings? Played it for a few minutes, changed gfx settings, seemed fun and had no issues. For the record, I run Mint XFCE and have an older Geforce 1070 Ti, with 32GB ram, and triple monitors, with the center monitor set as the primary for the X Screen in nvidia-settings.

Not encouraging or arguing with you, was just legit curious and felt like playing with it.

The best Linux distribution for gaming in 2025
3 December 2024 at 9:26 pm UTC

Quoting: WMan22I'm on Nvidia, so I basically have to use a rolling release distro if I want a good experience. Hence why I'm almost always using either CachyOS or Nobara Project. I'm sure Kubuntu is a great experience for AMD users though. Snaps are a problem though, Valve themselves say not to use the steam snap for example.

Are you just using Wayland based distros or something? There is no reason to use a rolling release distro for a good nvidia experience. This belief is typically propagated by users of those distributions.

In Mint it should work out of the box with Nouveu drivers to get you into the OS, at which point you open Driver Manager and click to use the official binary drivers. They install, you reboot, you're done. In Ubuntu I believe the process is similar, and they even use the same things under the hood, but you get to the menu different with the process being the same for Kubuntu. Oddly, none of this information/the process is even remotely new.

The best Linux distribution for gaming in 2025
3 December 2024 at 3:52 pm UTC Likes: 2

I would argue that Kubuntu is not necessarily the best, as many of the reasons given are simply personal preference. For example, I strongly prefer XFCE but for similar reasons that were stated, which boils down to preference. I find newer windows major versions to be annoying to use, and a little frustrating. Now-old windows was always more straight forward with a higher usability to me (due to being straight-forward and fast), while still be easy and attractive; I find this aligns more with XFCE then it does KDE. And yes, I'm not all that old, but I am in my early 40s and my first OS was MS-DOS and was very excited when my parents let me buy one of the MS-DOS version upgrades, although I don't quite remember the upgrade version.

Anyway, I would at least say Kubuntu is obviously a solid choice.

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what I'd recommend out of the gate without giving it some thought. The base recommendations in my head for an average user would likely be:

- Avoid rolling distributions wholesale.
- (Probably) avoid Wayland for now. While it's fine, it's still not great with Nvidia, and other issues besides. While it's probably the future, it really shouldn't be considered mainstream ready.
- I generally avoid main Ubuntu, finding packages just a little too unstable. Too many times I've run into issues with packages, only to find out they won't be fixed until their next major release, which just trades problems in what feels like an endless cycle. Typically minor issues, but an annoying thing to deal with nonetheless.
- Don't recommend any new hotness, stick to distributions that have been around for quite some time, have a solid track record, and a good sized user base.

My personal bias would point me towards a Mint flavor as a good all-rounder that's a solid choice for any type of user, I don't love flatpaks or how they often give the appearance of being official packages even when they are not. Snaps are worse, I'm sure that a casual user just doesn't care -- but that doesn't mean they shouldn't. You don't need to ram an opinion like that down someones throat, but it wouldn't kill a person that knows better to shy away from recommending (and normalizing) it. That said, and (strong personal opinion incoming) I don't see a way to avoid it with how things are going in recent years, feeling that rolling distros are largely to blame for classic packing not making as much sense as it used to.

Sony reportedly looking to acquire Kadokawa, owner of ELDEN RING dev FromSoftware
19 November 2024 at 4:20 pm UTC Likes: 6

I really hope this doesn't happen, the gaming issues are obvious and already pointed out.

Sony is getting more and more of a monopoly on all things anime, and has been cranking prices to everything they touch for some time now. Really looking forward to $100+ prices on BD anime seasons for nearly everything, when they even get released at all anymore.

Direct3D to Vulkan translation layer DXVK v2.5.1 released fixing GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition and an anisotropic filtering regression
18 November 2024 at 6:53 pm UTC Likes: 2

Proton Experimental tends to pick the DXVK updates so quickly I stopped bothering checking out the latest hotness manually, and just default everything to that knowing it'll get these updates within a day or a two. Haven't bothered with a stable version in quite some time.

GOG launch their Preservation Program to make games live forever with a hundred classics being 're-released'
13 November 2024 at 4:36 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: tfkI wonder whether they will keep the original versions available too for those who still have original hardware.

For what it's worth, in older adventure games where they use ScummVM (as opposed to say, Dosbox) they eventually removed original versions but not at first. They originally did include the executables as well, and people could use them on original hardware, but as ScummVM doesn't actually need those they always had the option to not include them, and eventually did remove them.

I don't think they ever announced why, unless I missed it somewhere. I always kind of assumed it was a "support thing" in that they solved complaints that the games wouldn't start or that people would get errors because they'd try to launch the games directly (in which case the simplest solution would be to remove the problem wholesale). Just conjecture on my part, but feels like a reasonable explanation.

EA Anti-Cheat arrives for Battlefield 1 breaking it on Steam Deck / Linux
23 October 2024 at 7:08 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: LoudTechieThe question is why does everybody use BattleEye, to actively break linux.
I mean all the other anti-cheats offer just as much support for breaking it.
This way the Wine people only have to implement the behavior BattleEye(Windows only edition) depends on.
Not that I'm complaining, but it sounds stupid.

I would assume it's the same reason things like google drive, and similar cloud storage, avoid making official linux clients. The general idea is that linux users are more savvy, and therefor, more likely to use the services to their maximum extent, and for storage using all of what you pay for is considered a bad thing.

In anti-cheat context, I can only assume they're specifically targeting "savvy".

Obviously all of that happens anyway, probably nearly immediately.