Yeah, I don't mind stuff like Flatpaks for devices like the Steam Deck, where you don't normally get write access to the entire filesystem, but on desktop?

Unless you have a need to sandbox something, just use your distro's packages - they will be compiled with the recommended versions of libraries for the whole ecosystem, instead of storing multiple, slightly different (and potentially way out of date!) versions depending on what you're installing.

Security vulnerability in a shared library? Update it through your distro and you're reasonably well covered across everything on your system. Flatpaks and Snaps? Time to download updates to every single sandboxed app... if they updated at the exact same cadence, if they bother to update it at all. (Yes, it shouldn't mean a *ton* of wasted space as they link and share the same library copy once you've downloaded it once, AFAIK) Almost as bad as all the 'native' apps just using downright ancient, vulnerable versions of Electron for way longer than they should. (*cough* Discord)

It's cool tech, but it should remain specialised, and *definitely* not the first thing you reach for for regular day to day usage, IMO. Heck, snapd was always pretty much the first thing I purged (the Firefox snap was way, *way* underperformant compared to the regular .deb at the time) when I used Ububtu, until I switched distros entirely. You don't *need* to keep five different versions of a library to cover two dozen Flatpaks or Snaps on disk in almost all normal use cases, unless the library update is an API/ABI breaking one.

All that said, one of the biggest criticisms I've seen of Canonical's behaviour is that it feels like vendor lock in, so if it's being opened up to other distros (and it's easy for communities to host their own Snap repos *not* on Canonical's servers), then it's still interesting tech to watch and potentially keep in your back pocket for those situations where it makes sense, so good on them for at least trying, now.

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Absolutely loving Pipewire, been using it for a while now. Reminds me a lot of CoreAudio on the Mac, though with a bit more up front configuration.

It being a drop in for PulseAudio, JACK, and ALSA, all at the same time while still being great on latency is just *chefkiss*. I can go from gaming to recording music tracks in Ardour with no messing around.

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Patreon's... definitely not my first choice, considering some of the stuff they've pulled over the past few years, but I appreciate there's at least another option (even if Paypal is *also* scummy... But pick your poison, I guess).

Glad to see it all going to good use and making this better for everyone! We appreciate the work you do. <3

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As someone who still hosts an old social MU* for friends off an old RasPi in a drawer, and learned Multi-User Forth (MUF) and MPI as some of my first programming languages in... elementary school...

This is certainly A Thing. I never got big into the combat-heavy MUD way of doing things, but it's fun seeing people keeping this style alive!

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Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: Kithop...really, the sound issue is because it's trying to hit ALSA natively? PulseAudio is... *checks notes*... 19 years old at this point. (GitHub issue link )

Though at least later on it sounds like it's from people using the Flatpak version instead of native - and yeah, that's the first thing I'd say for almost anyone: don't use Flatpaks for this. Use your distro's native Steam package as your first choice, and then move down the line to like, getting it direct from Valve or whatnot if they don't have one. Running Steam in Flatpak or Snap just sounds like a Bad Time. But hey, at least there's validation that the sandbox is, uh, sandboxing things!

...like your own app from a decent audio API... ;p

That's not how that works, the sandbox isn't just arbitrarily deciding to block a game from using ALSA (there's a bunch of other games that also use ALSA which work just fine). And, funnily enough, I tried it out on Flatpak Steam today and it seems to work fine, sound and all.

So, it's almost like the game either had regular launch problems or some setup-specific problems, but which weren't the fault of Flatpak. So, it seems your blame was misplaced.

I've admittedly never bothered with Flatpaks at all outside of the Steam Deck, and yes, there are potentially plenty of complicating factors, but multiple people had Flatpak issues; that's all I mean to reference, there. It sounds like it wasn't blocking ALSA, but access to PipeWire, so presumably there just needs to be some updated default configs upstream somewhere.

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One more reminder that with the Unity fallout, the solution wasn't going to be 'switch to Unreal', because there's nothing stopping them from being about to try to pull the exact same move.

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Yeah no, not after this fiasco: link

Not trusting any of their newer hardware on my home network.

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...really, the sound issue is because it's trying to hit ALSA natively? PulseAudio is... *checks notes*... 19 years old at this point. (GitHub issue link )

Though at least later on it sounds like it's from people using the Flatpak version instead of native - and yeah, that's the first thing I'd say for almost anyone: don't use Flatpaks for this. Use your distro's native Steam package as your first choice, and then move down the line to like, getting it direct from Valve or whatnot if they don't have one. Running Steam in Flatpak or Snap just sounds like a Bad Time. But hey, at least there's validation that the sandbox is, uh, sandboxing things!

...like your own app from a decent audio API... ;p

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Quoting: habernirhow do i install this FPS toolbar at the top?

thanks nir

On Steam Deck this is built in as the performance overlay ('...' button on the right), upstream it's just MangoHud

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Honestly, as weird as this is to say it - I honestly won't mind if this ends up going through. I know it's kind of blasphemy to root for Microsoft, of all companies, but the Xbox division at least has *sort of* shifted. First party games still ending up on Steam and in most cases running fine on Proton (even Starfield!), semi-official guides on getting xCloud Streaming working on Steam Deck, the work they put into WSL2... their accessibility efforts like that special pad w/ 3.5mm jacks for all the buttons...

Sure, you can argue it's for lock-in purposes, and there'll always be that to some degree, but heck - have we forgotten about the abuse & toxic work environment at Blizzard from a few years back? At least MS could rein them in and try to fix it.

It's not the ideal outcome, sure, but I can't bring myself to hate it either, I guess. I fully understand I'm in the minority on that one.

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