I've come back and played this off and on over the years - they started in 1998 on this(!) and are still going, which in and of itself is some kind of testament to... something.

No, seriously - genuinely impressed with the commitment to it, and yeah, it can feel a little weird at first, coming from other Sonic games, but remember - Sonic Adventure only came out at the tail end of 1998 in Japan. Here in North America, of course, we had the 9/9/99 launch date instead (I still have the Dreamcast pre-order T-shirt and goodies from Electronics Botique, now GameStop).

If Sonic Adventure was the herald for future mainline 3D Sonic games, SRB2 feels much more firmly rooted in the 'what if we just took Genesis (MegaDrive)-era 2D Sonic and made it 3D?' that even Sega / Sonic Team kind of went back to later, theme-wise, with stuff like Sonic Generations and Sonic 4. (Nevermind Sonic Mania being an amazing love-letter to that 2D world, of course)

Anyone who has fond memories of 90s Sonic and wondered what an alternate universe where Sonic Team didn't... do whatever they did in the transition to 3D, should really check this out, especially now that it's had 20+ years of polish. :)

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I mean, has Destiny 2 even been relevant since they started removing people's access to expansion they paid for and then went hard on the monetization bent? I know I stopped playing around the whole New Light F2P thing. :/

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So, this is just big spitballing on my part, having not tried to do this (yet):

After reading Ars' Linux breakdown on this, too, with the SteamOS filesystem being read-only (though Valve does give you the command to flag it read-write, with the expectation that if you then update, your changes get overwritten)... I wonder if there's a way to leverage something like OverlayFS to then mount your own additions to /usr, /etc, and such so you can then run standard pacman and other commands that expect a fully read-write filesystem, and have those writes + new files live in your separate image (on the microSD, even?) so that a SteamOS upgrade doesn't necessarily blow that away...

Technically the same thing LiveCDs with writeable tmpfs use, but instead of a tmpfs, back it to its own folder in whatever persistent read-write storage you have?

Now, there's the issue of 'what if the SteamOS upgrade changes a library/file you didn't account for in the overlay and now your stuff broke', but still - this might be a nice medium between wanting to run official SteamOS while also getting a full Arch experience - your changes are just a delta overlay on top. Screw something up? Unmount the overlays and you're back to stock SteamOS.

Similarly, I'm sure we can do something like resize the SteamOS partition and put our own distro on there to dual-boot - yes, even Windows ... I would be surprised if that's not just... straight up your favourite partition editor + grub2.

Pipewire support is nice - Wayland I'm curious to see if we can install (maybe using that overlay idea) and just switch to, especially since KDE Plasma's Wayland support has gotten way, *way* better lately.

Even though I've got a shiny new all-AMD gaming laptop here as a surprise present, I'm still excited for this to be a good replacement for e.g. my partner's aging desktop that's getting hardware gremlins.

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Just confirming that the combo of up-to-date kernel, mesa-git, Plasma 5.24, and now this XWayland update means SteamVR seems to work with my Vive under Wayland, though I'm getting this bug: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues/430

Kudos to all the teams involved here, but... that's it. I literally have zero reason to ever use the Xorg session again; Wayland's just better. :D It even works better with my DisplayPort monitor with 10-bit colour that used to come up with a very psychedelic rainbow artifacting in the previous version of Plasma.

Now we just need Wayland-native SDDM (or for me to try a different greeter). ;)

But yeah, going to try a couple different VR games (getting into VTOL VR lately) and see if they work under Proton here too.

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Quoting: kokoko3kI never said that.

Apologies - I must have fumbled trying to trim down the quote on my phone :p Meant to be a reply to this one further up I think? https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/02/retro-x86-based-machine-emulator-86box-32-brings-linux-support/comment_id=220331

Either way - more just general info for anyone who might think their AppImage is the only route.

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Quoting: kokoko3kNope.
At least, not for me,thanks.
This is GPL 2.0 code that can be packaged by your distribution and installed and uninstalled by your package manager.
I can understand that for proprietary apps, or if you just need to test the software.
More appimages mean more bloat/useless duplication, more memory use.

Someone's already got a PKGBUILD in AUR (and -git version) I might try later; just because the 86box team offers a distro-agnostic AppImage doesn't prevent everyone else from doing the 'right' thing with their distro of choice. I'm sure someone'll have a PPA for Ubuntu users, too, in time, etc.

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Going to give this a try with my Vive later - I believe the just-released KDE Plasma 5.24 added the DRM leasing bits to Kwin, I'm running `mesa-git` (and just did a fresh rebuild this morning), and the latest 5.17 kernel RC. Been running purely Wayland for months, now, but VR was the one thing I kept going back to Windows for.

The 'fun' part will be figuring out if I need to use the HDMI port hooked up to my laptop's APU (and reverse PRIME), or if I can use my USB-C to DP adapter that's hooked straight up to the dGPU, as my lappy is MUX-less.

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Other big one - under Wayland they now have the concept of a 'primary' monitor like under Xorg, so for multi monitor setups where those monitors are changing (i.e. laptops), it remembers your setup and consistently puts your primary panel on the same screen you set it to when plugging in an external monitor.

Looks like they may have fixed the bug I experienced, too, where a Konsole session would freeze if the monitor it was on (or the dGPU?) powered down while you were away with the screen locked, and just be totally dead when you came back and unlocked it.

I'll need to re-test and see if the DRM leasing support means I can get my Vive running on Wayland, next. That's pretty much one of the last things I keep a Windows drive around for, other than my Xbox Game Pass sub.

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Quoting: TrainDocI understand the frustrations with a lack of amd gpus in high end laptops but I feel like one of a few who very pragmatically concedes that nvidia makes the best gpus you might be able to buy. Mind you, I hate their drivers and am very well aware of their still continued anti-competitive practices but again I struggle to justify the costs of a worse GPU. Unless AMDs drivers for their graphics cards (open source ones of course) improve the performance in my games so much over my 2070 Super, I don't understand the insistence on AMD only.

I mean, check out reviews & benches on the RX 6800M and the consensus I've seen is that it trades blows with the 3070 and 3080 in comparable gaming laptops, while also being $100-200 cheaper. At least from a mobile standpoint, with RDNA2 at least it's very much not so cut-and-dry. Plus hardware AV1 decode (no AV1 encode anywhere in high end GPUs yet, boo), usually silly amounts of VRAM (12GB in my new lappy!), and in-kernel open source drivers.

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I'd been waiting and hoping for an all-AMD or even Intel CPU + AMD dGPU option from System76; there aren't a lot of options out there for laptops with Radeon dGPUs. I ended up going for one of the Asus ROG Strix 'AMD Advantage' laptops (same 5900HX CPU paired with a 12GB (!) RX 6800M instead), and while it's not perfect (the USB-C -> DisplayPort adapter I have doesn't seem to work under Wayland, but the HDMI port is fine), with an up-to-date system it works well enough for my needs, and no dealing with nVidia's binary blob drivers. Just the latest Mesa + kernel (5.17-rc2 as of writing). No hardware MUX though, and a whole lot of adding 'DRI_PRIME=1' to shortcuts to force the dGPU.

That said, 2.5Gbps Ethernet as standard on this is interesting, as well as having essentially two DP outputs - I wonder if it supports MST for daisy-chaining displays off that USB-C? i.e., could you set up your dual-external-monitor setup on a docking station and run everything through that USB-C port?

Also, big fan of having the full numpad on there - that's one thing I miss on this Asus laptop. I don't even mind that the whole thing looks a heck of a lot chunkier.

Hopefully this leads to a future all-AMD option from them!

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