Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: slaapliedjeWhy would they need two copies of the OS (unless you're referring to the fail over?) I know AtariOS does this with their immutable set up for rollbacks.

If you already know the answer, why ask the question?

The Deck has one /home partition and two completely independent copies of the OS - the current one and the previous one. Updates overwrite the "previous" version, which then becomes the "current" version, and the former "current" version becomes the "previous" version. The device always has at least one complete OS it can boot into because neither version can affect the other - updates are atomic.

Probably because I was not 100% sure they did the same thing. I have mostly been trying to see how good the Deck is without mucking with the Linux side much. The OLED versio, I haven't even booted to desktop mode yet!

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Quoting: CatKillerValve are absolutely not going to put a second DE on the Deck. They're space-constrained already with two copies of the OS before you even get to games and shader caches that you have to fit into 64 GB. They aren't going to bloat that out for something (choice of desktop environment) that's an anti-feature for the machine's use case. It's getting one, and Valve have already picked it: KDE. While there are several plausible reasons to choose that one - it behaving like a normal desktop rather than Gnome's One True Workflow, the devs being much nicer to work with, and so on - the reason Valve gave for their choice was that it was the DE that Valve staff use and like.

There is (finally) a Wayland HDR spec that people haven't rejected. But it isn't finished. So Valve took the parts of that which work for single-window fullscreen games and implemented it in their own compositor; KDE are using just that bit for single-window fullscreen games in Plasma 6, too. At some point all the finer details of how to handle mixed HDR and non-HDR content in multiple windows will have been worked out and there'll be a full Wayland HDR and colour management spec that the compositors can implement; gamescope, not yet being a Wayland compositor and only being interested in single-window games, doesn't need to bother with any of that.

Why would they need two copies of the OS (unless you're referring to the fail over?) I know AtariOS does this with their immutable set up for rollbacks.

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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

Hmm, I haven't tested my Index since I swapped to an AMD GPU. I'll have to test it soonish.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Eike

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

Please, please, please, please not!
I'm reading 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!

I just use the Debian version of the Steam package. Never have any issues with it at all.

The Debian repository package or Valve's deb? The former one is the one I'm recommending. Of course, the latter one works too, it just might need more manual "help".

I think I added details further up, but the Debian repository 'steam-installer' these days is just an installer script that does all the work of downloading Valve's deb for you :)

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Quoting: fenglengshun

Quoting: BrokattWhat 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.

Probably dependency issues, which is at the heart of the infamous "Yes, do as I say," in the LTT Linux Challenge.

Steam Flatpak has its issues, but it gets people arriving to the "I can install the game, I can play the game," faster with less risk (assuming you're not having to deal with your secondary drives/partitions at least).

I want to address Linus' issues directly. 1) he should have read the warning. 2) PopOS is now on my shit list of distributions. I had it installed on some friend's laptops and it ate itself in the worse way. One of them was looking like it was having a hardware issue (both identical laptops). I installed Debian Bookworm over it... worked perfectly fine afterward. On the other one, it ran into a massive dependency hell, and all I was doing was running updates that hadn't been done in a few years, since the laptop basically was sitting idle as a backup. Never seen such a mess on a debian based system, and I've been running it for 25-ish years?

I've lost confidence in PopOS, unfortunately. It looked like a great alternative to Ubuntu until they decided to make their own DE.

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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.

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Quoting: Eike

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

Please, please, please, please not!
I'm reading 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!

I just use the Debian version of the Steam package. Never have any issues with it at all.

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Quoting: fenglengshun

Quoting: slaapliedjeThe proper place for the X button, looking at you, Apple! I've looked up how to flip that to the other side on macOS, and apparently the Almighty Apple has spoken and does not allow such things... All other operating systems I've ever used has it on the right side... but not macOS...

Eh. I prefer top left window-control buttons. It especially made sense with a Unity-like UX, where you have the window-controls pinned on the top panel as well, and you have the behaviour of hiding titlebar when a window is maximized.

Top left just felt natural for me. Also, kinda corresponds to the location of Esc button and most back/burger menu buttons positions.

The beauty is, most operating system / desktop environments give you the option. Not so on macOS.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: PenglingIt's been several decades now, so I may be misremembering, but wasn't it on the left on the Amiga, too?

There was no X button on Amiga Workbench windows. But the dot-in-a-square the manual called "the Closing Gadget" was indeed at the top left.

Ha, I've mucked around with enough of the theming stuff in AmigaOS over the years, that I can no longer remember where the close button is.

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Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: slaapliedjeThe proper place for the X button, looking at you, Apple! I've looked up how to flip that to the other side on macOS, and apparently the Almighty Apple has spoken and does not allow such things... All other operating systems I've ever used has it on the right side... but not macOS...

It's been several decades now, so I may be misremembering, but wasn't it on the left on the Amiga, too?

Anyhow, the top-left is clearly the right place for it.

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After all, you don't want Close to be anywhere near to Minimise and Maximise, and it's convenient to have it near to the menu you use to open new things - that's simply good interface-design.

(Yes yes, I'm being a bit facetious, and I know I'm in the minority preferring to have the X there. I'm just glad that Linux desktop environments give us the options we want - Xfce lets me arrange these things however I like, for example, and I seem to recall that KDE also allows that.)

Yes, but you can move it where ever you wish. Same with all of the DEs on Linux (even Gnome!). macOS does NOT let you move it around. I think the most you can do at this point is maybe change colors. It also uses 'maximize' buttons completely different than all the other DEs / Operating systems I've seen...

For what it's worth, the Atari ST also has it in the top left corner, with its maximize button in the top right. Though again, you can install replacement desktops that'll let you change that (and add minimize).

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