Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, I downloaded it, clicked play. It brought up a launcher thingie. I clicked play game. It did a loading progress bar for a moment, then brought up the launcher thingie again. Rinse and repeat. I told Steam to try Proton experimental. It did the same thing. Not a very fun game so far.

You must have installed the DLC, Battlestar Galactica; Progress Bar Edition.

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Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: slaapliedjeWait, what? Who is requiring webcams to be uncovered? Most of the laptops I'm seeing now actually have built in shutters for them (maybe that's just Lenovo / Asus?) The Thinkpads have been including those for years.

Upon checking I found that I had slightly misremembered the details on this - my bad, I apologise, as I certainly didn't mean to get it wrong!

Uncovered wasn't in the requirement, but a whole bunch of other things were, including the user-facing webcam itself being mandatory, and required to have an HD resolution, auto-focus, auto white-balance, to be at eye-level, and to have a particular field of view.

I'd rather be able to get a laptop without one as I find a super-specific requirement like this to sound rather off, to say the least, which is doubtless what caused me to misremember this!

The specifics can be viewed in various places. I've just pulled this one and this one from a quick search;

QuoteAn exclusive document sent by Microsoft to OEMs detailing requirements for webcams, microphones, speakers, and real-time collaboration in general for entry-level, mainstream, and premium laptops has surfaced thanks to NotebookCheck. The document even mentions the “impact” if manufacturers fail to implement the requirements. Per the requirements, Microsoft has made it mandatory for all premium laptops to have a 1080p 30fps webcam with a horizontal field of view of 75º and a vertical field of view of 60º. Entry-level laptops can still use 720p webcams but their dynamic range should be ≥33 dB while spatial and temporal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) should be ≥30 dB and ≥33 dB respectively. Mainstream Windows laptops can also have 720p webcams but with support for ≥20 fps at 20 lux and ≥30 fps at 80 lux. Two requirements that cut across categories are an LED that is visible when the webcam is on and a webcam that is at eye level. The latter puts an end to manufacturers who experiment with awkward webcam placements such as placing it between the function keys on the keyboard.

QuoteBut Microsoft’s goal is a bit complicated. In its hardware requirements document, the company also states that Windows 11 laptop webcams must have an HD resolution and support for auto-focus and auto-white balance. These requirements will greatly improve the user experience on budget machines, though they may increase manufacturing costs.

Apparently, machines sold after January of 2023 which don't meet this requirement can't run Windows 11 at all. I really don't like this sort of removal of user-choice.

Wow, that is fucked up. So... they want the Windows Hello (shitty name for shitty login system) to replace passwords (at least that is how I interpret that)? My newest laptop has a fingerprint reader in it and a built in shutter, unfortunately the fingerprint reader has no Linux support... but at this point I think manufacturers shkuld just hook up with something like Yubikey / nitrokey and have that be part of the login.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80Really despise the whole fuck it we will patch it to playable at some point. Just because they can attitude can't blame game Devs for that. That smacks of publisher saying I have sales targets to meet push it out the door and patch it. Some advantages of the pre wide spread broadband days they had to have it be playable out the door. Well maybe except Troika who went bust when vampire bloodlines came out literally two days after the game was on store selves bought it and played it's emense jank long before the fan patches that make it work were around.

Yeah, for those old enough to remember (Pepperidge farm remembers); developers / publishers used to actually deliver games that mostly worked when they were played. There wasn't an easy way to get patches out to players, so they had to make damn sure things worked right. Being able to download patches off the internet kind of ruined a lot of that.

Most impressive thing I still remember, is for some random reason I actually registered my copy of Ultima IX. They sent me a new CD with the patched version plus some extra stuff!

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Quoting: MasterSleort

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: MasterSleort

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: MasterSleortAnyone knows if it works on the original Alienware Steam Machine? I read that it didn't in the last updated so didn't upgrade mine.

I wanted a Steam Machine, but never could justify the price of one (somehow I justify the price of an accelerator board for my Amiga instead...) But amusingly, you can get much more powerful 'NUC' styled systems now that perform a similar function.

Totally agree and really it is not worth much anymore, but for some local multiplayer games it works just fine. But most importantly I just like to keep it going for as much as possible and hate that a software update basically renders it useless 😛

Agreed! Granted, I would have just slapped Debian on one and kept it going that way. Now with the Deck UI being available on standard Steam, you could just set it up to boot straight into that.

From what I gather though, it appears to be a problem in the Vulkan drivers from Nvidia.... I don't expect much luck on getting an updated driver for such old and closed hardware. So installing debian, Ubuntu or Holoiso probably won't help for the Big Picture mode at least.
Good it's my only device with Nvidia. I remember being cautious about that as well back when it was new, but I wanted to support Valves initial efforts on Linux. At some point I might just mod something else into it, as I kinda like the design of the case/shell.

Yeah I kind of thought you could just swap in another low profile card?

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Quoting: Pengling(more means to prevent users from installing their OS of choice, requirements from a certain OS vendor for uncovered webcams, etc.)

Wait, what? Who is requiring webcams to be uncovered? Most of the laptops I'm seeing now actually have built in shutters for them (maybe that's just Lenovo / Asus?) The Thinkpads have been including those for years.

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Quoting: MasterSleort

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: MasterSleortAnyone knows if it works on the original Alienware Steam Machine? I read that it didn't in the last updated so didn't upgrade mine.

I wanted a Steam Machine, but never could justify the price of one (somehow I justify the price of an accelerator board for my Amiga instead...) But amusingly, you can get much more powerful 'NUC' styled systems now that perform a similar function.

Totally agree and really it is not worth much anymore, but for some local multiplayer games it works just fine. But most importantly I just like to keep it going for as much as possible and hate that a software update basically renders it useless 😛

Agreed! Granted, I would have just slapped Debian on one and kept it going that way. Now with the Deck UI being available on standard Steam, you could just set it up to boot straight into that.

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Quoting: denyasis

QuoteKinda amusing their note about verification but Valve ran it through anyway

Lol. But that's on Valve for doing it, but, it's probably smart of Valve to take it out of the devs hands. Now Valve has a shield against complaints "Look it's unsupported, go harass the dev if you want it to work!!"

I will say, you are right in that Valve was kinda stupid too. If your gonna use something in your promo material, you should probably make sure it works in the first place.

Hopefully they work together to make it not sink on the Deck.

We are forgetting back when they were doing marketing for the Steam Machine how they had images of Witcher 3, and this was before Proton could run it by quite a few years. This isn't the first time Valve did an 'oops' as far as marketing goes.

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Quoting: MasterSleortAnyone knows if it works on the original Alienware Steam Machine? I read that it didn't in the last updated so didn't upgrade mine.

I wanted a Steam Machine, but never could justify the price of one (somehow I justify the price of an accelerator board for my Amiga instead...) But amusingly, you can get much more powerful 'NUC' styled systems now that perform a similar function.

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Quoting: sarmad

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: slaapliedjeI bet you if there could be alt stores to snap, no one would hate it as much as they do.

Well that is the situation today but people still hate it as much as they do. Now there AFAIK does not yet exist such a store, but there _could_ do since everything needed to build it is available, it's just that no one have bothered and that is hardly Canonical:s fault.

I'd like to be proven wrong, but I'm pretty sure their backend is tied very much into their client.

The URL to the store is most likely hardcoded in the source code of snapd, but the code is open so it can be forked and so far we don't know how Canonical would treat a patch that changes that to a config value under say /etc/snap.d/.

Right, but who would want to bother when you can just use flatpak? :)

Of course, but then perhaps also at the same time stop the hate for snap? I mean that was the context, not that you had to use it ;)

My actual problem with snap is how difficult it is to remove it from an Ubuntu system... well less about how difficult it is, but it's annoying that it breaks the Ubuntu Software Center when you do. If you want to just use flatpak / debs, you're basically going to be using gnome-software (if you want gui).

I think with time it'll become harder and harder to remove snap from Ubuntu because it looks like Canonical's plans are to move in the direction of Ubuntu Core where system services are installed as snaps. This obviously will make Ubuntu more solid since there is less chance for packages to step on each other, but will pretty much force every Ubuntu user to use snaps.

Yeah, this is what I think will happen, and it'll basically make it no longer a Debian based distribution with decent defaults (which is what I used it for up until they dropped Evolution for Thunderbird. Sure is Thunderbird sufficient for a large swath of people using desktop Linux. Yes. Is it sufficient for enterprise use? No. (at least it wasn't at the time, some stuff has matured so that it's better than it used to be, though Evolution still beats it as far as being a full groupware suite).

I'd like to say it doesn't affect me, but then I've seen a few apps already that are limited to being distributed via the snap store (or tar ball), so are more difficult to install on Debian.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: mattiasb

Quoting: Purple Library Guy... so seems to me any excuses Gnome might make were probably . . . excuses.

It could just have been that they prioritized their time and choose to work on other things? Why would they have to make excuses for that?

The way you're framing this is so entitled. Free software is a privilege not a right.

I didn't know that using gnome is a privilege. I feel unworthy though, so I'll stick to kde plasma for now.

Jokes aside, if a thing is free, it doesn't mean we can't talk about its flaws. Lack of thumbnails in a filepicker is a huge flaw. If you are trying to select a picture, such filepicker is absolutely useless. For every application that has hardcoded gnome/gtk filepicker, I have to open a file manager to drag and drop a picture from there, because that's the only way to see what file I am picking, that's what I think about gnome usability. Now they present to us bluetooth quick menu (already in kde) and background apps list (finally they invented system tray). maybe in 20 years they will add minimize and maximize buttons to the window titlebar, and a taskbar.

taskbar is another interesting topic. for some reason a bar with tabs is fine in a browser, but in a desktop environment a bar with running windows is a suddenly outdated evil thing to get rid of

thankfully we have kde, yet I am glad for gnome. at least its filepicker won't waste my time in apps that don't implement support for a default DE filepicker

What's always weird is when you use an old Qt program, and the file picker is some weird crappy one (not KDE's, but like a default Qt one). Chitubox on Linux does that to me. It's awful.

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