I'm not sure I want a simulator of my day job, lol.

Although, simulated "work gossip" could be amazing!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

That makes sense.

I do have a question for those that own one. How is the desktop mode on the deck, like not with an extra keyboard and monitor? For some reason, I guess I worry it looks a little small?

I'm imagining this use case say for traveling/commuting, but maybe I'm wrong?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Dwarf Fortress is awesome. It introduced me into the whole "small scale" builder thing. I don't think I would have played RimWorld or Factorio (two of my most favorite games) without Dwarf Fortress.

I remember when I had this "genius" idea to make an underground power station by rerouting the river via a subterranean channel under my fortress... Apparently dwarves do not float well and my colony got swept away by the current...

...I'll never be civic engineer....

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Thanks for the article! This actually looks very nice!!

In regards to remote play:

QuoteIn my own testing, over WiFi the experience was not great

To be fair, that might not be the Deck or your Network. That may just be Remote Play. For me, over the past 2 years, it's gotten worse with audio/video corruption on the same hardware (wired network). I actually see the criticism you mentioned concerning Valve flip flopping as potentially being valid here.

QuoteFeel free to let me know in the comments what other types of Steam Deck content you want to see!

I'd love to know more about the battery's longevity over a longer term. Has it shown any signs of degradation so far?

Also, how hard/awkward is it to play while it's plugged in?


Thanks again for the review. That was wonderful!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Hope the developer and their family/friends are ok.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: EssemI'm kind of confused in regards to how it was verified when the game doesn't seem to work out of the box.

Verified for Deck, which is different to all the distros on desktop.

I was kinda wondering the same thing. Thanks for explaining it. Hopefully they get the Linux desktop part sorted out quickly.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: rustybroomhandle

Quoting: DebianUser

Quoting: jordicomaUnsupported? This has more sense than on spanish "No compatibles" (no compatible), as many of these games works on my linux, even some are native.

Maybe unsupported only means that you do not have any support from the publisher ?
I agree not compatible is terrible.
The problem is that in this list, you have both : not compatibles, and compatibles but unsupported.

Unsupported reasons generally the following:

1. "Valve is still working on adding support for this game on Steam Deck" - When you see this it usually refers to Proton features being worked on. In most cases this refers to mfplat support. There's a good chance these will work eventually.

2. "This game's anti-cheat is not configured to support Steam Deck" - Not Valve's problem, fire ze missiles at the dev/publisher.

3. "This game is unsupported on Steam Deck due to use of an unsupported anti-cheat" - Don't expect these to work any time soon.

4. "Steam Deck does not support VR games" - I mean, you can in theory get VR working on the deck, but the experience will be terrible.

5. Games that fail to start at all. Tried to find an actual example of this, but gave up.

I would agree, but why is Outlast, which I played through natively, appearing on my "unsupported" list?

Native (and even "Platinum on ProtonDB/AppDB") does not equate verified for the Deck.

I doubt many games were made with a 7"-9" screen and controller only support in mind. In fact, I'd imagine some simply will never work by design, regardless of Linux compatibility.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: anewsonkind of amazing how many problems HOTAS systems have relative to how expensive they are.. I had a Saitek x52 for Elite Dangerous and it had countless problems with not a ton of use.

Not gonna lie, the best stick I've owned is a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro joystick. Despite being a cheap retail stick (you can tell because they added "Extreme" and "Pro" to the name, lol)

Mines 17+ years old. Not perfect, but gets the job done.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: denyasisI guess it's another win for Valve and Open source successes. I guess I feel slightly conflicted about it. While I appreciate Feral's work, I'm also glad that open source tools like Wine/Proton have finally taken over in a meaningful way.

I guess it's both a loss and a gain.

it is a loss.
on one hand, its good that an general purpose solution like wine/proton is better than porting, but that says more about the porting process and quality than about wine.
the ideal solution is linux geting enough marketshare to be threated like an first class citizen and open apis like vulkan becoming the standard.
its almost like if we were living the flash era vs html5 era, flash was multiplatform but had an crap support for linux, where html5 would be the "native" solution, using open standards.
while wine is gpl, directX isnt.

Is it? I'm under the impression most of these porting companies use wrappers, don't they? It's not like they all rewrote the binary and renderer into openGL. Maybe some did, but Valve has toGL, I forget what Aspry's wrapper was, etc. I'd bet some of these older ports looked a lot like a windows game under the hood, and the proprietary porting tech worked a lot like wine in some cases. Heck, there are even projects using DXVK as a wrapper for porting. I believe there are a number of Linux releases on GOG that are essentially wrapped with Wine.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, in a sense, we've put the power to "port" into our own hands, at a level simple users like me can leverage. And if a "native" port is just using its own wrappers and layers under the hood, is there really a huge moral difference there?

take a look at this conference, where the company who ported dying light to linux comment about the porting process:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2015/04/techland-presentation-on-porting-dying-light-to-linux/

TL:DR, it was impossible to rewrite the code writen by 200 employees with only 2~3 employees, especially considering that the game was still under development and as a result the code was changing all the time, so they had to seek for paterns and make an translator or layer or soomething akin to that.
but if they relied only on this layers, the performance would tank and no computer in the world would be able to play the game in an acceptable framerate even on minimal setings, so they had to manually optimize any bootnecks.

i think that is how you port anything, write an general purpose code converter, then look at the profilers to see what is kiling the performance and optimize by hand.

as for anyone who want to complain that 'this or that company' is lazy, then go port something, there are plenty of open source projects on github that are windows only.
in the mean time, try to turn this ports of you into an sustainable business model, and if you can, you can complain about feral all you want.

Thanks! I'll try to check it out on my lunch break. I think it totally make sense that a porter would use a layer/translation tool/wrapper, especially if it is a business trying to maximize efficiency. I wasn't trying to imply the porters are lazy or anything, my apologies if it came off that way.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestThe only appeal they have now is to offer DRM free games

I think GOG kinda lost it's way when DRM-free stopped being a thing customers cared about.

When they started, it was a good play. There were a lot more stores and the number of stores was decreasing, so people could be concerned about losing their library if a store closed.

Today, I think people are not worried that a store like Steam will close, or are that worried about DRM in general asuch as they were in the past. I think GOG as a store didn't really figure out how to react to that in a meaningful way and still haven't.

View this comment - View article - View full comments