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Latest Comments by scaine
AMD publishes the source code for FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2)
23 June 2022 at 11:33 am UTC

My understanding of this is limited, but I think it has to be engineered into the game - FSR2 can't be "hacked" into a game externally the way we had with FSR1. But from the videos I've watched, it's pretty incredible. I couldn't really tell the difference between FSR1 and DLSS, but now you'd need a zoomed in side-by-side comparison to spot the difference.

Fingers crossed this is worked into existing games retroactively too, although that might be too much to hope for.

KDE Plasma 5.25 is out now, here's some of what's new
19 June 2022 at 1:02 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: fenglengshun
Quoting: GuestAs the biggest seller of Windows games, remind me how exactly are Valve "getting away" from Microsoft?
Oh that's right, they're not.

???? The Steam Deck?????

Microsoft is trying to bundle everything into the Game Pass subscription, which pretty much creates an ecosystem where you just keep subscribed to Microsoft and spend most of your time with their amazing value.

The Steam Deck, on the other hand, is a platform that heavily incentivize remaining on Linux, by making a very convenient, fairly-economic, and flexible device that's also not very convenient for Windows use.

Steam Deck, on its own, is making Linux starting to be part of the consideration, to the point that even Square Enix mention it for their FF7R on Steam announcement. Ideally, that would create a loop leading more Linux releases, enough to at least be a big enough market that Steam and Linux doesn't lose to the combination of Game Pass, PS Plus, and Epic.

Before Steam Deck, there really was a good chance that they'd get rolled over by the combination of those three, and it would have been out of their hands. But now they have good long term hope, and most of their fate are reliant on things that they can control - which is their own development of the Deck as a platform.

That changes things considerably as even if everything else went wrong and Microsoft does shit that threaten Steam's viability as a platform for Windows games (a real possibility before Microsoft Store's failure, but now brought back as due to Game Pass), with Aya and OneXPlayer interest in SteamOS, they are looking to have a platform that they could keep selling games to.

They're happy to keep selling Windows games, mind you, but the problem is if there isn't anyone to sell them to or if the platform makes it less viable because Microsoft controls Windows and theorically could fuck with Steam if they manage to find a way to do so without major backlash (see: Game Pass).

So yeah, they now have a platform that they also own and control, without the horrendous amount of commitment that Canonical had to make and then fail at. If they're already making their own platform, why the fuck would they want to let themselves be fucked by Red Hat (see: CentOS and the insanity that legacy boot removal was even proposed) and Gnome team (see: literally everything that happened since Gnome 3). Sure, they might want to make their own DE later on, but not even system76 did that out of the gate and even Canonical failed, and if they aren't doing that, then KDE is the only sensible choice over using yet another Gnome fork that stagnates.

Is FF7R a GNU+Linux native game? No, it's a Windows game running via a compatibility layer.

Remind me again how Valve are "getting away from Microsoft"?

If Valve genuinely cared about GNU+Linux, they wouldn't require every game sold on the Steam Store to have a Windows executable.

They wouldn't effectively block GNU+Linux native only games from being sold on the Steam Store.

Microsoft could, if they wanted, acquire Valve or make it so upcoming Windows games break Proton compatibility.

  • You don't need Windows to play FF7R. Sqeenix even boasted about the fact it's steam deck compatible as Liam noted in the FF7R article.

  • Yes, Valve require a Windows executable, but again, that doesn't require Windows.

  • I'm not aware of Valve blocking Linux native games - what are you referring to here?

  • Microsoft can't "acquire" Valve because it's not publicly traded. Maybe they could make GabeN a huge offer? Maybe? But he's already worth nearly $4Bn, so money isn't his motivation.

  • Finally, maybe Microsoft could (yet again) be anti-competitive and try to break proton compatibility, but since Proton is based on Wine and wine is based on re-implementing Windows itself... that's a tall order. Honestly though, they already do this - secure boot, anti-cheat, TPM chips, it's not really there to protect consumers. It's there to put barriers in front of people like us who want to load their own O/S on a PC.

Starship Troopers: Terran Command on Steam Deck and Linux — a quick guide
17 June 2022 at 8:31 am UTC Likes: 4

Not gonna lie, if I'd bought this, I'd have refunded it in a heartbeat, even knowing that this fix exists. I have so little patience for developers and publishers expecting their own goddam customers to fix their shit. I used to - but something in the past couple of years has zeroed it out. I think it's my own expectations, which have been raised by the developers and publishers who do actually care about their reputation and customers. Because of them, I have no tolerance for this kind of ineptitude.

Great that it works though. But no money from me until they do the bare minimum I expect - their game to launch when I press the Play button.

MATCHO is a unique first-person shooter with match-3 mechanics
16 June 2022 at 5:43 pm UTC Likes: 3

I'd never have thought that would work - a match-3 FPS, but here we are! Looks like fun! Shame it's quite far out though, although I suppose 2023 is only just over 6 months away. Gotta love a bit of optimism, eh?

KDE Plasma 5.25 is out now, here's some of what's new
15 June 2022 at 1:25 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: const
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: scaine
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: itscalledrealityEr…we’re halfway through the year and there’s very little about fixing multimonitor support, one of the biggest hurdles for those switching to Linux. I’m hoping that suggested promise earlier in the year is actually met. The stitched-together giant desktop just doesn’t work well.

It’s great they learned about color detection so they can apply accent colors and other vanity features but who does that really help?

Was talking to a colleague about this yesterday. Windows still has shit multimonitor support as well. Funny enough, the last time I remember really great multimonitor support was when I had a Matrox card...

Quoting: itscalledrealityNope it's not games, it's definitely how KDE handles multimonitors. When my computer sleeps then wakes again, it does not properly restore my desktop and monitors to their previous state

I don't think sleeping works as well as it should in general, never mind waking up... oh wait, you're talking about computers... my comment still stands.

What issues does Windows have with multimonitor support? I havent seen any

I use multimonitor at work on Windows - it's not exactly a shit-show, but it's not any better than what I had under gnome when I last used multi-monitor, about 2 years ago. Maybe a bit worse - Windows frequently (well, a couple of times a week) just doesn't detect the monitor when it's plugged in. App windows frequently (all the time) start on the wrong window too, Windows seems to prefer the primary (laptop) monitor for just about everything, which just gets a bit annoying. A few times a week, I can plug in my external monitor and Chrome is just... gone. Technically it's still running, but it's shot off into the ether - somewhere miles up to the top-left, I think? I have to close it down and restart it for it to re-appear. Biggest pain though is that when I sit at a new hot-desk at work, there's an identical Dell monitor for me to plug into, but despite that, Windows treats it like it's never heard of such a thing before, and I have to reposition it over to the left of my laptop again. God knows how many of those "monitor position" profiles my registry has stored now. I bet it's HK_LOCAL_MACHINE too, so I'll lose them all when I get a new laptop and I'll have to re-train them all again...

But multi-monitor support is incredibly complex. For example, if you have your apps all laid out nicely across two monitors, then unplug your hub/monitor, all your apps squeeze onto one monitor, which is expected. Then plug the external monitor back in again, everything just stays on that squeezed up screen and you have to lay them all out again, which is a pain. But is that expected? Or should they re-position back to the multi-monitor layout? I know I'd like them to, but I bet there are plenty of use-cases out there where that's a bad idea.

How about when modals pop up - should they use the primary monitor, the monitor of the window creating the modal, or the monitor which has the mouse pointer (what about multiple mouse pointers...)? What about notifications, where do they pop up? What about alt-tab, or Overview?

What about when to resize window contents when dragging a window between two monitors with different DPI settings?

What about multiple refresh rates. Or freesync?

I mean, it's all solvable, and it's frustrating that it's still NOT solved, but it feels like both Windows and all the various Linux DEs still have to figure this stuff out.

Nothing that you describe does Linux do better (as much as I love linux, lets be real here)...I run linux on an Nvidia card, so that means no wayland support - and if you look at common complaints about xorg its that it has atrocious dual screen support, particularly on kde.

Don't even get me started on how neither SDDM nor LightDM support projecting to external screen on boot on a laptop, a basic feature available on windows and one which KDE devs refuse to fix.

Ahm.. I have a 2-3 monitor setup, running KDE on SDDM and my login screen is always showing on all active monitors. One of the screens is regularly turned on and off and I have no issues. I can actually choose the loginscreen I want to prompt (though I always wonder why it isn't just mirrored). I suspect configuration issues? I really wonder what all of you are even talking about.
My only issue with changing monitor setups is damn java awt applications getting unusable, but that's not KDEs fault.
That's what I meant by SDDM having the login dialog on each screen, vs Gnome it shows only on the primary, with the other two just showing a background. While SDDM isn't mirrored, each screen acts like it's an individual process of sddm running. It's just... odd. Not really something that breaks the world, just strange.

I haven't played with it yet, but does the KDE Overview let you also search? One thing I hate about the mac, since I'm so used to Gnome is that when in the 'overview' you can't use Spotlight...

Yes, you can search directly from the desktop on kde - there's two ways to do it 1) just start typing on the desktop and the search will appear and 2) press alt+space and that will bring up the search bar

I think slaapliedje was asking about the new KDE Overview desktop plug-in, which was introduced in 5.24. And yes, when you activate Overview, it's extremely Gnome-like. It scales all the active (including minimised) windows smoothly, and when you start typing, you get a krunner-like search box which can open apps, and so on.

The only problem with Overview currently is that even when you bind it to ALT-F1, it won't activate on a single tap of the super-key. You have to manually enter a terminal command to bind the key correctly before this becomes possible. Hopefully they fixed it in 5.25, but I don't think so.

KDE Plasma 5.25 is out now, here's some of what's new
15 June 2022 at 1:15 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: CZiNTrPTHow can I get multiple mouse pointers? That's something I wanted to have forever! I think it's one of the things that holds back voice control and automation back the most...

I wish I knew! When you plug in a second mouse, at least on KDE, you just two mice fighting over a single pointer! But Liam's SteamDeck video on its keyboard showed that each thumb gets their own pointer, so it must be possible somehow. I suspect that all the work for this stuff is related to multi-touch and not multiple mice.

KDE Plasma 5.25 is out now, here's some of what's new
15 June 2022 at 1:14 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: scaine
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: itscalledrealityEr…we’re halfway through the year and there’s very little about fixing multimonitor support, one of the biggest hurdles for those switching to Linux. I’m hoping that suggested promise earlier in the year is actually met. The stitched-together giant desktop just doesn’t work well.

It’s great they learned about color detection so they can apply accent colors and other vanity features but who does that really help?

Was talking to a colleague about this yesterday. Windows still has shit multimonitor support as well. Funny enough, the last time I remember really great multimonitor support was when I had a Matrox card...

Quoting: itscalledrealityNope it's not games, it's definitely how KDE handles multimonitors. When my computer sleeps then wakes again, it does not properly restore my desktop and monitors to their previous state

I don't think sleeping works as well as it should in general, never mind waking up... oh wait, you're talking about computers... my comment still stands.

What issues does Windows have with multimonitor support? I havent seen any

I use multimonitor at work on Windows - it's not exactly a shit-show, but it's not any better than what I had under gnome when I last used multi-monitor, about 2 years ago. Maybe a bit worse - Windows frequently (well, a couple of times a week) just doesn't detect the monitor when it's plugged in. App windows frequently (all the time) start on the wrong window too, Windows seems to prefer the primary (laptop) monitor for just about everything, which just gets a bit annoying. A few times a week, I can plug in my external monitor and Chrome is just... gone. Technically it's still running, but it's shot off into the ether - somewhere miles up to the top-left, I think? I have to close it down and restart it for it to re-appear. Biggest pain though is that when I sit at a new hot-desk at work, there's an identical Dell monitor for me to plug into, but despite that, Windows treats it like it's never heard of such a thing before, and I have to reposition it over to the left of my laptop again. God knows how many of those "monitor position" profiles my registry has stored now. I bet it's HK_LOCAL_MACHINE too, so I'll lose them all when I get a new laptop and I'll have to re-train them all again...

But multi-monitor support is incredibly complex. For example, if you have your apps all laid out nicely across two monitors, then unplug your hub/monitor, all your apps squeeze onto one monitor, which is expected. Then plug the external monitor back in again, everything just stays on that squeezed up screen and you have to lay them all out again, which is a pain. But is that expected? Or should they re-position back to the multi-monitor layout? I know I'd like them to, but I bet there are plenty of use-cases out there where that's a bad idea.

How about when modals pop up - should they use the primary monitor, the monitor of the window creating the modal, or the monitor which has the mouse pointer (what about multiple mouse pointers...)? What about notifications, where do they pop up? What about alt-tab, or Overview?

What about when to resize window contents when dragging a window between two monitors with different DPI settings?

What about multiple refresh rates. Or freesync?

I mean, it's all solvable, and it's frustrating that it's still NOT solved, but it feels like both Windows and all the various Linux DEs still have to figure this stuff out.

Nothing that you describe does Linux do better (as much as I love linux, lets be real here)...I run linux on an Nvidia card, so that means no wayland support - and if you look at common complaints about xorg its that it has atrocious dual screen support, particularly on kde.

Don't even get me started on how neither SDDM nor LightDM support projecting to external screen on boot on a laptop, a basic feature available on windows and one which KDE devs refuse to fix.

Sure. I wasn't saying Linux was better. I was saying Windows is (nearly) as bad.

KDE Plasma 5.25 is out now, here's some of what's new
14 June 2022 at 7:04 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: scaine
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: itscalledrealityEr…we’re halfway through the year and there’s very little about fixing multimonitor support, one of the biggest hurdles for those switching to Linux. I’m hoping that suggested promise earlier in the year is actually met. The stitched-together giant desktop just doesn’t work well.

It’s great they learned about color detection so they can apply accent colors and other vanity features but who does that really help?

Was talking to a colleague about this yesterday. Windows still has shit multimonitor support as well. Funny enough, the last time I remember really great multimonitor support was when I had a Matrox card...

Quoting: itscalledrealityNope it's not games, it's definitely how KDE handles multimonitors. When my computer sleeps then wakes again, it does not properly restore my desktop and monitors to their previous state

I don't think sleeping works as well as it should in general, never mind waking up... oh wait, you're talking about computers... my comment still stands.

What issues does Windows have with multimonitor support? I havent seen any

I use multimonitor at work on Windows - it's not exactly a shit-show, but it's not any better than what I had under gnome when I last used multi-monitor, about 2 years ago. Maybe a bit worse - Windows frequently (well, a couple of times a week) just doesn't detect the monitor when it's plugged in. App windows frequently (all the time) start on the wrong window too, Windows seems to prefer the primary (laptop) monitor for just about everything, which just gets a bit annoying. A few times a week, I can plug in my external monitor and Chrome is just... gone. Technically it's still running, but it's shot off into the ether - somewhere miles up to the top-left, I think? I have to close it down and restart it for it to re-appear. Biggest pain though is that when I sit at a new hot-desk at work, there's an identical Dell monitor for me to plug into, but despite that, Windows treats it like it's never heard of such a thing before, and I have to reposition it over to the left of my laptop again. God knows how many of those "monitor position" profiles my registry has stored now. I bet it's HK_LOCAL_MACHINE too, so I'll lose them all when I get a new laptop and I'll have to re-train them all again...

But multi-monitor support is incredibly complex. For example, if you have your apps all laid out nicely across two monitors, then unplug your hub/monitor, all your apps squeeze onto one monitor, which is expected. Then plug the external monitor back in again, everything just stays on that squeezed up screen and you have to lay them all out again, which is a pain. But is that expected? Or should they re-position back to the multi-monitor layout? I know I'd like them to, but I bet there are plenty of use-cases out there where that's a bad idea.

How about when modals pop up - should they use the primary monitor, the monitor of the window creating the modal, or the monitor which has the mouse pointer (what about multiple mouse pointers...)? What about notifications, where do they pop up? What about alt-tab, or Overview?

What about when to resize window contents when dragging a window between two monitors with different DPI settings?

What about multiple refresh rates. Or freesync?

I mean, it's all solvable, and it's frustrating that it's still NOT solved, but it feels like both Windows and all the various Linux DEs still have to figure this stuff out.

Ha, 'not exactly a shit-show' and then describe a shit-show. I try very hard to make sure I have matching monitors, and that sometimes fixes the issues (especially with scaling, etc). But I have the issue where one of the screens randomly don't work. I've had issues with them blinking on and off (which I think is an issue with the cable, as I switched to using the mini-DP port vs HDMI and that went away).

My set up at home is rather esoteric. 3840x1200 monitor on the bottom, with two 2560x1440 monitors up above. All three support 144hz, but I can't get 144hz on one of them as it's via HDMI. But so far I haven't had these odd issues. I think some of this is based on using a 3080 RTX card?

Well, the thing is, I suspect that it's okay at static multi-monitors, but it's just pretty flaky with hot-desking style of moving your laptop around an office and plugging into various different monitors/meeting rooms. Although at least Zoom Rooms takes care of the meeting rooms these days (no need to muck about with HDMI now). So it's probably inflated a little. And as I say, Gnome had much of the same issues - not remembering window placement, and so on.

Quoting: slaapliedjeSo when will I be able to finally change KDE enough that it works just like Gnome Shell, but with Qt?

I've already emulated it pretty much perfectly as far as I can tell. The only thing missing was the combined window-reveal & search bar, but the Overview matches that pretty nicely now. So, yeah, no going back to Gnome for me.

KDE Plasma 5.25 is out now, here's some of what's new
14 June 2022 at 4:11 pm UTC Likes: 7

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: itscalledrealityEr…we’re halfway through the year and there’s very little about fixing multimonitor support, one of the biggest hurdles for those switching to Linux. I’m hoping that suggested promise earlier in the year is actually met. The stitched-together giant desktop just doesn’t work well.

It’s great they learned about color detection so they can apply accent colors and other vanity features but who does that really help?

Was talking to a colleague about this yesterday. Windows still has shit multimonitor support as well. Funny enough, the last time I remember really great multimonitor support was when I had a Matrox card...

Quoting: itscalledrealityNope it's not games, it's definitely how KDE handles multimonitors. When my computer sleeps then wakes again, it does not properly restore my desktop and monitors to their previous state

I don't think sleeping works as well as it should in general, never mind waking up... oh wait, you're talking about computers... my comment still stands.

What issues does Windows have with multimonitor support? I havent seen any

I use multimonitor at work on Windows - it's not exactly a shit-show, but it's not any better than what I had under gnome when I last used multi-monitor, about 2 years ago. Maybe a bit worse - Windows frequently (well, a couple of times a week) just doesn't detect the monitor when it's plugged in. App windows frequently (all the time) start on the wrong window too, Windows seems to prefer the primary (laptop) monitor for just about everything, which just gets a bit annoying. A few times a week, I can plug in my external monitor and Chrome is just... gone. Technically it's still running, but it's shot off into the ether - somewhere miles up to the top-left, I think? I have to close it down and restart it for it to re-appear. Biggest pain though is that when I sit at a new hot-desk at work, there's an identical Dell monitor for me to plug into, but despite that, Windows treats it like it's never heard of such a thing before, and I have to reposition it over to the left of my laptop again. God knows how many of those "monitor position" profiles my registry has stored now. I bet it's HK_LOCAL_MACHINE too, so I'll lose them all when I get a new laptop and I'll have to re-train them all again...

But multi-monitor support is incredibly complex. For example, if you have your apps all laid out nicely across two monitors, then unplug your hub/monitor, all your apps squeeze onto one monitor, which is expected. Then plug the external monitor back in again, everything just stays on that squeezed up screen and you have to lay them all out again, which is a pain. But is that expected? Or should they re-position back to the multi-monitor layout? I know I'd like them to, but I bet there are plenty of use-cases out there where that's a bad idea.

How about when modals pop up - should they use the primary monitor, the monitor of the window creating the modal, or the monitor which has the mouse pointer (what about multiple mouse pointers...)? What about notifications, where do they pop up? What about alt-tab, or Overview?

What about when to resize window contents when dragging a window between two monitors with different DPI settings?

What about multiple refresh rates. Or freesync?

I mean, it's all solvable, and it's frustrating that it's still NOT solved, but it feels like both Windows and all the various Linux DEs still have to figure this stuff out.

Microphone noise suppression app NoiseTorch returns with a new release
13 June 2022 at 6:10 pm UTC Likes: 6

Quoting: DrMcCoyAyyyy, okay, I strongly disagree with that:

Quoting: lawl
Quoting: principisBesides, that's a very annoying clause ["Modified versions may not be conveyed to others under same name as the original program"] to have... It makes it impossible for packagers to apply distro-specific patches.

Good. You got the point of the clause.

Distro-specific patches are very common and pretty much necessary for distributions to, well, essentially work as intended.

Yeah, it feels like sour-grapes when I read those messages on the Github. Very much a "that's my football, and you're not playing with it" attitude. If Lawl wanted to keep the name, he should have kept his repo up, let the team fork it as Noisetorch-next, and that would be that. But he didn't - he pushed the whole lot into the group's new organisation, then when he didn't like the ideas they had for it, changed the license and is now throwing a hissy fit over the name?

There must be something else going on behind the scenes to drive that behaviour, but I don't know what it is.