sudotstar

My Deck and Linux desktop regularly have shader cache updates every few days, but they're generally tiny and finish near-instantly. I've never seen the behavior here of needing to download multiple gigabytes of shaders daily (and I'm thankful for it, with the frustrating data cap I have from my ISP).

I expect this is simply a case of "Valve Time" on that effort. Perhaps there's a long-term path towards more "official" SteamOS on these devices, but if there's any area where HoloISO diverges technically from SteamOS in a way that's not reconcilable, that'll be problematic for offering users a "seamless upgrade".

Long-term, I think it would be slightly more harmful to Valve's efforts if more manufacturers started standardizing around HoloISO, so I expect that this might be a motivating factor to speed up their efforts to bring official SteamOS to third-party devices.

I am very interested in the success of this device. I have, use, and love my Steam Deck, but my biggest hopes for this form factor in the future is it using generational CPU improvements to create a more diverse set of devices, rather than just chasing higher performance.

I don't actually play many games on my Deck that toe the line on its performance limits, I prefer to play 2D and lighter 3D games on it, while leaving the "spectacle" games for a more powerful system outputting to a much larger display at a higher resolution. I would love long-term to have a more smaller, lightweight device for portable PC gaming, and I hope that increased diversity in the market, running Linux-based systems (even if it's all just SteamOS) will help drive towards that. I think that the pipedreams of running x86 games on Linux on ARM on a really power-efficient device, even as unrealistic as they are, are far more likely to occur if there's a healthy market of Linux based systems, than they would on Windows handhelds given the state of Windows on ARM, and on these devices in general.

If Valve is working with Ayaneo to get SteamOS shipped on these devices, then I imagine Valve would have some level of involvement on at least the software support side, even for things specific to the device. If Ayaneo is just like shipping by using one of the existing 3rd party SteamOS installers and not working with Valve at all, then yeah I expect things to be not as smooth sailing as the Deck.

I love the DualShock 4 and DualSense controllers' support on Linux, but I'm not a huge fan of the controllers themselves despite exclusively using the DS4 as my PC controller. I'm perfectly okay with the layout since I grew up on the PlayStation, and in fact prefer it to the mainstream Xbox/Nintendo options due to being the only controller to have a touchpad, and both gyro and analog triggers, but the abysmal battery life on the controllers has been a frustration for my couch PC gaming setup, my fairly old DS4 controllers barely last for more than 30 minutes on battery now. The biggest thing holding me back from buying a new DualSense to replace those controllers is the fact that it, too, has terrible battery life.

I'm hopeful that Valve's desire to make a Steam Controller 2 pans out, as I expect that such a device will also provide stellar Linux support (or perhaps already does if it ends up reusing as much of the Steam Deck's input setup as it can), and would hopefully offer much better battery life than Sony's attempts.

I think this is a good change overall, especially for high DPI screens running at non-integer scaling. I think I personally prefer the older icons as I always run at 100% scaling on my displays and I prefer the "crisp" look of the 1px lines, but I think this is a necessary change to align Plasma with modern display trends.

I'm a big fan of the series and would consider it to be my favorite JRPG series, not just for the story but because I enjoy the gameplay it offers as well.

It's a fairly "cheap" series to try out and see if you're into it. The entire series is a singular, continuous story, so the recommended place to start is Trails in the Sky First Chapter, which can be picked up fairly cheaply on Steam, especially during Steam sales. It's not as long as future games in the series, and is fairly representative of the pacing and storytelling format that later games will follow (though it is considered one of the slowest-paced games in the series). Basically if you're not a fan of Sky FC, you're not likely to be a fan of the future games in the series either (especially given that the substantial improvements to gameplay over the series' 20 year history likely won't have much appeal to you).

There are also demos available for some of the newer games in the series (e.g. Trails of Cold Steel III), and while I would not recommend actually playing through those games out-of-order, they may serve as a quick/cheap way to see if the format of the games is right for you.

I will say that while the combat of the games is rarely very difficult, and the game provides difficulty modifiers to make it even easier if you'd like, that the combat system is still fairly fleshed out and quite good casually IMO, but if you're really not into doing it even at easy difficulties, one option (PC exclusive) may be to download completed game saves and play through the games on New Game+ and completely trivialize the combat.

On my Thinkpad 2in1, the behavior your desire is what I get. I'm on Fedora KDE (Kinoite) which pre-installs Maliit by default though, I'm not sure if it comes with some additional configuration.

I'd probably pick something esoteric and then just stop programming, tbh. I enjoy being a polyglot programmer, and learning many languages and learning from many ecosystems is incredibly interesting to me, far more than hyper-specializing in a single language would be.

If I'm not literally touching the content I'm trying to scroll, I'll stick to the default orientation (scrolling down moves content down). Wayland touchscreen input handling seems to handle this just fine and not couple touchscreen scroll direction to trackpad/mousewheel scroll direction.

Unfortunately, I think many of the Asypr/Feral ports from the early 2010s, like Civ V, Borderlands 2, etc. fall victim to this. Those ports were amazing for Linux gaming at the time, but due to the fact that they were held back by their macOS counterparts and Apple's limitations on that platform, as well as the fact that they were third-party ports with far less post-release engagement from the original dev than the Windows versions, have left those versions to languish. It's a huge shame because those companies did, and to a certain extent still do support Linux-native gaming quite well, but their earlier ports have not aged well and there's not much that can be done given the opportunity costs for the many involved parties on those older games.

Civ V is a game I still play regularly to this day, and I basically have to run the Windows version under Proton to avoid crashes on modern hardware, maintain compatibility with popular mods, and play multiplayer with Windows users without terrible game desyncs.

It might be somewhat controversial of a take, but to me an awesome-performing Proton version of a game is far better than a Linux version that may be native, but has severe deficiencies and/or lags behind its Windows version.

To me, my favorite native Linux games would be ones that do things on Linux that are not possible on other platforms. Generally, this would be an "unfair" advantage, as games should strive for feature parity on all platforms within reason, but so often we end up being on the wrong side of that equation that seeing some of the perks of the platform is nice.

To my knowledge, the only major game I can think of that does this to a certain extent is Factorio, which enables non-blocking game saves on Linux and macOS and not Windows. It's not a Linux-exclusive feature, but it's nice that the developers went through the effort to implement the feature on Linux even though it's not possible on Windows.