MudMan

You know what? Good luck with that, genuinely.

You’re still wrong, though. Or at least overconfident.

Oh, by all means, share your knowledge on the state of gaming. I am looking for investment opportunities right now and that seems like a hot scoop.

Hah. You may have accidentally come up with the new “this is the year of Linux Desktop”.

“Five years from now is the year of Linux gaming being financially relevant short-term” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, though.

Honestly, I don’t have any predictions on this. So much is riding on how hard Valve is willing to invest on becoming a OS company and how receptive end users are to it. Right now the outcome falls somewhere between “Steam Machines” and “Nintendo Switch”, and I genuinely don’t think anybody can predict where in between it will fall yet. At the very least we need to see what happens to the Legion Go S and SteamOS adoption.

Nah, it’s always a cost/benefit analysis. If anything, many of them tend to be very shortsighted about fuzzy reputational impacts they can’t easily measure in dollars.

2% of users (and less of that in revenue, I bet, since some segment of Deck players will bite the bullet and play on Windows desktop anyway) may be worth salvaging…

…but only if it doesn’t cost you more than 2% in terms of additional dev cost or in terms of losing you players due to having worse security.

That math is debatable, but I guarantee it’s very likely how many of these decisions are getting made. Review bombing may or may not help there.

Most games I know about do both, but my understanding is it’s hard to stop some of the client-side stuff server-side.

Look, we’ve been here before. I’m not super invested in multiplayer stuff, so I don’t care that much, but I am old enough to remember when gamedevs would not even try crossplay and just let the PC be the wild west when it comes to cheating.

I didn’t necessarily hate it. I lived in a world of dedicated servers where moderation and security came down to some kid in his underpants being pretty sure he didn’t like you and kicking you out. I’m guessing there’s a bit too much money and too much of an expectation of free-form matchmaking for the mass market to go back to that.

But hey, I’m not a security software engineer and I’m not excessively involved in competitive shooters, which seems to be where most of the problem happens. My interest in this is having enough PC security for crossplay to make matchmaking in fighting games less of a hassle than it used to be in the Street Fighter 4 days. You sweaty FPS nerds can do whatever, as far as I’m concerned.

We actually know this number. As per Steam’s hardware survey this group is around 2%, including Steam Deck players.

Best guess, Steam Deck sales are 5-10% of the Switch, which is in the same ballpark, so both numbers are probably roughly right.

Wheter you want to count that as “significant” is up to you, I guess. I bet the impact is very different depending on the game, even for supported games.

The generals still went the right way, but I’m quite frustrated by them not being as mobilized for regionals and locals as a way to signal disatisfaction on something they perceived to matter less. It has lots of practical effects that shouldn’t be ignored for the sake of performative anger.

Wait, which election were you asking about again?

Well, not for me. I didn’t pay all that extra money to have my GPU and monitor do worse color reproduction. It took long enough for Windows to get their ass in gear for modern display support, I’m not keen on waiting another five years for it elsewhere.

And for as much as “having some level of support” is an improvement, it still doesn’t work properly on my setup, so Linux is just broken for me, even under the right flavor of KDE.

I do agree with you that I see Bazzite getting there sooner in terms of just widespread hardware support. What I see SteamOS doing first is pointing at specific hardware configs, or rather to specific prebuilt boxes and saying “this will just work”. And, you know, actually mean it, not like when Linux advocates say something will just work and then it doesn’t.

I think that’s a bigger deal than most of the Linux community likes to acknowledge, but I also don’t think the Linux community would have a big issue with the idea of SteamOS being paired to specific hardware and then slowly trading reliability for flexibility by one step through Bazzite and by multiple steps by adopting Proton and maybe Gamescope in other distros. That seems like a… very Linux state of affairs.

Honestly? That I would rather have Meta (and a bunch of Western countries, while we’re at it) lift restrictions on that front first before they go against LGBT people.

I’m not on board with the idea that edgy or offensive humor is valuable in itself, but I absolutely abhor the scenario where offended conservative and traditionalist views are treated in their own terms while marginalized groups are considered needy or nagging if they ask for the same treatment.

Also not on board with comedians assuming that noting their ignorance or bigotry is the same as not having a sense of humor, incidentally. Everybody sucks, is my point.

I do this in recent times, but I have to be honest, it’s clearly less helpful and worse than the old days when I fell asleep to a book. And even now when I try substituting a paper book in for audio or video content I fall asleep faster.

So I guess that’s a tip? Paper over audio over video?

There are two reasons I disagree with you there.

The least important one is booting straight into Game mode, which is good for TV top boxes meant to act as gaming consoles. I’m mostly fine with autobooting to Steam Big Picture on Windows, but people make a big deal of edge cases where you may need a mouse and keyboard, so the demand is there for a native implementation in living room situations.

The more important one, IMO, is SteamOS’s handling of displays, and especially of HDR. I recently spent a not insignificant amount of time and effort trying to get a fairly typical high end desktop setup (Nvidia card, couple of HDR monitors with high refresh rates and different resolutions) on an existing Linux distro and… yeah, it’s not good. Not only did I have to try multiple distros and do some manual configuration until I found the right mix to get everything going under Wayland/KDE Plasma, but the end result is kinda flaky still and struggles with going in and out of sleep without breaking everything.

If, and it’s a significant if, Valve figured out the sort of display reliabilty they have on Deck for desktop that would be a major step forward. Granted, that’s several steps down the line. An endgame solution needs to have out of the box support for all GPUs and their drivers (and good driver support in the first place), reliable support for VRR, support for multiple HDR standards and built-in monitor profiles, support for multimonitor with indepenent scaling and on the fly changes and more. Some of that is already in there on SteamOS, some of that is a long way away.

But it’s the bar for success here. That’s when I consider switching for real. If someone else figures it out before Valve does, even if it involves building on top of Gamescope, then great, but Valve sure seem to be the closest, at least for gaming-focused setups.

For now I can see them adding support for specific closed hardware specs by certifying third party handhelds and consolized MiniPCs (hi, Steam Machines 2.0), but I won’t really perk up my ears until that includes at least one device with a high end dedicated Nvidia GPU and external display support.

Hm. It’s a start, I suppose. At this point this seems like it’ll cover more or less the same handheld devices Bazzite was doing. The big game changer will be when they figure out desktop PCs, and specifically those on Nvidia cards, I think.

As it is, I may give it a go on my one handhled dual booting Windows and Bazzite to see if it’s any better, although Bazzite is just fine already.

I did try Bazzite on a desktop PC with an Intel card at one point and it was… fine? It kinda sorta worked, with enough rough edges that I stil ended up switching back to Windows there. I would like to give that a go with a official Valve distro if and when support is there, but it seems there’ll be some more waiting still.

Nope, Ben is Pete’s dad’s brother, but May married in, so no blood relation.

Poor lady married this nice guy who got randomly offed for no reason and got saddled with his brother’s son because fate hates that branch of the family and Pete’s parents were already dead with no suriviving grandparents.

Once you get to a certain age, Spider-Man is less a fun coming of age thing about a special orphan boy and more the gritty story of some single adopted mom with a serious heart condition who REALLY doesn’t get enough recognition for her efforts.

I was going to say “gross”, but I’m enough of a nerd to know they’re not actually blood relatives off the top of my head.

Oh, man, where to start. I mean, the Kelvin Trek movies are definitely not the best Trek, but I do enjoy all of them. But speaking of contrarian appreciation, I think most of Star Trek Discovery is also pretty solid, barring perhaps the very last season.

I’m partial to Lynch’s Dune, too. Maybe I just got used to it over time?

In the least hip stance possible, I actually think there are very few bad Marvel movies and most are worth at least a cheerful watch (not you, Doctor Strange 2, you suck).

To put this in perspective, it fell by 0.48%

Windows 10 grew by 0.89%

Linux actually dropped by 0.26% in that same period.

Not that I’d be too concerned about any of that, because that’s all data from reported OS in website visits, so all those are well within the margin of error.