SteamOS also uses an immutable filesystem and the system updates as a whole. Because of that, there is no risk of something updating separately and breaking compatibility.
It's fairly common for things to update on regular linux distros and break e.g. anticheat support in Proton or some other thing.
Another thing SteamOS does, at least on the Steam Desk, is actually using two partitions. The updates are always installed to the inactive one, so there's always one image that's known to work. Even if an update fails, the device will simply boot into the intact OS image. Regular distros usually don't have much in terms of fail-safes, so if things break, they have to be fixed manually.
Basically, SteamOS is trying to be as reliable and "hands-off" of an OS as possible to provide best console-like experience.
It provides an alternative UI environment built and optimized for gaming. It has a separate windows manager, a complete ui, and a set of menus to simplify customization of whatever is needed for gaming and power saving.
And quick access to steam store.
It is extremely convenient if you like a console-like experience, but, if you are a tinker gamer, it has anyway a lot of nice additional features.
It is inconvenient as general purpose desktop os, because on update you basically lose packages not installed as flatpack
And it is somehow moddable, like people created plugins for the UI. I hope someone ends up adding alternative stores directly there and not just steam. But in any case you can install the respective apps and so on.
yes, it doesn’t run plasma when it’s in big picture, it runs it in github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope along with other tweaks, so it’s lower overhead and game windows tend to behave better
it also handles updates to os as well as to steam so you don’t ever end up with an update that breaks steam, they’re always in sync
Mainly that it’s specifically calibrated for running games on Linux. I’ve tried the Steam Deck and it works pretty damn well out the box, compared to any other distros, so a PC version would be cool.
Aside from native proton, being able to do everything (easily) from the controller. It’s amazing how often you still need a mouse, or just the windows key, in windows :(
What I really appreciate is that it’s geared toward handhelds, but has a decent desktop experience and is powerful enough to be a nice mobile media/piracy box with a remote and a USB-C breakout dongle. You don’t even need to change the read-only filesystem if you use WireGuard VPN (this might take some legwork to generate the .conf files you need, depends on VPN provider) and a streaming/torrenting program that comes in flatpak.
EDIT: Also forgot, you can add a custom shortcut to your Steam Library and have (some) programs launch from the SteamOS frontend rather than desktop.
Mostly just Valve specific software implements to make the experience better. SteamOS has a really good suspend/resume sleep feature where you can just power off the Deck during a game like any other console, then when you hit the power button again it just lights back up to where you were in the game.
The Steam deck is very quick though. I just paused Like a Dragon Gaiden and it took about 2 seconds to go to sleep, left it sitting on the table for an hour or so while I did some errands. Picked it back up and hit thepower button and I was back on the pause menu in about another 2 seconds.
Steam Deck "sleep" is more like locking your phone than it is like putting a Windows PC to sleep
Yeah thanks for the heads up, I’ll buy it in a year after release, when it’s patched, for 50% discount on a steam sale. Or maybe in two years foe that botched launch apology hit discount of 70%.
Honestly even the very best VR-only games are only interesting because they are in VR.
Half-Life: Alyx is IMO still the best of those and it can be played outside of VR thanks to mods… But in that case it’s a curiosity, not an actual good traditional game.
HLA in VR is incredible though and I wish there were more games like it.
Alyx absolutely broke that mould for me. it started off good but built up to incredible as it progressed. I just wish more developers would do similarly. But then this article is the reason why they don’t
I don’t have problems with VR. I sold my Quest 2 cos there are not games like Alyx, which I enjoyed a lot, and that’s a pity. I see it going the way of 3D.
I gave Starfield a fair chance, I played it for 20 hours, patiently waiting on why it deserved an “8.4” rating from critics. But it never delivered. The gameplay is a copy of Fallout 4, the user interface is a mess (they’ve gone backwards somehow) and the world is just so generic and uninspiring that I couldn’t bear one more minute of it.
I can see why it’s got a 5.5 from real players.
On a side note, the gaming reviews now mirror Rotten tomatoes. What the professional paid “critics” love, doesn’t necessarily mean the players do, and vice versa. The real players always give a more fair rating.
Imagine it in five years when the modding scene has popped off though. It could truly be something spectacular. Which is frankly the only saving grace of Bethesda games. They’re a solid sandbox/framework for others to fill in.
When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.
Because it wasn’t just a rock, but the first time entering another natural body of mass in the universe, apart from our earth. Something that never happened before. In contrast, over a million players have discovered planets in Starfield by now, including all customly made content by Bethesda for the planets.
The astronauts where excited and happy as they achieved a huge step for humanity - somewhere I heard that before - while one could literally only achieve one small step for a human in Starfield.
Yeah, and it’s not like the astronauts just put up a flag and left. They took soil samples, set up sensors to measure tectonic activity, etc. Rocks are interesting when you can interact with them.
Did this game focus on anything in particular and do that well? Exploring isn’t it.
I’m tired of being negative gamer. This game looks fun even if it isn’t mind blowing, but seeing as I’ve never played a Bethesda game I think I’m just as likely to play one of the older games because they look about as good.
Personally it feels like a lot of the promise of Mass Effect: Andromeda was channeled into Starfield and they took the launch version of the story in No Man’s Sky and ran with it. It definitely stands on the shoulders of other games but it is a reasonably solid iteration.
counterpoint: there’s not a single “amazing” game of this genre. Elite Dangerous does the space sim perfectly, but it’s boring apart from that. No Man’s Sky has the wonder and exploration, but every planet is functionally the same. Starfield expands on No Man’s Sky with a comprehensible story and actual gameplay. Star Citizen will never come out. Did i miss anything?
There does seem to be some people out there who are just radiating negativity about this game even more so than most.
I played a good few hours last night and it’s Skyrim in Space which is what I wanted.
I don’t know if it’s the Xbox console exclusivity that’s bringing fanboys out the woodwork or just that people like to attack a big, hyped up release like they did with Cyberpunk, but it’s brought out the worst in people.
Only the bugs are gone. Weird design decisions and some horrendous mechanics are still here. It’s still isn’t an incredible game, but not a bad game either.
I have a former best friend who still somehow finds a way to fanboy over Musk, despite the excessive information about him and actions he's taken. All very public and easy to find information, yet never swayed the guy's opinion and the last time we talked about it he was still fanboying. It really should have been a warning sign of things to come with that friendship. Truly, only mentally and emotionally inept losers are still on Musk's side and the former friend's the only person I know who still has a favorable opinion of Musk.
Tough luck man. Have been in this situation a couple times.
Current working theory is that the reason are our relationship templates formed in childhood.
If someone has had abusive and/or gaslighting role models early on, they will not avert or even seek narcissistic relationships. I have been in this situation for a long time and am working for years to get rid of it.
This is what I think happens with people liking clear cut narcissists like musk and having friends who „somehow“ like him.
Sometimes people flock to a figure because they see them as a struggling underdog challenging the whole world.
But even that angle kinda falls apart when you remember that this guy is the wealthiest person in the world. He's not a brave rebel. He's not even taking a stance on something important, though he very well could, with his money.
Exactly my thinking for Horizon. These studios are pumping so much money into mechanics and graphics, I wish they would put similar resources into story and lore.
I wanted to bring up Horizon but I thought people would quibble over post apocalyptic vs fantasy. But really, if you’re going to quibble about that then you’re already blind to how beholden you are to fantasy tropes and are rejecting things that are genuinely new and different because they are different “wrong.”
That’s exactly what they did. You have official matchmaking, then you have community servers people host. If you use official rules, you can still earn xp in the community servers.
They have a server browser, official matchmaking servers just don’t show up but they only last one game anyways.
Please be sure to sign it if you are from the EU. We might need 1.4 million signatures, since some people signed from outside the EU. And those will not count.
Yeah, I… ok, I haven’t read the entire actual post, but uh…
Yes, Steam is not perfect, but… just run it on linux.
Via Proton.
A project massively spearheaded by Valve, that functionally has resulted in, among other things, extremely significantly improved game support on older hardware.
Also…with… a great many older Steam games… at least on linux, sometimes even on windows… you can just download the actual game files, and then move them out of the Steam directory, and … back them up, run them outside of Steam.
Its usually much, much trickier to do this on Windows, but still.
Yes, this doesn’t work if its reliant on hooking into Steam for whatever various services… but like… you can do this, I’ve done it many times for fucking around with more intensive attempts at modding a game.
And you of course can setup Proton without using Steam… at all.
I am honestly baffled that Kaldaien, who has been modding PC games for quite a while… seemingly doesn’t know or realize this.
I guess they just don’t have much linux experience?
… fucking MSFT doesn’t even support Win98, XP, or 7 or 8.1, and 10 is basically on its last legs.
How can Steam be reasonably expected to work on OSs that aren’t even supported by their own publishers?
Ok, I’ve now read his post.
Like don’t get me wrong, I super understand the frustration of being a modder and running into unending stupid edge cases where you need something to work that just does not have an actual ‘responsible party’, because it lies at the convergence of systems that 2 or 3 or more entities built to work between them, at that point in time… but that just is the nature of this beast.
A whole lot of this screed seems to be frustration with stuff like that, and… weirdly being angry that deleting your steam profile results in your posts being deleted?
???
I think Kaldaien needs a big fuzzy hug from a penguin.
The Voxelibre mod is probably what you want to start with if you want to have a Minecraft+ like survival experience.
EditYou can download Luanti from F-droid too… as in the Android store!!! The touch screen controlsk work great on a phone and I am pretty sure you can use a gamepad if you want too. Luanti/Voxelibre multiplayer servers thus are actually kind of awesome social hangout chatroom-esque spaces that are very chill and low pressure. Also… most of them that say they are family friendly are serious in their moderation around it (though of course, if you are a parent don’t count on it being 100% perfect at screening out annoying people).
I don’t mind the vanilla texture pack, but I was starting to get bored of it I mean I won’t argue it is amazing compared to the obviously very mature world of minecraft texture packs.
I will switch between the ones I downloaded and edit with some recommendations if any stick out to me!
Also I like playing on the multiplayer servers, some of them are really chlll and I prefer to explore multiplayer servers with the vanilla texture pack (or whatever the server intends) and then switch to different ones after I see the landscape all the architects and artists intended in the right light first if that makes sense?
Blocky Survival, Your Land and Square One are all pretty chill, the nice thing is that they are all running collections of modpacks that create a minecraft+ experience, so it is a good intro to what Luanti and Voxelibre can be!
when they fix the hardcoded craftmethod table so we can do data-driven craftmethods, maybe. i tried years ago and the code was so spaghettified that i gave up.
For Palworld, a new island takes 6 months, per the article. Probably talking about Sakurajima and the big southern one. That makes sense, since it’s not just putting stuff there and calling it a day on the first finished thing, some level design has to happen so the place makes sense and doesn’t feel super boring to explore.
It would also be great if devs added things during development that should simply be there at launch. Instead of that, shit gets rushed out the door with promises of future fixes and updates. And then devs get all huffy when people rightfully ask for things to be added that are supposed to be basic launch features…
There’s a strong argument that the server architecture needed to be better at launch, but then the game sold more than an order of magnitude better than it was expected to, so no one would have noticed that it scaled badly had the player count been in line with their design and testing.
Ah yeah that’s a tricky one. I guess as developers we’d all like to be ambitious and plan for millions of users but that sort of hardware and architecture takes time and money that might not be realistically in the budget/scope.
I’ve also not really got insight as to who would have a say on that kind of hardware, whether that’s PMs or devs. Probably higher-ups, right?
I think for something like this, you’d rent cloud servers as you’d expect the number of concurrent users to change over time and ideally would be able to spin up more capacity when you need it without having to have those machines available all the time. You still need some kind of system that decides when to order more capacity with enough warning that it’s actually available (you can tell AWS you want a VM immediately, but it still takes a couple of minutes to transfer your data onto it and boot it up, which is longer than people want to sit in a loading screen) and decides which servers to assign to which users.
Fair! I’m in web so wouldn’t know either. What kind of software do you work in? I’ve been thinking about jumping careers lately after realising that I quite like architecting a more complex system, and sort of hate working with front end web dev😂
Well, the fact is that there are also a LOT of dumb customers willing to buy crap. God knows why.
Just look at the trending / best selling lists on Steam. There’s shit on there that I wouldn’t play if you paid me. Yet somehow there’s enough of a customer base for that that they sell it.
Honestly, Steam should look into setting a minimum quality level for things sold on the platform.
Well, the fact is that there are also a LOT of dumb customers willing to buy crap.
As much as everyone love Oblivion…it all started from there with the $9 horse armour DLC.
God knows why.
Yet somehow there’s enough of a customer base for that that they sell it.
Kids. Fucking kids. Thankfully I am never that stupid to buy individual DLCs even when I was a child, which is compounded by familial circumstances and education, but kids will be kids. Either they stole their parent’s credit card to pay for useless virtual items, or they were spoiled and never taught with financial literacy.
Yess. I boggles me that the narrative is still “devs this, devs that”. It doesn’t take becoming a game dev to understand that actual software developers are not calling shots on plot twists, monetisation model and so forth. Like, what the hell is wrong with people babbling about devs?
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