Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
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Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
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This is why I gave up buying on GOG and buy my games exclusively on Steam. Valve has made linux a viable gaming platform through seamless proton integration and steam deck. GOG on the other hand hasn't even built a linux client after all these years.
Steam is even helping to push more people to Linux, by ending Steam support on WIn7, this January 2024.
I would probably have left Win7 running on several older machines, but like XP it's become so widely unsupported that I can't really condone using it online anymore even if the app-services allowed it. Unlike XP, there's a lot of apps that would run fine on Win7 if supported; but like XP there's just not much incentive for a dev to support such an old OS except as a pet project.
Win ≥8 is awful; I've helped Win10 users recover from the most insanely unacceptable issues I've ever seen in ≥35 years of using computers, with absolutely useless official responses made in each case. I will never poison one of my own machines with something so heinous as Win10, just for the sake of a game. And other than games, I don't see a compelling use case for Windows anymore.
So, Linux, & holding out hopes for decent Steam action on Linux, I guess!?
One of the few companies I've purchased digital good from - and they haven't enshittified themselves yet
If anything ever happens to Gabe such that he can't run the company, that's the day I'm immediately downloading and backing up my entire steam library to a hard drive.
Wouldn't those games be locked up through steams DRM?
Some games from Steam can still be used without Steam's DRM. It's a little difficult to pull it off, but it can be done
Even then. If steam actually locks out out of your games, then I bet hacked will quickly put more effort to sidestep the drm and make that more easily accessible.
Drm on Steam is optional. It's up to the dev whether to include any or not.
However, if the game uses any steam features, like achievements, voice chat, leaderboards, etc., then those won't work without steam.
Yarr. Want some crack, kid? Harr.
It's because they're a privately owned company.
The pressure for enshitification mostly comes from shareholders. Without them, the company can actually think about their long term future and decide exactly when and when not to increase profit.
I tend to avoid proprietary things whenever possible these days, but I found most things by small, privately owned companies are pretty good towards their users.
I would be so proud to be the dude who first said “enshitification” right now.
It’s probably my favorite new word I’ve ever heard in my life and seeing it widely used brings a smile to my face.
I’ve got a cousin who is probably claiming he invented it at this very moment.
It has been used so much recently that there is even a wikitionar entry for it - with a link to its original creation!
Oh hey, it actually was my cousin. Cory is always claiming he coined every cool word or phrase so haha, funny he actually did for a change. He actually claimed he popularized “epic” and “uber” in the 2000s. I mean, I know people pay attention to him but in all honesty he’s always kind of tooted his own horn wherever possible.
I’m sorry. I made all of that up. I guess my actual cousin and I aren’t that different, only he’d never say he made it up. He’d say it was a fact until he takes his last breath haha.
Hope everything is going well for you bud.
Well they did try to sell paid mods and push pay-to-play in the steam marketplace with Artifact, but luckily they ran it back. Steam is super good now but don't get too comfortable.
Yeah, I've been burnt before and know it's only a matter of time. Enjoying it while I can.
I mean, I don't have a problem with mod authors earning money for what they do instead of having to offer it for free. Especially the mods that bring the base game to a whole new level.
What's the argument that paid mods shouldn't be a thing?
It was pretty disastrous. As soon as money was at play tons of people re-uploaded other's free mods and tried to sell them. They even tried copying their steam profiles to seem legit. There was another can of worms where paid mods would use assets from other games or made by other people. Aside from all the attempted theft, there was also tons of spam and fake/unconfirmed mods lying about what they are or trying to upload the same thing multiple times under different names to appear more in search... Etc...
Moderation didn't keep up and the whole thing collapsed on itself. Mods shouldn't be paid IMO, it just encourages terrible things rather than people making content for fun.
I remember the outrage at the time but just because it's paid doesn't mean it's bad.
I don't game regularly, and Steamdeck is probably not something I'm going to be purchasing anytime soon. However, I was hopeful that Valve's investment into Linux would be beneficial and to the larger Linux landscape.
I'm hopeful that more companies will look at Valve's success and start building more on Linux in a way that will benefit the upstream community.
To a certain degree sure, I'm still miffed at what they did for the steamdeck. Having custom drivers and configurations they never open sourced and have not declared any intention to open source. See https://gitlab.com/open-sd/acp5x-ucm-files#notice .
Valve is still a good advocate for open source, the support they've given to dxvk alone is worth praise. But they ain't no angels.
Is what they're doing causing issues to users of their devices? If not, then no one should care. It's the same for nvidia, if no one is affected, then whatever. But nvidia does cause measurable harm to the FOSS ecosystem and makes adoption worse, so they deservingly get shit from the FOSS community. But don't just criticize companies purely for closing their sources.
valve has done a lot of great things for foss but keep in mind they do those things for money like everybody else
Define users of their devices? As a steamdeck owner my experience for installing an alternative os was terrible because theirs specific hardware configurations that valve made for the device and never bothered to upstream it so they were applicable outside of their environment. I'm not criticising valve for closing their resources, I'm criticising them for exploiting open source software to get a usable os up quickly and then not contributing to the same ecosystem that let them do that... not even assuring anyone they would eventually do that. Valve is a for profit company like any other, if you wanna waste time defending their less savory actions than go ahead but don't pretend they aren't what they are.
Doesn't this article explicitly state that they are contributing to drivers and other projects that they use? It just sucks that you overlooked all of what they did and just focused on them not opening up their hardware configurations.
Also, what hardware configurations did they close? I couldn't find any problems when looking this up. It seems like you can just install another OS while having some hiccups. Which is understandable since most desktop OSes are geared toward a mouse and keyboard control.
I bet Linus still thinks their code is shit tho