this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Steam Deck

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[News] Steam Deck officially hits over 12,000 games Playable and Verified (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And with that, a shitton of games that weren't yet, are now also playable on Linux, sometimes on 1:1 parity with Windows performance. (sometimes even better)

I thank Steam for finally kicking the habit of using Windows as my browsing and gaming desktop.

My development and work rigs and laptops have been Linux based for over 2 decades.

But after attempting to go full time on my gaming system with Linux every couple of years, I always ended up going back to Windows because the compatibility issues couldn't be overcome at all, for some of the games I regularly played.

Now, while there's already a crapton of games that simply get released on Linux at launch, plenty have Windows targeted versions that simply work on Linux compatibility layers, thanks to Valve.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Biggest issue I have with Linux is the inability to sanely use multiple hard drives. Not to mention a ton of bugs with random hardware configurations. Like Wacom tablets don't work well with Nvidia drivers.

Steam deck specifically solves both of these by being hardware designed for Linux and for being a handheld.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Biggest issue I have with Linux is the inability to sanely use multiple hard drives

What do you mean with that?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If I want to install an application installed by the official repos to another hard drive, not the one mounted at /. How do I do that? Note: If you tell me a command line command, you've failed. The Windows way to handle this is 1) format the drive. 2) Install the app. No excuses, no "What if other apps can't find it." no "What if it includes already installed libraries." Just install

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The package managers and official repos for most distros would be better thought of as lego blocks to build an OS from - they have no concept of OS and application separation, and splitting installation of an OS across multiple physical drives doesn't really make sense.

Application focused distribution methods with a clear separation from the OS like Flatpak or AppImage do support this.

AppImage - drag the .appimage wherever you want it.
Flatpak - supports system and per user installs (under home directory) by default. Additional installation directories can be configured, but I'm not sure if any of the GUIs expose this feature - so likely doesn't currently pass your bar of not needing to use the command line at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The package managers and official repos for most distros would be better thought of as lego blocks to build an OS from - they have no concept of OS and application separation, and splitting installation of an OS across multiple physical drives doesn’t really make sense.

The packages for Blender, steam, etc, and typical Userland apps are in these repos. The package managers are not the "Lego blocks" only. They are the utilities, user apps, and libraries you need. They are everything in one place. That's a large point of Linux. Everything you need is in the repo.

Also, repos are distro related. You can't use Fedora repos on Ubuntu. Originally you couldn't use any distro's repos on any other distro's repos. With Ubuntu and its offshoots and arch and its offshoots, we've started to see repos grow to multi-distro but to say that they have no concept of OS is wrong. The whole reason there are distros is so that specific distros can configure things to their liking. This is why things like Debian and Ubuntu exist. It's why OpenBSD exists. Again, a large selling point for Linux users is that all your packages are configured to be used with your distro.

Flatpak and Appimage are very specifically not what I am talking about. They aren't typically supported by distros and don't include distro-specific fixes/configurations for a lot of things.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yeah, packages for things like Blender and Steam do exist in most distro repositories. But they make no distinction between packages that provide software like that and packages that provide core OS services + userland (systemd, pipewire, coreutils, cups, a desktop environment, and so on). What you want requires a distinction between those things.

See SteamOS, Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite + universal-blue, openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa, Endless OS, and possibly in future Ubuntu Core Desktop as examples of modern systems (or systems in development) that make use of traditional packages as the building blocks of the base OS, and then lean on application distribution methods like Flatpak or Snap to provide desktop software. Use of the distro package manager for software like Blender is explicitly discouraged by all of these.

Distro specific fixes and configurations shouldn't be necessary as long as the OS provides what the application platform needs (desktop portals, audio server, display server, print server, message bus, etc) Flatpak doesn't even prevent distro specific repositories if it's really necessary either; Fedora ships with their own Flatpak repository in addition to Flathub.

You want better control of or isolated and relocatable end-user software installation, and it already exists - it's just not being done at the traditional package manager level, and I haven't heard about any development effort going towards changing that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Those distros are different than what I am talking about. Those are immutable distros that preserve the preinstalled system base. It's not at all what we've been talking about.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You've decided that it has to be the traditional distro package manager providing the solution - but that isn't going to happen, because those have been designed to manage a single installation of interdependent software with no distinction made between core system libraries or services and end-user applications. The solutions to the problems that come from that - which also make it extremely simple to fix issues like the one you have using a single config file - led to the development of Flatpak and Snap.

Some traditional mutable distros also ship with Flatpak + Flathub configured out of box and present them alongside and with equal importance to their own distro-specific packages - e.g. Linux Mint, PopOS, Clear Linux, CentOS, and Fedora Workstation. And Ubuntu is pushing Snap. So they're all unlikely to start putting work into enhancing their distro package managers to start providing the desktop software specific features that you want.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I don't have hope for Linux becoming a major desktop OS anymore. It doesn't seem like a priority. So I agree, distro developers trying to create an environment that would win over the Windows crowd seems like it would never happen because they don't care to. It's fine, different oses for different use cases.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Linux doing something for you? The audacity.

(I hate it too. Some things I don't need to do for my computer, it's meant to do them for me.)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

And I've competed three of them

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Got Steam with Proton going on my Devuan laptop a few weeks ago, and very impressed with how many games work. I might just get a Deck, after trying out a friend's.

I think M$ needs to be very afraid -- probably why they bought Activision and are trying to dig their way deeper into the gaming ecosystem.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Yeah they own half of the game developers in the world, I don't think they're worried. If anything, they practically negated Valve's efforts to free themselves from MS's whims. All these megacorps need to be broken up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Steam Deck from Valve has now hit over 12,000 games that are rated Playable or Verified.

While it's still far short of the total number of games and software on Steam, which is now over 96,000, it's still an impressive number that Valve has been able to get through and give some form of testing.

At time of writing the current numbers are:

You can check out the full list on SteamDB, which includes titles that had their store page hidden although owners can still download the games.

There's various reasons for games to no longer be sold including expired licensing.

You can download and try anything on Steam Deck these are just what Valve put through testing.

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