Seriously for all the protests and walkouts over Gaza last year, my main thought was “didn’t you know MSFT/Google/Meta is literally evil?”

I can’t blame anyone for wanting a stable income, but you might as well be working for Lockheed Martin. There’s a reason why these megacorps stay in an oligopoly at the top, and it has nothing to do with talent or quality solutions.

Lots of games that ship with kernel level anticheat have an android port that doesn’t have that feature because android (also linux) similarly doesn’t hand out root access, let alone kernel access to anything in userland.

Huge example being Fortnite.

Already ignoring the fact that kernel level anticheats have well known bypasses, cheaters can also just use the Android version to make cheating easier if that was really an obstacle.

Anyone peddling kernel anticheat as a requirement is just using it to cut costs in running moderation staff. Epic Games specifically is just being a dick to linux because they know they have zero leverage in that market, and don’t want to give Steam more traffic.

All Valve really has to do is sell enough units to tip the percent of linux users that these publishers would not want to miss out on. That’s how so many updated and expanded with the steam deck. Currently the estimate is about 4 million monthly active users on a linux platform. I think if they can reach 10 million (I think 6-7%), it would be enough to incentivize the change.

I never would have thought Microsoft would allow Halo Infinite or MCC on linux 5 years ago, but they actually changed their minds because they knew people wanted to play on the steam deck. I would even take a guess that the new CoD stuff will shortly follow since MSFT is taking a more open platform approach anyway.

EDIT:

Yeah except I have never seen anyone actually suggest Zorin OS for this purpose due to its controversial pro edition.

There are other distros that achieve the same thing. My point is that Zorin is making money off of something I could do with zero effort, which implies its not even worth making a pay to use distro when one of the inherent benefits of linux is that its free.

I could understand if Zorin provided some groundbreaking software like Crossover, which for a long time had some serious advantages over wine and proton (yes I know irony that all are based on wine). But as other people have pointed out, most of this OS is just a reskin + preinstalled app combo. Might as well just use Nobara, which GE made in his spare time with some lazy scripts for Fedora.

Even though LTT said valve gave a cold stare at a $500 price tag, the BOM estimate is sitting around $420 (compared to $300 for the deck).

If they follow the same path as the steam deck, they could still comfortably sell the base model at $600 or $550 if they want to get aggressive with consoles.

Valve basically broke even with the base model steam deck, so I’m assuming the remaining $100 per unit cost is all the external stuff like production shipping etc. They make profit on the higher level models by charging more for storage and OLED.

Valve’s plan was never to compete with consoles, but they’re sitting on a golden opportunity here with Xbox flailing in the water and being able to price match without loss. Their major blocker is the anti cheat holdouts though, and I don’t think they’ll be willing to change unless steam machine itself becomes very popular, which forms an annoying loop.

I think they’re probably having some great arguments behind the scenes on what point exactly they should settle on based off of the public response everyone is giving from this statement lol.

“EA completely blew this game release, I’m never buying their slop again”

Bruh ain’t no way people are choosing Zorin OS over all the available options.

If this is a result of people searching “best windows like distro”, they’re profiting off of a windows theme for GNOME, not even a full DE.

You can achieve the same thing with zero effort on any distro because DEs and themes aren’t tied to a distro.

One one hand, a superior ROM choice

On the other hand, subpar crappy Google hardware

Its still lagging is its MRs, like HDR coming in just less than a year ago.

Valve’s complaint was that even after getting approval from at least 3 DE projects, protocols were not getting merged due to hypothetical discussions and implementation baggage.

I imagine it all started with them making their gamescope compositor a few years ago and realizing a bunch of stuff was still missing.

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia

Check if you have ffmpeg-free or ffmpeg (from RPMFusion)

Honestly forgot which codecs+encode/decode aren’t included in Fedora’s free build, but I think they don’t include some parts of H264, H265, and other proprietary codecs.

Yes Yes I have been continously using it and it wasn’t viable until around late 2023 and early 2024.

My complaint isn’t that it sucks now, its that it sucked for a solid decade doing nothing.

proper HDR

Is completly up to each compositor to implement properly. Its still experimental in KDE because afaik theres no proper SDR + HDR tone mapping for mixed apps on the display, like a desktop.

Valve made their own compositor and cheats the problem by ensuring their client and overlay supports HDR colors + only having to handle the HDR from game output.

full VRR support

Not if you have an Nvidia GPU before 2017, and again already a thing in X11.

no screen tearing and reduced latency

Again, VRR and wayland’s ingenious solution to this was triple buffering, which is a pure software solution that adds latency making it unsuitable in several cases like this: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/3373

The clipboard also works fine

Welcome to Xwayland clipboard hell: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/6132

Its not that Wayland can’t easily fix any of these issues or that the other major improvements you mentioned are not worth it, its that it took Wayland like 13 years to do so.

Most of this should have been sorted out in the first couple years of development. People were already making fun of Wayland back in the day for pretending to be “decoupled from the graphics hardware” and then deciding on the aforementioned triple buffer.

Wayland didn’t even merge in HDR support until 9 months ago: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/14#note_2777587

Fedora (with KDE Plasma) or OpenSUSE tumbleweed (with KDE Plasma)

Mint is good but its kernel is usually slightly out of date and it still has upstream Ubuntu issues.

Other Ubuntu downstreams are subpar imo.

Plus Fedora & OpenSUSE ships with SELinux if you want MAC security support.

The only downside for Fedora is you have to enable 3rd party software after install and run a couple of commands to swap to full ffmpeg and Nvidia drivers if you have Nvidia hardware. I think OpenSUSE might ship with these enabled but I forgot.

Wayland is responsible for kneecapping linux desktop in so many ways its infuriating, especially since linux basically figured out the golden standard of UX design back in the 2000s with stuff like GNOME 2 and Compiz.

It’s such an unnecessary burden with progress as slow as ripoff projects like star citizen.

I hope valve picks up the slack with frog protocols or at least gets PRs merged, because it would be stupid to ship steam machine and then explain to the user that the clipboard doesn’t work yet, even though it used to work perfectly fine in X11.

Yeah I used to do it through my mobile hotspot, but Android dropped support for 802.11b, so now I gotta use my PC.

On the other hand, I think emulators like MelonDS have an emulated network passthrough which makes it super easy to use.

https://pkmnclassic.net/ in case you want to do DLC events, GTS, and other wifi features.

Have fun with gen 5.

This is the general sentiment I’ve been hearing, though surprisingly a lot of people belive that these games will eventually reach steam machine anyway because it seems stupid to them that it never happens.

I didn’t expect it, but a lot of Xbox players I know are considering saving up for the steam machine because it replaces their need for a console + PC for games, and they are aware that Xbox has been pretty open to putting their games on PC anyway. Some even considered Nintendo emulation which is defnitley something I didn’t expect to see from Xbox only players.

Halo Infinite and MCC run just fine on Linux. If they were comfortable letting their core IP on steam, it would be easy and probably beneficial for MSFT to do the same for CoD.

I think the main holdout will be Epic Games, simply because they want to be a competitor to steam and they seem to hate the idea of giving valve any leverage in the gaming industry.

Oh no the trackpad itself is actually pretty okay. Its the fact that I have to drag a ridiculous length for the subsequent input to match on screen, even with the highest sensitivity setting.

Apple’s ingenious design was to make the trackpad feel like a 1:1 representation of your display, which is why its so huge.

And since way too much stuff in MacOS is functional around mouse clicks, I was constantly swiping all over the place for basic functions.

I think apple users kind of got used to using only their arm, but thats hard for me to do since I’m used to regular old trackpads and mice.

EDIT: Comparatively, I’m fine one something like a thinkpad or even a very cheap HP notebook, so long as the OS or Application UX is cool enough to keep things sensible.

AD and LDAP is notoriously insecure as hell by default. It took until 24H2 for MSFT to enable SMB signing, which was a solid 50% chance for an unauthenticated attacker to reach domain admin on any enterprise network.

There are a lot of solutions that eclipse AD in both quality and scope. It’s just like VMWare, a once solid product that orgs got vendor locked into, and are stuck for life.