Tech Over Tea - 2025 Is The Year Of The Linux Gamer | Andrew Moore

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

2025 truly is the year of the linux desktop, just not for the desktop itself it's for gaming, there's some incredible stuff in the pipeline so lets chat about it. ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson ==========Guest Links========== Website: https://andrewmoore.ca/ Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@FineWolf ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as always your host, Brodie Robertson. And today, we have a returning guest to the show, Andrew Moore. Last time you were on, you were talking about the Firefox privacy-preserving attribution. So if you haven't seen the episode yet, go check it out. It's not at all relevant to what we're talking about today, though, because today we're talking about Linux gaming, Steam Deck, and various other Valve and various other valve related things so um welcome back to the show i guess thank you it's good to be back absolute pleasure to have you back on it was a fun episode last time and uh i'm sure there's

gonna be i don't know i'm sure there's gonna be a lot to talk about today because there's i i do really think 2025 is going to be a very exciting year for Linux gaming in general, not just for what Valve is doing with the Steam Deck, not just with like, you know, Lenovo potentially having a new device, but just in general, with all of that ecosystem forming, 2025, you know, it's kind of cliche to say, you know, the year of Linux desktop, the year of Linux gaming, whatever. People like to say it every single year, but it really feels like we are at the point of something changing. Yeah, definitely.

And even outside of the ecosystem, there's Microsoft being extremely bullish with the upgrades to Windows 11 requiring new hardware. And there's some people right now in the economy that we are today, there are some people who just can't afford new hardware. And there's some people right now in the economy that we are today, there are some people who just can't afford new hardware, and they'll want to upgrade to something that allows them to play the latest titles. And for those people, they might be exposed to Linux True Friends, who might own a Steam Deck or one of the new devices that are coming out soon. So we'll see what happens. It's going to be really interesting to know how the market shapes up

in the coming months. Did you hear about Microsoft partially loosening the requirements of Windows 11? It's a weird state because it's... The way I understand it is you can install Windows 11 without TPM 2.0

but you won't get updates or something like that? It was already the case. It's just, I think people watched onto a support article. Yeah, there was a support article that existed even before. So you can disable TPL requirements and install them, but Microsoft is essentially not guaranteeing support for those installs. You might have crashes.

You might have features that are not available. One good example is if you want to play Riot Games. Games made by Riot Games. So the anti-cheat there, which is called Vanguard, does require TPM to be enabled on Windows 11 as well as hardware-based virtual memory. I forget what the security feature is. And yeah, we'll see what happens here can you give me one second there's somebody at the door

sorry about that cut that segment yeah you're back no I know so good all right you want to restart that question or do you want to start from here? Uh, we can do- I'll just cut that bit out, um, you know, it- Okay. Every episode with random heal I get disruptions, but three minutes into it is certainly the quickest I've ever seen. And, yeah, just some random NORD docker, I have no idea what was going on. Either way! You're talking about, um, Riot, Riot, Vanguard, TPM? Yes.

Yes. So Vanguard does require TPM and Windows 11 security features enabled, essentially. So if you do have older hardware that doesn't support TPM 2.0, or you have those features disabled for whatever reason, you might want to have them disabled. Wait, so does it not work on slightly older hardware on Windows 10 then? So it depends on which hardware. There's some unsupported CPUs

that do have TPM 2.0. Either it's provided by a motherboard chip or it is provided by a CPU, but there's other features like hardware-based virtualization, which is also a requirement for Windows 11. That might not be supported in the CPU SKU that you may have.

So in that case, your CPU is not compatible, but you do have the TPM requirement. But even in that case, you wouldn't be able to play Valorant, for example, because I think it would block you since you don't have all the Windows 11 security features enabled. Okay, okay. That's annoying.

Let's see. I don't play Riot games. Me neither. Okay, yeah, two years ago they removed support for older versions of Windows 10. So maybe it's the newer versions that might have some of those Windows 11 features in it as well. Yeah. Um, yeah, last year they dropped everything prior to 1709. Wait, no.

That's two years ago. As of December 2023, I guess it's two years ago now, technically, they dropped everything below 1909 by the looks of it. Yeah, yeah. And at the time, they also dropped 7 eight and eight point one

i would say vanguard's probably the most extreme of the anti-cheats out there with like how because like you know you can still play a lot of like the the the what do you call it like um call it like a lot of the call of duty games will still work on older versions of windows 10 from my understanding but riot's like no no you you're gonna be on the newest stuff get over it or don't play our games yeah pretty much and I mean some some gamers are fine with that I personally am not I tend to avoid those types of games uh but yeah and it's it's coming to a point where unfortunately anti-cheats do need to validate the integrity of the runtime because

the old system of just detecting a cheat signature and banning it doesn't really work when you have cheat vendors that essentially roll out builds for individual users so that they don't get caught by those signature based signature based solutions

uh so it's it's unfortunately like a double-edged sword i kind of understand why those solutions are there on the market i don't personally support them uh i personally think that it would be better if they would be server-side tools to do behavioral analysis uh is it perfect no there's going to be some cheaters that are not going to be detected by behavioral analysis but is it perfect no there's going to be some cheaters that are not going to be detected by behavioral analysis but it's mostly because they're behaving like normal users and at that point is cheating really impacting normal users right right yeah if you have an aim bot which only aims at them when you can visually see them like is that actually that bad like it it's like you know you have two kinds of aim bots you have an aim bot which will x-ray and you have an aim bot that

will only target things that are in your line of sight yes it's still cheating yes it should still be dealt with if it's known about but it's certainly a lot less bad than you know being able to spot people without having any visual cue for them. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can still detect snapping to people even if they're just visually by behavioral analysis, right? So you would have essentially an aimbot that will try to follow the

person, but as a human with some error and everything, at that point, you're just playing like a normal human and you're just giving yourself a crutch. It's still cheating. It's still bad. But it's not affecting the general population. You would just look like a skilled player instead of looking like somebody who is less skilled.

It's still an issue, but it's not as disruptive as the current sheets out there for gaming, which, personally speaking, has turned me off of competitive gaming. Yeah. The only competitive e-mult I like, I, the only, the only, like, competitive-y multiplayer game I play right now is Marvel Rivals, and it has got a bit of a cheater problem. When you die, there's a kill cam,

and you'll sometimes see, like, a Hawkeye or a Punisher that's, like, following you through a wall, like, you come out one side, and then they just, it's just intuition. They know you're going to come out one side and then they just, it's just intuition. They know you're going to come out the other side where there's no indication whatsoever of it.

Or the game has a couple of weird issues. Things that look like they're cheating, but they're not because there's some like really bad code in the game. Some of the- Yeah, it's desync. Well, no, no. This is, it's so much worse than that. There is, so you know how you're not supposed to

you know tie any of your game logic to frame rate yep yeah um there's some game logic tied to frame rate things like horizontal movement with uh the with doctor strangers like upwards dash uh star lord's fire rate during his ultimate is tied to his frame rate. I think Wolverine's damage is tied to his frame rate. Like, again, those are actual problems with the game. No, I do agree with the whole behavioral analysis thing. And there are some games I've seen where they will actually intentionally put things that troll X-Ray players. Where they'll put a player character outside the map or in an area they cannot get to so if you are seen to be focusing on that target just insta ban because

no one can know it's there yeah yeah absolutely and valve is trying that approach i hear with the new counter-strike the issue is that unfortunately the players don't understand that those types of systems take time to train. Right, right. It takes a while to get it right, and right now, a CS2 is not necessarily in a super good place.

It will eventually come. There's also the issue that it's costly for game developers to run those systems. You essentially have to analyze every single game. It's not like client-side detection. You're using somebody else's compute.

You're not paying for those costs. It's great. When you're doing stuff server-side, at some point somebody has to pay for that compute. And there's no real incentive right now for game developers to do that. And until we see client-side solutions, even like the very invasive ones,

stop working, which will eventually happen. It's a game of cat and mouse. We won't see developers shift towards server-side detection. But it's going to happen eventually. The other thing that people often talk about is actually employing GMs

to analyze game systems that are happening, analyze kill cams, things like that. And Marvel Rivals actually does do this. So this is sort of like the two-sided thing here. They've got their anti-cheat, which is kind of funky. But if you report people and they're actually cheating,'re gonna get banned pretty quickly i think they have like 40 people on staff that are just gming now you can do this because you are a free-to-play game that makes just a lot of money and you have 500 000 players on steam but i don't know it's just

not really super scalable to make that happen plus it is very costly to have you know full-time staff that are analyzing things and yeah it's a mess valve did solve that issue though if you remember in csgo there was the overwatch system where you could report a game and then it was reviewed by players where players would essentially vote if it's suspicious or not. And if there's enough reports saying it's suspicious, then it would go to like a staff member. So the staff member itself would have very little bad data coming in. You wouldn't have like reports for like normal stuff because it would be player verified beforehand. So players would essentially see an anonymized version of the replay for the suspected player,

and they would get to see, okay, well, is it suspicious, or is it just the person is, I think the person is good, and then action would be taken based on that. So there's a solution out there to reduce the cost for game developers. I really hope we're going to see a shift.

That said, for competitive multiplayer titles, there's still some work that needs to be done on the Linux side for Anti-Cheat. And those systems somewhat already exist in the enterprise space, which is

interesting. So we already have... The thing that caused hundreds of thousands of Windows machines to be knocked out, is that what you were getting at? No, not at all. In the server space, for a lot of enterprises, we have zero-trust computing. CrowdStrike, you're thinking about CrowdStrike? Yes, yes, yes.

Yep. People think about the Windows side, but there actually was a big screw-up on Debian as well. That's what I was remembering there. Yep. So, CrowdStrike does exist on Linux, but again, it's a kernel module. That's not necessarily what I'm talking about. But there's zero-trust computing solutions that are out there. For anyone who doesn't know what that means, can you just explain that model? Yeah, essentially. So, that model itself is you create a chain of trust where you don't necessarily trust every single component, but you can trust the system as a whole of trust where you don't necessarily trust every single component,

but you can trust the system as a whole. So you have hardware solutions that would verify the hardware itself that hasn't been tempered with. Then you verify that the software hasn't been tempered with. Then you isolate your software package that you're going to run the server as much as possible so that the previous layers don't necessarily have a view on it. So you really don't trust the environment as a whole. But you can verify each part individually right uh so kernel signing is a thing that already exists

in linux and you see it on enterprise enterprise distributions like redat or uh sles where they would offer signed packages that are signed by themselves. So you can verify the source of it. Linux themselves, when they release a kernel package, they do sign the code source as well. And we have a whole bunch of signing is nothing new in the Linux world. When you download something from your package manager, chances are it's signed by a PGP key

so you can actually verify that what you're downloading is the thing that you would expect. However, on the runtime, we don't necessarily see the same thing as you would see on Windows or Mac OS where application packages are assigned themselves. It's usually the distribution packages that are assigned, but once it's installed,

the binaries themselves are rarely signed in Linux. But if you would have a solution that would allow for signing for every single one of the binary packages that you would have, solution that would allow for signing for every single one of the binary package that you would have a software solution and the kernel you could have some interfaces as well there where you would say okay no the the integrity of the runtime is there every single kernel module assigned by its vendor we recognize those those solutions and then an anti-cheat solution could say hey the runtime is good there's no like self self uh compiled packages there from vendors that

we don't recognize so there's no modification we know like it hasn't been altered with we're not running an hypervisor because that's also part of the hardware verification uh so we're good and there's stuff already that exists like if you look android for example is somewhat loosely based on linux There is Android validation. I forget what it's called. Google does that. There's a name for what Google does. But you can verify that the integrity of Android hasn't been compromised.

It's used, for example, you can't use Google Wallet unless it passes that verification. Google, I forget what it's called. Yeah, I'm not sure what I need to search to find the documentation on it. There's the PlayIntegrity API, which is the integrity that you go through, yes. I forget what the... There's a term for the device itself, assertion, that is done. And that's something that I used to have at the top of my hand when I was very much into CyanogenMod

and modding Android devices. I haven't done that in a while, but you used to be able to somewhat bypass it and fake it. Nowadays, it's like really hard to do, which to be fair, sucks for personal freedoms, right? You want to be able, you use Linux because you want to be able to modify your runtime and configure your machine as you want it.

But at some point, if you're going to run software that needs to validate the integrity of your device, there has to be a compromise somewhere. And having signed kernel modules and signed kernels, to me, is a lesser evil. And you can always choose to opt out and use whatever you want, but you wouldn't be able to play anti-cheat protected games if we do go down that route.

Well, if this was... Sorry, I thought you were done there. No, go ahead. What I was going to say is if that's the route we go down, you would end up having basically only certain distros that you could actually play games on

because you wouldn't... There's no way you would end up having basically only certain distros that you could actually play games on because you wouldn't... There's no way you would have every single... every single operating system, every single distro in this system where it's signed in a way where the company agrees, like, okay, yeah, this is okay for our Antigit system, if I'm understanding it correctly. Well, you could have official kernel blobs

from the kernel, right? And distros could ship that, and it would be signed by the kernel, or distro could say okay, well, I trust, let's say, Fedora to we trust Fedora's keys and Fedora's kernels we're just going to use the Fedora Linux kernel, which is a stock kernel anyway.

As far as I'm worried, they don't do any modification on the kernel. Very, very minor stuff. Very minor stuff, yeah. Nothing like Ubuntu. Yeah. So you would have distributions, yeah, that would have trusted keys

and would have trusted kernels, but I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing. It just means, yeah, you would need to use like a sign-rec sign recognized kernel to play to play anti-cheat protected games and only anti-cheat protected games right it wouldn't stop you from playing the vast majority of games out there sure um and yeah the way i'll see this go most likely and you know you've already seen very minor cases of this already is effectively the steam deck would be what that would happen on.

It wouldn't happen with your Fedoras and Ubuntus first. It would be the SteamOS environment is what we say the games can run on. And there was a game recently which actually did exactly this. Infinity Nikki, where people initially thought it checked the CPU on your system. Someone then swapped SteamOS to Bazit, tried to run it, and it didn't work. So it's something on SteamOS it's checking for. It's obviously not to that same level of integrity checking, right? But it is checking for the Steam environment.

So it's the first step towards going down that route. Yeah, I wonder if it's checking for the Steam environment. So it's like a it's the first step towards going down that route. Yeah, I wonder if it's just checking the ETC release file. It's probably doing something very simple. Yeah. Because I've seen games where you could bypass it by passing Steam Deck is equal one as an environment variable because that's a default environment, but

variable that is there on the Steam Deck, but Bazite, especially the Steam Deck distribution of Bazite, does that by default. Yeah, there's something it's checking. No one's really sure, because, you know, when you have an anti-cheat game, if you then start trying to test different versions, at some point you need to get locked

out of the game, so it's really difficult to, like, check each individual possible thing with no lead on what it could be. Yeah, and it is somewhat of a... I don't want to use wrong language, but it's a bit of a shitty thing to do from a game developer standpoint to just allow one distribution, not the others.

Like, there's nothing special about SteamOS that would prevent cheating more than any other Linux distribution. At least not right now. Right, yeah. If it were, I have to go down that route of zero trust where everything was signed and you, you know, yeah, at that point, absolutely. And I wouldn't like

it. I would prefer a system where more was accessible. But if that is what had to happen to bring these anticheat systems confidently over to linux it's better than nothing yeah and if it's something like even even if it would be like for example custom kernel that is signed it could just be an optional install on any other distro yeah it could just be here install the vanguard kernel on arch or

whatever yeah as long as i hope it's not vanguard kernel because or else you end up with a separate kernel for every single anti-cheat vendor please no well that would be horrible hopefully okay maybe it could be like install the steam os kernel or something yeah the valve approved kernel or the yeah something like that uh and i'm sure valve is looking into something like that to like i want to use the word appease anti-cheat developers just because it is a known problem problem and as much as i was personally peeved seeing for example apex legend doing a post saying they're removing linux support without any data supporting or any public data supporting their

decision there. I kind of understand the premise behind it. As a software developer, I'm not in game development. I'm doing web development and data processing and stuff like that. But I kind of understand the premise behind it. And as

somebody who used to love multiplayer gaming, i grew up playing unreal tournament 99 that's probably the game that still today i have the most hours in uh i kind of understand but then again if we go back to 1999 or any other like multiplayer games in the early 2000s cheating was a problem but not that much. Why? Because people had servers that they managed themselves. If somebody was an ass and cheating, they would get banned from that server.

Well, that's effectively the idea of game mods, right? It's just game mods at a lower level. You are running the server. You are the game mod for that server. Yep. And essentially, if you ran a server, you built a community around that server yep and essentially as somebody like if you ran a server you built a community around that server it was in your uh in your best interest to actually run that server really well and ban like any cheaters and stuff like that uh we had tf2 at a bottom like problem until very recently and it was mostly on the cat like the the tf the valve

provided servers where it was an issue because if you went on a lot of like community run servers those would get bad really fast and you wouldn't have that much of an issue playing like on a community server now tf2 is in a much better place uh at least on the bot front i wouldn't say like as a game i think as a game it's it's slowly dying i think people have seen enough of tf2 even though it was a fantastic game but uh yeah i'm saying that but i haven't seen the numbers i'm sure like it's still in the top played games uh currently has 50 000 players online it is what oh? Oh, okay. Wait, wait, what happened there?

Did they... Wait, it went from a hundred and forty thousand players to seventy. Was this... there's not seventy thousand bots they banned. Why did it drop like that? Yeah from... Oh, true. I see the graph right now. Actually, wait, is it just people playing over the holidays? Surely not. Well, the holidays are not done. Right, but it dropped on December 30th, that's weird. Hmm.

There's a seamless peak around the middle of July as well. I do not play TF2. I have no idea why those numbers have happened. If anyone happens to know, please do let me know. Yeah, that is very curious. Unless there was an uptick in bots again and they just released an update that fixed it. I have no idea. I haven't played TF2 in many, many, many months.

Yeah, like... Go on. haven't played TF2 in many many many months yeah like it's no well I was saying like the only type of like the only competitive game that I kind of play nowadays is Overwatch because strangely enough it's not too bad to play with 250 ping so

me being from Canada my partner being from Australia we have a limited choice of games that we can play right uh you would think that games like borderlands would be fine i don't know why borderlands steering is based on ping so if you're in a car and you try to drive a car with 250 ping uh it's about as good as driving under the influence i would say you're swerving all over the place. You can't control your car. It's an absolutely horrible experience. So even single player titles, sometimes it's a bit tough.

But Overwatch 2, we've been playing it. I've been playing as Mora. I can't play hitscan heroes very well with 250 ping, let's be honest. But support heroes like Mora or even tanks, that's totally fine. And it's been a fun experience to be honest. I haven't seen a lot of

cheaters, even in quick play. I don't know what Blizzard is doing, but they're doing something right and it's working on Linux, so yeah. That's good. That's a bonus. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Considering how people feel about Overwatch 2, with there just being less players,

you know, you're gonna have less people cheating in general. Yeah, possibly. Possibly. But the game is... It's in a good place compared to where it was when they switched from Overwatch 1 to Overwatch 2. Right. So if you haven't played in a while, try it.

They've also nerfed the most annoying hero. Much to my chagrin, because love playing as sombra so that's one that would go invisible and everything and they kind of nerfed that power uh but it's it is a fun game to play and if you're looking for a shooter to play like if you've been let down by apex and you're looking for a shooter to play and you're on linux give a watch ago It actually performs pretty well. And it's quite fun for what it is. As I said, besides the cheater problem, Marvel Rivals also works perfectly. Literally no problem at all. With one exception, the Cosmic Desktop,

because there's like a launcher when the game first opens. And I don't know why, but it opens in this tiny little box and you can't click on anything. They know about the problem. I think it's something to do with it resizing upon launching and for some reason cosmic doesn't know how to handle that the only desktop that has a problem with it is cosmic everything else worked perfectly well the good news is it's gonna allow them to find a bug that they wouldn't have found it if it didn't exist so it would have probably popped up with

something else at some point, but it's the only piece of software that I've ever seen it with. Okay, well, that's interesting. I'm interested in trying Cosmic when it's going to be a bit more stable. I'm on KDE, and I'm very happy on KDE, but, yeah, I need to try something new. Yeah, Cosmic, it's coming along. According to Carl, I don't believe him, the beta is supposed to be sometime this month that's okay i he thinks the beta will be sometime this month and full

release will be in march i i don't believe that time frame there's no way that time frame's happening we'll we'll we'll see and we'll see when open suza is going to make it available because lately uh they've been a bit slow on package updates but it is what it is oh is that what you're running right now yeah uh open suza is my main uh so i run open suza tumbleweed on my desktop and on my like a mini pc for my tv i I run Bazite on my Steam Deck, and we can get into the reasons why I'm running Bazite instead of SteamOS. It's a long discussion.

Actually, no, for sure. I'd love to hear about that. Yeah. Long story short, full disk encryption. I really think as a mobile device, the Steam Deck is a fantastic device, but it's a mobile device. If you don't have full disk encryption

and you're moving it around, you're kind of putting yourself at risk. steam os doesn't have built-in support for booting until like a lux protected partition uh basite does and it's working fantastically what is that that backplate you have on is that like a it's like so that's an extreme rate uh transparent backplate for the original lcd uh the original lcd steam deck but it also works on the olad model uh does still looks great on the original lcd model though uh but yeah i didn't even know you could get custom backplates for it you can uh and it's it it's a small and super easy customization you can you can do on your Steam Deck to make it look personalized. So I'm running a red backplate on mine, my partner is running a green backplate on hers, and yeah, they're fantastic. GS Aux also has a series of black bites for the Steam Deck.

They made holes for the fan, which, I mean, there's some engineers that look at the terminal design of the Steam Deck when they designed it. They didn't put holes there, so I don't see why having additional speed holes for your fan would make it any cooler. I mean, they're still great quality, though, and you can still buy them. But yeah, it's a really easy mod to do compared to just do a full shell replacement for the Steam Deck, which then you got to unglue the screen and do a whole bunch of things.

Right. So yeah. I've also done other mods on my steam deck so replace the buttons uh i forget the name of the i think it's extreme rate again that does like clicky buttons uh for the steam deck so i got clicky buttons on my oled model clicky for what the face buttons so for the for the uh yeah the uh xyab buttons as well as the uh the d-pad i mostly wanted a d-pad i play a lot of like retro i play a lot of like kaizo mario rom hacks uh so i the d-pad on the steam deck is very mushy uh which i mean it's very functional for a lot of games but if you're doing precision games with a d-pad it's kind of it yeah it can be improved let's put it that way so having clicky

buttons uh makes it way better so i've got that uh the this lcd deck that was an original launch lcd uh which i gave to my partner the battery had became a spicy pillow so that had to be replaced that was an issue with the original vdl batteries uh if you want to identify if you have a vdl battery open it up if it's vertical text instead of horizontal it's a vdl battery you can also use a bat info u power to see the uh uh whichever so i replaced the battery on that and the fan started clicking as well so i just replaced the fan actually two days ago on this one. So yeah. Pretty fantastic devices. And it's impressive how

Valve managed to make a user friendly, and I'm not saying Linux is not user friendly, but let's say normie friendly Linux device. For a lot of people, they wouldn't even know they're running Linux.

99% of the time, you're in Steam big picture mode. Exactly. 88% of the games, I'm not making up that number, I'm just looking at the top 1,000 games that are rated by... From ProtonDB, 88% are gold

or platinum rated. A lot of games run fine on SteamOS. The problematic games are mostly multiplayer titles. And they're mostly shooters when anti-cheat. Maybe League of Legends is one that people would want to play on the Steam Deck and can't on SteamOS. But all games just work fine. And it's such a fantastic experience when the go, when you're on the go, you're sitting in a plane for 16 hours.

Do you really want to see the same tired movies that they're showing in the in-plane entertainment system? Nah, just get a steam deck, like have, and you've got like a nice 16 hour play session in front of you if you can't sleep. Uh, so yeah, it's, it's, it's really, it really is a fantastic device. Well, that takes us into the main thing I want to talk about. I don't even know where to start with this, because there's a bunch

of different directions we can go. I think the first place to go to, though, is all the way back to when Valve first started trying to do this Linux gaming thing. When they announced the Steam Machines as their own standalone thing. Now, for anyone who doesn't know the history of Linux gaming, this is about four, five years before Proton became a thing, something like that.

So, back then, back, 2013 was the Steam Machines, i'm pretty sure and then like 20 2018 or something was proton so steam machine was released in 2015 according to wikipedia uh okay am i where did i get 2013 from i don't know according to wikipedia i could be wrong though but i think they announced it uh we've let during the okay there were articles that came out in 2013 but it might have been like a pre-release thing at that point okay okay uh so it was released on november 10 2015 and proton uh the very first version the initial release was in 2018. So it predates Proton by three years. Yeah.

The Steam machine was a horrible idea. I think it would have gone very differently if the early versions of Proton would have been available. Yeah, I don't think it was necessarily a horrible idea, it was just horrible timing for it. The infrastructure for Linux gaming wasn't there yet. At least for running the most games, right? The Windows games.

Yeah, it was a machine before its time. Yeah, I think even so, I think even if they did have proton available early proton the list was like 50 or so games a lot more games worked it's just they hadn't tested them yet things probably would have gone differently it wouldn't have been as much of a failure but i don't think we would be i don't think we would have seen like this big uptick in Linux gaming like we did with the Steam Deck.

Like the Steam Deck, it had given Proton a good couple of years to get good. People forget before the Steam Deck came out, most things pretty much already worked. It's gotten a lot better since the Steam Deck, but it wasn't like it was bad before. I was only gaming on Linux at that point.

The Steam Deck came out, it got even better, but I don't know. I think the Steam Machines, if they well, the problem with Steam Machines is they thought they could get people to port games. That's the issue they had.

It was also a tougher sell when people were not exposed to linux gaming in general because okay think about it you're a consumer in 2015 you want to buy a steam machine as a living room device so you want to buy a computer for you want to buy a gaming machine for your for your for your for your living room would you buy a playstation or an xbox which has a series of established titles made from that is sold by a vendor you recognize or buy something from valve which you as a living room gamer would not necessarily recognize because you're not a pc you're not a pc gamer would you buy a machine that's running that's that's running something in a library games and

it says it's a very limited number of games that do work. It's only Linux. It was only, I think, Linux-compatible games. Yes. So would you really buy that? So you could do Play on Linux, but I think... Was Lutris available back then? I know Play on Linux was a lot more popular back then.

I think Lutris was available, though. It was just very early on. But, like, you wouldn't know about these things if you weren't already a Linux gamer. So it was like a device made without a market. So the PC gamers, they had a PC. The console gamers, they had a console. They didn't have a Valve Steam library. And then the Linux gamers, they had a console, didn't really... They didn't have a Valve, a Steam, like, library.

And then the Linux gamers, they didn't exist yet. But the ones that did, they already were running Linux and didn't really have any reason to buy this machine. Yeah, and if you would buy a living room machine, you would want a plug-and-play device, which didn't require any fiddling or setup, which the Steam machine wasn't, let's be honest. It was the first

step towards getting there but it was before its time speaker games way before their time it reminds me of another one the uya oh boy the u if the like okay the uya came out like people talk about um mobile gaming now and there's like gens, Genshin, there's Honkai, there's all of these really good games. The Ouya came out in 2015. People were playing, like, Bejeweled back then, and there weren't good Android games. Like, maybe there was, like, an emulator or something.

But, like, today you have Fortnite, today you have Call of Duty Mobile. If the Ouya came out today, I don't think it would sell because everyone just plays games on their phone, but it would at least make sense as a device now. Yeah, possibly. I think the issue with the Ouya, there was marketing, but also it was priced similarly as a cheap Android tablet

and could play the same titles. So why wouldn't you get a portable device that would play the same titles? Again, it would have been a tough sell for a device that is sitting in your living room and taking up space for something that you could play on the go. And Valve, I think,

recognized that with the Steam Deck because buying a mobile gaming device that you can carry around with you, it's way easier for consumers to understand that there will be compromises in that device. The performance will not be as great as a device sitting in your living room. But you can play any game, Asterix, that you want while on the go. And the market bought it.

I have not spoken to anyone at Valve about this, but I would be very surprised if when the Switch came out, they didn't think, hold up, wait, people care about mobile gaming. Like, I'm almost certain that the success of the Switch influenced the Steam Deck.

Possibly, and I mean, mobile gaming was not necessarily a, like a market that was totally hidden, because I mean, there was the Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo targeted that market very well. That's the thing, it was only Nintendo, because whenever anyone else made a handheld, like the PSP, yeah, the PSP has like a cult fandom, but it didn't sell well. The Vita didn't sell that well.

And you have like the, um, the, the, what do you call it, the Nvidia Shield. Like that didn't really sell that well either. No. Everyone who's tried to do it has failed except for Nintendo. Yeah, that's, that is true. And Nintendo with the Switch created a market where not only it was mobile gaming, but when you're in the comfort of your own home,

you can also play using your bigger TV and resume the exact same gaming session that you would have on mobile gaming. That's something that you couldn't do with an Nintendo 3DS. And that's the market that the Switch created for the Steam Deck. While, yes, the Steam Deck has a dock and everything, I think for most people, resuming their gaming session means closing the game and going on the PC. And because of Steam Sync, you have your save file,

you can continue exactly where you were. That's a huge selling point. I had an Xbox in my living room. I sold it. Because you know what? I prefer to have all my saves on one system and then I can just resume my gaming session whenever I want.

Versus having, like one of the games I really love playing on the Xbox was Tunic. Having my Tunic save file be completely gone if I switch over to PC. That said, I could have installed it using my Xbox Store on PC. I'm not on Windows.

I'm on Linux. I don't have access to the Microsoft Store, so that's not something that I could do. Now I can play Tunic on my Steam Deck. I can then resume playing on my PC if I want to. Or even on my, I've got a little mini forms PC that's running OpenSUSE through Moonlight, just resume my playing session from the living room on my main PC.

And that's great. It's one ecosystem that you can run on so many classes of devices, and it's fantastic. And Steam is also, Valve is also seeing that. That's why they're working on the Fremont device, right? So that's their new rumored Steam machine for the living room that I think is going to be pretty popular

considering the success of the Steam Deck. Some people will want that Steam experience now that they've seen their friends have it on the go. They might want that for the living room. And it's nice to know you can purchase your title once on Steam and not be, I'm sorry, fucked by Sony or Xbox by forcing you to repurchase that title

on the next generation of consoles. If you own something on Steam, you own it at least for your lifetime. That's a different story. The Valve will close your account if you die. Your account is not transferable. Also, if you get banned, you lose your game library. If you get banned completely from Steam, not from in the middle of the game.

Yes, yes. Yeah, that's true. If you do get banned, you do lose your entire Steam library. That's true. I forgot about that. But it's... Don't cheat. It's still anti-competitive. Don't don't cheat it's still anti-competitive

yeah it's still anti-competitive yeah yeah true but i i still don't like that yeah no it is it is what it is unfortunately but it's one purchase and you can play on on the go on your steam deck you could play in your living room maybe with your firm on device or if you have a custom mini pc that's running if you don't want to run it remotely run basite like it's again it's a great operating system um or you can play on your pc one thing on your macbook if you're if you're if your game is compatible with mac yeah yeah i actually think a lot think a lot more a lot more compatible thanks to the like what do you call it the the the the the mac wine the mac uh compatibility layer what it's called called? Cross, what is it? Crosso?

Yeah, Crossover. That's the company that does wine. No, it's not wine. It's the thing that Apple made that converted things. Oh, the game porting toolkit. The game porting toolkit. Yeah. What I was thinking about is,

whilst the Steam machines were a failure, and whilst early Proton wasn't that successful, I do think both of those things needed to happen for the Steam Deck to be popular, because people, as you said, were not aware of Linux gaming beforehand, so if they had just dropped the Steam Deck without all of that history of, uh, of, uh, of the Steam Machines, let's say Proton didn't exist until the Steam Deck and was in the state that it's in today, so it's, like, really good, it still wouldn't sell that well, because people, like, gaming on Linux, like, you can't game on Linux, because there are still people today who think the Linux game is bad, but there's

all this history of it being good, so people can actually go and correct them. But without that history, most people would be in that category of having no idea that, you know, they're- yeah, you can go pretty far with like YouTube marketing and things like that, people making videos. Linux is incredible for gaming now, but you sort of need that history to get a lot of people up to speed because a lot of people aren't paying attention to every single thing that comes out they need you know a good couple of years to know about something that's in their periphery is actually becoming a good thing yeah and and and seeing also that for example it works onOS, but it works also on other distros. It's going to help change, I think, the

general misconception that Linux isn't great for gaming. There's unfortunately some people today that still misunderstand, still think that Linux generally is bad. It's just SteamOS that's great. Not really. All the tools that Valve has made

available runs on any distribution. Well, GameScope has some issues with NVIDIA still. I would argue that that's more of an NVIDIA problem than a Valve problem. But NVIDIA drivers are vastly better than what they used to be. And I say that as somebody who's running an NVIDIA GPU on my main computer. But yeah, I wouldn't make that mistake again. Probably my next computer will be an AMD GPU.

But yeah, hopefully it does expose more people to gaming on Linux, to trying out Linux and seeing that, hey, you know what? Most of the things that I want to do work just fine out of the box. So that's why I really think with the new devices that Valve is working on themselves and with their partners, we'll see more people getting exposed to Linux. One of them that I think is gonna be really interesting

is the new lenovo legion go s the reason why i'm saying that is while the steam deck is fantastic global availability of the steam deck is problematic it's only so getting better but australia only just got the steam deck a couple of months ago yeah and i and i believe like people are starting to get their shipments of steam decks uh now so for for people uh for people who ordered in australia or new zealand uh but it's still an issue because if you're living in one of the uh 100 or so countries where you cannot buy a Steam Deck, then you don't necessarily have a, I'm going to say, hero class device that shows you that Linux gaming is possible. Lenovo has a way bigger global reach.

I'm sure there's one or two companies they don't sell to, but compared to Valve, you probably have Lenovo devices in your stores. Yeah, absolutely. So seeing the Lenovo Legion Go S being sold around the world, being announced at CS, it's going to be interesting to see how many people do choose to buy the SteamOS version as opposed to the Windows version. Then again, you could just install probably SteamOS on the Windows version. I think the hardware is probably equivalent other than the shell having a Steam button versus the other one having a generic Legion Go button. We'll see.

The announcement is on January 7th. Yes, for anyone who is watching this, we are recording this on January 2nd. So if this device does not exist, we will sound very stupid. Well, I mean, we already know that it will be announced. We already know that Pierre-Luc

Griffet from Valve is going to be present. So, yes, this device does exist. We don't know the retail availability. We don't know if it's going to be released worldwide or only in select markets. So we're making assumptions here. But it's going to be an interesting device.

And at this stage, we don't really know anything about it performance-wise as well. We have a spec sheet, but the spec sheet is you have to be stupid not to be able to fill it out. It's like, oh, it has an RDNA 2 chip. Oh, it has an M.2 drive.

It has Wi-Fi 6. Like, this is, you can, like, guess the spec sheet, and you'll get all of this stuff right. Is the Zen, uh, the AMD Z2 Extreme still RDNA 2? Apparently. Okay.

I didn't follow the release that much. We'll see what it has. It would be interesting to see the first handle with RDNA 3 if it does have an RDNA 3, but again, speculation. Nobody really knows what the hardware will be. But the original Legion Go was a really good device, to be honest. I've had a chance to try it a bit.

One of my friends bought it, and yeah, it's good for what it is, but it is still a Windows device. Would I want Windows on a handheld device? Eh. It's, yeah, Windows isn't built for that specific use case. No. They've tried it. Yeah.

They always forget it. They try it, and then they forget it exists for that specific use case. No. They've tried it. Yeah. They always forget it. They try it and then they forget it exists for a couple of years. I've got bad memories of Windows 8 and people not realizing that you had to go in a hot corner to open up the start menu because they removed the button. What a great user experience. They fixed that with Windows 8.1 like six months later. But yeah, Windows 8 was a...

Yeah. UX disaster. I didn't with windows 8.1 like six months later but yeah windows 8 was a uh yeah ux disaster i didn't touch windows 8 i didn't install 8 until 8.1 came out i was like 8.1 is fine it's not great it's fine yeah it it was okay but that's uh yeah and then windows 10 was good. I fortunately, unfortunately have to use like all three mainline OSs for work. So I'm kind of exposed to pretty much all the versions. Still, I choose Linux and KDE for my own computing. It's just, it works better for my workflow. I don't get pop-ups reminding me to enable whatever AI bullcrap that is being pushed by Microsoft that week. I am not reminded every single time I open a Windows Explorer that my files are at risk because I don't have a Microsoft 365 subscription to backup my files to OneDrive.

It's just a better experience. Now you get one pop-up every single year asking you to gently donate to KDE. And that's a great way to do it it's once a year if you don't want to donate say not now or just turn off the pop-up like forever but yeah it's it's a gentle reminder and versus what microsoft is doing just reminding you to give them money every single every single time you open whatever microsoft tool that you open hey if you want to if you want to deal with pop-ups um just give it some time with with give them money every single, every single time you open whatever Microsoft tool that you open. Hey, if you want to, if you want to deal with pop-ups,

um, just give us some time with, with Firefox. They've got their whole orbit thing that you can now add into Firefox. I am grateful that is an add-on and not something that's built. Yeah. Yeah. Well,

it's an add-on for the beta. We have no idea if it's going to change when they have like it being fully done. I hope it stays an add-on for the beta. We have no idea if it's going to change when they have it being fully done. I hope it stays an add-on, though. I hope. And if they bundle it, okay, that's one thing. You can always uninstall it as long as it doesn't come back with updates. But yeah, we'll see.

I understand why it's happening. Unfortunately, boards and CEO level people really like AI right now. Yeah. Does it create value for the user? I'll argue that no, but some people are really into it. It is what it is. Yeah.

Mozilla, with their new CEO, they're really shaking things up, trying to really shaking things up, trying to change how things are going. I don't know. They certainly needed someone to shake things up over at Mozilla. They didn't really know what they were doing.

Yeah, absolutely. They've also announced a new search partner, which is not default still, Ecosia. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, so we'll see what happens with that. But I think they're also a bit shaken up by the fact that Google might be forced to end their, I'm going to say, subsidy of Firefox through the default search engine deal. So we'll see what happens with Firefox. It's still my main browser on all my devices.

I use Firefox on my Android device. I use Firefox on my Linux devices. I use Firefox on my Android device. I use Firefox on my Linux devices. I use Firefox on macOS, and I use Firefox on Windows. And I have been doing that since version 4. I'm not going to change. And a lot of people are now starting to switch to Firefox as well

just because Google has been so bullish with ending Manifest V2. I hope that an uptick in users will show Firefox that it's important to make user positive change instead of being user hostile. We'll see.

So going back to the whole Fremont thing, where do you think this should be targeting performance wise? Like obviously it this should be targeting performance-wise? Like, obviously it probably should be, like, with it being a, assuming it's a real thing, a console-like device, it should probably be faster than the Steam Deck, otherwise it wouldn't really make any sense as a device. But, where do you think it should be? It's a tough thing to answer because the best would be a device that is capable of 4K gaming, right? 4K TVs are relatively prevalent.

Some people are like, it's going to be a device that's going to be living in the living room. It's going to be connected to a TV. You'll want to be able to output at 4K. That said, that's super expensive and it's relatively tough. In the PC space, we kind of have 1440 screens that are the great middle ground for people

to actually have a high-resolution display without having to push 4K gaming. But yeah, I... Because those are the price point that's a concern Yeah I would say like their most likely target is probably like an Xbox Series S

class of device but with more memory because that is one issue with the Xbox Series X that the memory is a bit constrained You said S before and then you said X, which one are you Sorry I said S as in Sierra. Sorry, that might be my accent showing.

So the Xbox Series Sierra, let's call it that. It is memory constrained, which is an issue for game developers right now. So hopefully with more VRAM and more memory than this Xbox Series Sierra, but something that would be able to play comfortably at least 1080p gaming in the highest settings, and then for 4K, targeting 30 FPS, maybe.

Yeah. But yeah. Because there's a problem we're starting to see with the Steam Deck, where it's starting to struggle with some newer titles. I know Valve's talked about wanting to do a new version when there is a revolutionary jump in performance. They don't want to just have a new device every year and just crank them out.

I hope they do make something eventually. That would be nice. But the problem you're going to have, like no matter what you do, right. It's going to become outdated. And with the, I I've got,

I've, I've, I've got plenty of things to say about the current way that game development's done. I really, I really hate all this insist, insistence on like upscaling tech and just don't stop stop trying to have such high fidelity textures you then need to scale down and then

scale back up there's a i it's a whole problem um yeah part part of it is the facilities that are provided by game engines like unreal Engine, which does automatic LOD management and stuff like that. Before, in previous engines, developers had to actually optimize their games. They had to create their own level of detail meshes and everything. Now the engines do it for you. And game budgets balloon to such a level that it's just easier for them and for their workflow to have the engine manage that for them. Which, in a sense,

it's great. It allows high-fidelity gaming for a device that can actually run those games. But you're leaving all those devices behind by taking those shortcuts. One great example of that is the new Indiana Jones games, which only runs if you have ray tracing hardware.

And I'm sure as a game developer... I was like, what? Not... Yes, the new Indiana Jones and the Great Circle requires ray tracing hardware to run. That is in their minimum requirements. It will... I don't know if it refuses to run.

Probably so if there's no baked-in lightning, but it does require ray tracing to run. If you open the Steam page, it is in the minimum requirements. GPU hardware ray tracing required. That is insane. Yep. And, I mean, yes yes it's simpler as a as a game uh like a level designer and everything to say okay well

i do have higher quality lighting and i don't have to manage and bake all my shadows and the game looks great and it's way less work for me to create like good looking environments than having to create those light maps and having to actually place point lights and everything to make things look as I intend them to look based on the art direction that I was given. But

ray tracing hardware started to become good with 30 series NVID Nvidia GPUs. Before, it existed, but you were sacrificing a lot of performance. So all those people with

5-year-old GPUs, 6-year-old GPUs that are still on the 20 series, they're left behind or they have a poor experience with their games. Minimum required card for the game. But you're not having great experience. Yeah, you're not having a great experience playing that on a 2060, let's be honest.

Apparently, it's targeting 60. If you're targeting 60, I imagine there's going to be dips below it, though. Or I haven't played that title or it works but the amount of of ray passes that it does is so low that the light is extremely blocky right right and and the quality isn't great so that's another possibility as well right but you're not let's be honest at that point the the visual degradation affects like your enjoyment of the game because it is from what i've heard a very atmospheric game and it's really fun to play at that point, the visual degradation affects your enjoyment of the game. Because it is, from what I've heard,

a very atmospheric game, and it's really fun to play. But you're choosing to leave out a whole class of people who don't have the latest hardware. And at some point, yeah, we've done that with rasterization before games used to be software rendered and then you needed like voodoo cards and like three accelerator cards like we will see those shifts but i think that shift is happening a bit too soon at the moment uh i think the difference as well is

we're seeing here's here's another one hot takes i i hate ray tracing i think every game that's done ray tracing actively looks worse than it could if they just put effort into doing the lighting properly um there's this insistence on making every like we it it stopped for a while it was very nice but when like the the ps3 came out there was this like you know big push for more realistic graphics and things slowed down and now that hardware's gotten really good and you legitimately can do you know if not photo photorealistic really really close and movie productions are using unreal engine yeah yeah that's part of the toolkit so and what you're seeing is rather than focusing on art style you're seeing games that are like oh let's just make it look like real life

and that's fine for some games but when every game from a triple-a studio comes out and it has the exact same art style i don't like if you show me a screenshot from 10 different AAA games, I legitimately could not tell you which ones they're from. Yeah, and we've had that happen before. If you remember, if you ever gamed in the end of, like,

2000 to 2010, like, in the 2007 to 2012 period, every game was gritty and brown oh yeah no i do remember the uh the games yeah i remember that that was fun yeah it was yeah so it was like gears of war started that trend and just every single game just looked like gears of war and gamers like tired of it pretty quickly uh we're seeing that push to ultra-realistic lighting and ultra-realistic characters, which, I mean,

yes, it's great. Does it improve my gameplay enjoyment? Eh, not really. The best titles that I've played this year have been indie titles that, let's say, okay, Bellatro, for example. It's not ultra-realistic.

It doesn't have great graphics, but it's a fantastic game. I'm playing currently A Thousand Times Resist. Very sci-fi-y look. Fantastic game in a genre that I would not normally play. But I've been enjoying it so far on my Steam Deck. It's been great. Games like Tunic, which have their own distinct card style.

Hollow Knight. I played a bit of Hades 2 when the early access came out. Beautiful. Granted, it's just Hades 1, but that's all I wanted. Yeah, and Supergiant Games have such a distinctive visual style. Their games have been great visually. And yeah, it's not super realistic, but it looks fantastic.

I'm thinking of Ori, the Ori series, Ori and the Wild Forest, Ori and the Will of the Wisps. Beautiful games. Fantastic gameplay and everything. If you're into Metroidvania-type games, great games. Later today, I'll be streaming a game called nine souls which if anyone hasn't heard of that one yeah it's got a beautiful art style yes fantastic i'm stuck in one of the bosses right now

uh yeah so nine souls is a fantastic game as well that's that's really i i love platforming and combat based metroidvanias such a great game uh animal well another great my brain's been too smooth in that game well you can still play like the first the the first layer of the game it doesn't necessarily revolve like it's based on like too much puzzle so it's it So it's a great playthrough. I definitely would check it out. And then after that, if you're... Yeah. I would say, other than the very last layer, most people should be able to solve those puzzles.

It's not that... They're not that obscure. But I think games like this, they take advantage of more modern tech whilst having a distinct art style. Like, a game like Animal World, it uses 3D lighting for a 2D art style. And you see this a lot for, like, a 3D-esque lighting. Well, actually, a really good example of this, actually, is...

Hollow Knight is a 3D scene what is the Square Enix 2D, 3D game there's like a mix of art stuff um I know what you're talking about um a list of Square Enix games Um... Uh... List of Square Enix games...

I... Oh god, this company makes too many goddamn games! Uh... It's not Bravely... No, it's not Bravely Default. I've got that in my head. But it's not... It's, uh... Octopath Traveler. Yeah, there you go. Yep. Like, that's a game that takes advantage of modern lighting, modern game design tools,

but has a very, very, very distinct art style. Mm-hmm. Yep. And funnily enough, those games run great on a mobile device, on the Steam Deck. You don't need super realistic graphics and super realistic lighting to make a game fun. Nintendo. Nintendo was the prime example of this. People always say,

oh, Nintendo has the... With the exception of the GameCube, Nintendo's always had the slowest console in that generation. But it doesn't matter. The only reason the GameCube was faster is because no one knew how to program for a PS2. Because it was a weird architecture.

Yeah. That's true. But Nintendo has never been about graphical fidelity they've always been we are nintendo we make games first we have an art style you look at a nintendo game you know it's a nintendo game like there's no question about that and i think this it ahead, sorry What I was going to say is, limitation breeds creativity Yep It did bite them in the ass this generation to be completely honest

There's been some quite sizable performance issues with Tears of the Kingdom when it came out, they did manage to fix it The Pokemon games on the Switch are To be fair, Game Freak Game Freak is one of the laziest game developers on the planet.

Anytime a third-party studio makes a Pokemon game, it's just better. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there is also the Pokemon MMO, which is pretty fun to play as well, which is a fan game, which you can get. And it runs, by the way, great on Linux as well. So, yeah, I mean, they did have some issues with performance on some games but i would agree that nintendo does no yeah uh yeah

true but i would argue that nintendo does know how to prioritize uh gameplay first bowser's fury is the first party title which i i just remembered that does have some, some performance issues when you, when you play that mode, but sure. It's based on an older engine that was made for, for, for Mario 3D world.

And they just, they didn't upgrade it. Then. Yeah, it is what it is. But like still a fun game for sure. My main point though, is like,

you know, Nintendo has never been in this camp of like chasing like the the most realistic graphics i always what i always say is if i watch a game trailer and the first thing i see is the developers talking about the tongue animations i i don't care about your game i i could not care less Like you're talking about things that do not have anything to do with the game. Yeah. Yeah. There was that weird section, I think maybe 10 years ago,

where it was like about, oh, look at him walk up the stairs. The foot mash is where it's supposed to land. Yeah. It doesn't tell me anything about the gameplay. I'm never going to look at that while I'm playing. It doesn't affect my immersion, even though if it was like a flat plane and the person was walking like a flat

mesh and the person was slightly floating above the stairs who cares like is the gameplay fun is the story fun that's all that i want in the game yeah yeah does it make me want to come back and continue the story or does it just want me to like leave it aside because there's no substance there it's just a graphical fidelity demo that lasts 12 hours right that's not interesting to me yeah there's a lot of games that have basically become ue5 tech demos which is fine but like how many ue5 tech demos do you need? One, Fortnite. That's it. That's actually true. Fortnite- well, Fortnite is actually a prime example of a game- like people- You've probably seen people complain about UE5 games and every game in UE5 looks the same. Fortnite.

Yep. That's like- that immediately proves you wrong. The issue is UE5 provides you a lot of tools, and a lot of game developers will use those tools, and only use those tools, and then you will start seeing things look very, very similar, especially if they are chasing photorealism. You know, if you want to make a person, there's a correct way to make a person look photorealistic.

So you're going to have every game look exactly the same. And if every game is using the same lighting system they're gonna look the same but you can be creative you can make games i uh is uh is the new final fantasy 7 ue5 or it's still ue4 good question because i know the first part one and I think Crisis Core were UE4. But yeah, Fortnite looked... Like, it's Fortnite. It looked great. It might not be your art style. It has its own...

Sorry? Yeah. It has its own distinct art style. It looks fantastic. And they're quite fast to the detriment of players, players unfortunately to push new features from unreal engine into fortnite because that's their test bit yeah yeah uh lumen was first introduced i believe and maybe i'm wrong in fortnite uh was it stable when it came out no but it was there. But yeah.

Yeah, I'll need to search for Final Fantasy. I don't know. And that strategy didn't always work for, OK. That strategy of using their own games as a tech demo didn't always work for Epic. And the best example of that is Unreal 3 Black Edition. It was a huge tech demo for the newer version of the engine, but they pushed graphical fidelity above gameplay.

They also consolized the game. They made it look very Gears of War-ish, which I never understood why. UT was always a PC game for the PC market. They tried to sell it to the console. It was way too fast-paced for console players. It was an arena shooter that requires precision.

Yeah. And they ended up making a game that didn't sell well, and that killed the whole series, which was sad because I was very much an Unreal Tournament fan. I completely forgot about this thing. Holy shit. Yep. UT was great as a game

because all the maps were different. There was always that variety of assets and everything. Every single game was different. The community provided maps, new maps, every single game that you could play that was new game modes made with the community. UT3 came out with a map browser

that essentially followed, like, revolved around the same three teams there was like the asian team for like the the izagani corporation if i recall which all their maps look the same there was like the necris very like gothic spacey style for the necris uh faction And then there was the generic human industrial for the Leandri mining corporation. All the maps, the 50 maps that came out in the game followed that exact same structure. And there wasn't any variety.

Everything looked gray. The gameplay was okay, but you could see it was consolized. And it's sad because it kind of killed my favorite franchise. Would I play Arena Shooters today? I don't think i have the reflex for it anymore but yeah yeah it's uh yeah yeah no especially if you go well there are still there are servers up for things like the older ut games there are there are quake 3 servers still up the people that play those servers are fucking crazy. Yeah.

And if you're interested in trying UT99, if you're watching this podcast right now, it is... Epic did a deal with Old Unreal a couple of weeks ago. You can actually go on oldunreal.com and their downloads, you will find a full game installer, which does run just fine and wine, by the way. They will

release a Linux version shortly. But you can download the game for free and play it for free. It does come with community-run master servers so you can actually also connect to multiplayer games, and it runs fantastically. It will run on Windows versions, it will run on Linux, it even

runs on ArmBase Max. There's a build for Arm Base Max as well. So you can run, I believe they offer Unreal, Unreal Tournament and Unreal 2 on the website. So that's what they have deals with with Epic Games. So pretty fun games. I can't play them. pretty fun games i can't play them i used to play back in high school used to play a lot of um quake live which was based on quake 3 this is before quake live became full of microtransactions like every free to play game ends up doing yeah um but holy shit the people that are good at quake man those people if you've played, you know,

if you've been like a mono-game Andy for the past 10 years only playing Quake 3, like, you're a crazy person and you're really good at that game. Yeah, especially on Ensogib servers. It's just like, you stand no chance. That said, it's a game that will really reward you for trying to play and learning.

The learning curve isn't that high, which is great for a game. It's not like, oh, you're playing Overwatch, you've got to learn all the heroes and the counters. No, I mean, everybody plays with the exact same loadout. It's just map knowledge, where are the pickups, and how the guns work. And that's it. So, yeah, it's, they're fun games. I, yeah, I love playing them.

I don't have the reflexes to play them anymore, but I still play them once in a while. Yeah, I like something a little bit, just a little bit slower. Call of Duty is as fast

as I'm able to go. But even then, like people, if you've been playing Call of Duty since Modern Warfare again, it's the exact same problem you see people playing Black Ops 6 now, and the way people move around the map, I can't do that nope

and now you've got to dedicate a whole hard drive to that game, so that's a bit problematic what is the size of Black Ops 6, What's some stupid number? Oh, I don't know. They just decided to package all their assets for all their games within one package, and then you get...

Oh, it's only 100... Wait. No, it's not 102 gig. Wait. I heard it was going to be smaller. Oh, it was going to be bigger than that. Did they fix it? Did they fix it?

That's a big question. Yeah, I do remember early on it was reported that it was going be bigger than that. Did they fix it? Did they fix it? That's a big question. Yeah. Uh, yeah, I do remember early on it was reported that it was gonna be 300 gigs. They might have actually reduced it. Hmm. Even then, like, even if it's like a hundred something gigs, why? Well, I can understand a game being a hundred gigs when it's like a Baldur's Gate 3. But it's gonna- that size is going to be mostly textures and assets.

Yeah. And audio assets. Do you really need... Baldur's Gate 3 has cinematics. That's also contributing to the size. If you're not rendering them in-game, which I believe Baldur's Gate 3 is... Probably. Yeah. so that wouldn't apply

but any game that does pre-render their their their cinematics and then shipping it as a video file yeah that's going to contribute to the size if you have a lot of them unless you want to be FFXIII on the Xbox where that game was across three DVDs because of the video and they also hyper compressed them so they looked terrible because that game was made for PS3 first which had Blu-ray and Xbox at the time was

dual layer DVD oops yeah I mean you don't necessarily always want to render in game your videos because you can't necessarily do all the things that you want to do in game but yeah it's

becoming a problem where games ship with such like I want to say like high resolution textures and stuff like that but the issue is that you really need to have ship with such... I want to say high-resolution textures and stuff like that, but the issue is that you really need to have 4K textures everywhere.

Even if you target 4K hardware. Nobody's going to be sitting right in front of a wall. I talk about this with games like Forza. Do you need 4K graphics for the crowds? No? Even if a player wants that make make it an optional install do it yeah do i need 8k grass like not really no if i want to touch grass i'll go outside but yeah you you will definitely see this where there's a lot of games where they're like again it's it's cool but i think again limitation breeds creativity

you have like modern hardware has so much storage space it has so much performance that you can get away with shipping 4k textures for random rocks on the ground you can get away with shipping a toothbrush that has a hundred000 polygons. Like, it doesn't need to be like that. Yep, absolutely. And you got games that are pushing the envelope to the other side. Again, we talked about Animal Will earlier.

33 megs. That includes all assets, all audio, all the music tracks, everything, 33 megs. How big was the Bellatra? I believe that was also really small as well. Uh, a couple, I would need to check actually. Uh, I think it's a couple hun- like maybe 100 megabytes?

Man. That's- I can just go in settings here. 119. Okay, that's not too bad. But like, yeah, I think there's a lot of... With the AAA game industry being in the state it's in, there's a lot of room for... This has been happening for a while.

There's a lot of room for the indie games and then your AA games to also become really, really popular. Again, like Baldur's Gate 3, that is a solo published title. If you want to be pedantic, technically, you know, they're getting funding because

it's like an officially licensed D&D thing. But, you know, games like Black Myth Wukong, games like Bellatio, which is obviously an indie title by itself. Actually, there's a lot of really cool games coming out of China, which is actually like that. For a long time, you know, you saw a Chinese developed game and you're like, oh, it's going to be full of microtransactions. And for a long time, that was true.

Or gacha mechanics. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But with the success of games like Black Myth Wukong, we're seeing a lot of other things where, you know, it's showing that you actually can make a popular single-player title based on Chinese mythology from a, like, a Chinese perspective, and it's actually gonna, like, sell well. And I think the reason it sells well is, firstly, obviously, it's a good game, right? Like, first and foremost, it doesn't matter what you want to base your game on, it has to be good, it has to have good game mechanics, and has to be good, it has to have good game mechanics, and has to be enjoyable. But also showing that people are, people want to see something new.

Because, you know, you've got, you've got a lot of, when we talk about games with like an East Asian aesthetic, usually that just means Japan. Like, Japan is the only country that exists in that entire region, if you look at the history history of gaming with the exception of like one or two other titles. But now that like a lot of these developers are entering the market and not just trying to make mobile cash grab games, there's a lot of cool stuff that I'm like I'm really excited for and that was not something i would have said about like anything a couple of years ago yeah there's a lot of studios that are seeing the value and respecting the player and and that sounds a bit ridiculous to say but unfortunately for a lot of triple a studios they kind of forgot that there's a player at the end of of of their pipeline that's going to

play their game uh it's it's mostly monetary transaction where you're developing a product for a market hoping to get a return on your investment uh i'm never gonna buy ubisoft idol again in my life like they've lost me as a customer it's gonna take a while uh yeah because i played like when i was when i was a kid i played santa time a fantastic game i played the early assassin's creed games fantastic games but like again there's yeah ubisoft just not doesn't know what they're doing yeah exactly the the new prince of persia and the Lost Crown game looks really interesting to me. Still not going to purchase it. I don't want to support Ubisoft. I used to own

the crew. They pulled that away from me because they didn't want to remove the very optional online features that they added as an excuse to have their game always online. And now the game died because they didn't want to support for the server. Which, by the way, is fine.

As a game company, you should be forced to support, to keep your servers alive. But at that point, either publish the protocol so that the community can actually take the torch and do support for you, or just remove the online requirements and make it a single-player title. Do something that allows the game to live on.

And Ubisoft does not do that. Instead they decide to pull the rug. And say no we're done with that game. We're done with the title. Thank you very much for your money. You can't ever launch the game ever again. They've done also like some. Personally I think it's worse.

People who purchased DLCs for Assassin's Creed's title. Once they removed the DRM for that. You couldn't access the DLC content content unless you already had it installed. Not on console release, because that was tied to the console shops, but for PC, there's a few DLCs for Assassin's Creed that is no longer accessible if you don't have the software already installed. I forget which one. Brotherhood. Revelations? Yes.

Maybe it's a couple. It's a couple of them, yeah. Old Assassin's Creed DLC are no longer available, so... Okay, AC3 is part of the remastered version. I'm getting so much conflicting information. I'm definitely seeing Brotherhood and Revelation, though. That's so dumb. That's so dumb.

Yeah. It is unfortunate that companies feel they have the right to do that it is unfortunate that in most jurisdictions the law does allow them to do that yeah hopefully we'll see a push from europe to actually outlaw that and that's going to force maybe a global change unless they want to be petty like apple and just say okay we're just going to change stuff for the europe market and everybody else can get screwed yeah i did see that for anyone who doesn't know what he's talking about that's um when the eu forced apple to allow side loading also known as installing software without using the app store uh they decided to

make the change on eu devices. No one else. Which is something, like this is the difference between a hardware change and a software change. I talked about the whole USB-C enforcement thing the other day. A software change is a lot easier to make for a single region. Forcing USB-C, like having to make a Euro device and

then a worldwide device, like that's a lot harder to do that that cost engineering effort you need to actually manufacture devices so that's a lot like there's a lot more effort in making that happen plus apple doesn't really lose out on anything if you have usbc they do lose out on something if you can install software without going through their store yep uh and it's not the first company that did that, by the way. Microsoft also did that with the... Sorry, my dog's barking. You were saying...

Yeah, so it's not the only company that did changes specifically for the Europe market that was only available in the Europe market. Microsoft also did that with browser choice screens, where if you installed an edition of Windows in Europe, you had to have a screen that allowed you to select an alternative browser. I believe it was part of the windows n edition uh that was released in europe uh maybe

i'm misremembering but uh it also didn't have like yeah uh uh had been designated Oh, it's because they were designated the gatekeeper because of DMA. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, so essentially when you first did install Windows you have a screen that allows you to select an alternative browser install. Let's say Firefox instead of just having Edge pre-installed and set as

default by out of the box. I didn't realize they'd done this. I've heard people say it's, oh, they can't do it. This would be way too confusing to the user. They literally only have an interface for it. Yeah.

Same thing with Google, by the way. Google implemented the change in the out of the box experience for Android as well. Only available in Europe where you actually select what browser and what stuff that you want. This is the one turned to search engine.

I found. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's possible for the search engine. Yeah. But they did do one. They do.

They did a constant screen for on a choice screen on Android as well. And then they turned around and said to you, to us lawmakers that no, it's not possible. It's like going to be too confusing for users. You're already doing it in one possible. It's going to be too confusing for users. You're already doing it in one region. It's one extra click. At some point,

there's nothing wrong giving the user a choice. The only reason why you are scared of giving a user a choice the only reason why you are scared of giving a user a choice is because you don't believe your product is the best I personally don't think that Google has that fear because the majority of people use Google search I don't it's been shit but for Microsoft I can of understand because Edge is just, well, it's okay now, but yeah. I look at the list of search engines. The ordering of the search engines feels petty to me.

So DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, that's usually what they have at the top. Now, Google Search is like 3 or 4 down on every single UI brave search is the one directly below google it's supposed to be random ok maybe it's just the screenshots they have

yeah so it's possible that it's only the screenshots that they have it's either random or alphabetic I think was the two options that were it's definitely not alphabetical. Yeah, it wouldn't be advantageous for Google to put it alphabetical. I wouldn't put it past them to just do... It's going to be random, but we're going to make sure Google is part of the first three. Which probably is still somewhat compliant.

Probably. I would imagine they probably are required for it to not be the first option though yeah i have not looked at the regulation but i'll be very surprised if that was not a requirement yeah unless they can prove like no it's random it just so happens that sometimes it's on first which probably would pass as well if you're doing a true randomness and you can actually like get that audited uh iited, I'm sure that would be okay. Sure. But, I don't know.

Sometimes you're lucky. Sometimes you're lucky. Well, yeah, lucky if that's the way you want to call it. Yeah. Yeah. I do hope the EU does something and steps up with the whole game issue thing.

The problem is... Go on. Hopefully Australia and Canada follows as well. I have very little hope for the US, but... The thing with games is... Once the software's out there, even if they don't make it so it's possible for other regions with what they provide the software's out there people are going to make

it happen like they might not like that it's happening but um i don't know it there definitely will be workarounds if they start making it more possible to actually build community servers for stuff. Yeah, true. The way I see it is though, is like game is part of culture nowadays. Like gaming is just a core part of how we consume multimedia and consume stuff. Like you had, like if you look at the,

like all the past history that we can actually like look and study today is because of written accounts. And if every single written account, every single visual account was behind a DRM door that you couldn't open anymore, what would we really know about history? Yeah, Mozart on a DRM. No Mozart anymore.

Yeah, exactly. We can't see it deleted. We're kind of walking towards that future, and it's kind of scary like what's going to happen in 200 years we want to see back at what life and culture was like in the early 2000s if everything is just this every single media is disappearing we have entire tv shows that are produced and then killed and completely erased because they weren't profitable because it's just better for tax reasons to make it disappear that culture is gone gone if somebody wants to like actually see

okay well what was so bad about concord in the year 2024 and i'm studying that from doing a phd in like game design in like 2300 something, maybe I would like to look at the game and study it. You can't anymore. It's gone. And yeah, it's a bit sad to see that something that is

such a core part of some people's identities, myself included, I consider myself a gamer, can just disappear because one company decided to just say, no, I don't want to support this. I don't even want people to see this because, I don't know, I'm ashamed or something. It's a bit troubling.

Yeah, and the market of, you know, whether you want to call it game preservation, game piracy, know whether you want to call it game preservation game piracy whatever term you want to call it it's all it's all basically grouped up together anyway that only really goes so far and there's some games where there's just it's just not possible and there are efforts to revive deleted games like there are community servers being worked on for like final fantasy 14 1.0 which is a got like that game's just gone the game doesn't exist anymore but people are trying to bring it back it's there's like most of the way there from my understanding um or like before like old school RuneScape came out

there were people running private servers for old versions or classic wow people are running old servers for old versions of wow and yes that'll happen but for some games it firstly is just not possible secondly no one's trying to do it anyway so there's some games that some people just don't care anymore and maybe it was culturally significant at some at some period of time and just isn't anymore because it's a 20 year old game and like nobody plays it anymore but yeah it's it's a touchy subject i just hope that we have we see more uh customer-friendly legislations uh being brought up by various different jurisdictions around the world. It's probably going to be the EU first, let's be honest.

Yeah. But things need to change. They do, but, you know, it's... The only way is... It's one of these problems where it's not going to change until people that are in those positions understand that there is a problem and this is a problem you have especially you know you you see hearings i think the best example of this are the tiktok and facebook hearings in the u.s where the i think one of the questions the

tiktok one was does tiktok connect to your home wi-fi it yes? Like, that's how it has to work? Or, like, in the Facebook one, I think there was complaints about Google to Mark Zuckerberg. It's like, the people who are doing these hearings don't even know what it is that they are complaining about. And I'm glad the EU seems to, like,

at least have some people there that know what they're doing because like USB-C Would never happen in the US. You ask a US senator what USB-C is Most of them probably have no idea. There's like a couple of them that are in like 30s and 40s, which would probably Probably know. I know there's one who has streamed on Twitch before. She probably knows and the rest of them have no idea Yeah, and they don't care to be completely honest they don't care um and that's that's that's a reality that's everywhere right the the the people who are being elected are becoming older and older and not necessarily

in touch with the technology changes of today and some people don't necessarily are uh literate in technology. And there is... Once that generation essentially stops being in power by either through time and everything, we're probably going to see some more positive changes. That said, we also have a situation where the youngest generation,

I would argue, are probably a bit less tech literate than we are, simply because they live in the magical land where everything just works out of the box, versus we kind of lived through the early days of computing where we had to fight to get computers to do what we wanted. But it's still way better.

They'll understand, for example, USB-C. They'll understand everything. I see personally in the line of work that i do a lot of like more junior developers as soon as they hit an error message instead of reading an error message it's like well i'm blocked i can't do what i want to do it's like man you got to learn to read error messages like do a bit of diagnostic it's not like computers are not magical not everything works all the time. But there's that skill of being able to troubleshoot, which seems to be...

And being willing to troubleshoot, I think that's one of the biggest problems I would say Linux will have, is that not everything runs out of the box. You will have to learn new things. You will have... If you want to switch to Linux, you have to learn new things.

You have to learn how to troubleshoot issues. And that's not necessarily a skill that every single human on the planet has. You have to learn and adapt and become good at it. And that's normal. The other troubleshooting on Linux is this is why game developers

just ask any of them that have a bunch of bug reports. Almost all of them are going to say most of them come from Linux users because Linux users, for the most part, are more used to having to report bugs. Like even if you're not reporting

every single bug you have, most people have probably gone to a Bugzilla, a GitHub page, a GitLab page and reported something. And it's just part of the culture on Linux to report bugs you see. Whereas on Windows, usually what you'll see is if an application

crashes, it's like, send bug report. There's just a button there. Having that on more Linux applications probably is a good thing. But by it being the only option people are exposed to and a lot of applications people use don't even

have a public way to report bugs anyway. If you ask me, how do I report a bug against Adobe Reader? I don't know. Do you have a support plan with Adobe? No. Deal, like, you're gonna have to deal with

that bug, that's it. And, yeah, no, definitely. There's also some class of issues that are just caused by the way Linux is. Dependency management in Linux is just a whole beast on its own.

You have some dependencies that are modified by some distros for some odd reason, and then you have applications trying to run against that version of the dependency that's not necessarily the same as the upstream one, and you get some classes of bugs. Flatpak is great for that though, where you have all the dependencies

somewhat self-contained within the container. You do have some external things that you can pull. You're triggering the NixOS users. They're going to be in my comment section right now. Every time I talk about containerization or anything like that, NixOS people immediately show up. You're like, NixOS solves all your problems.

It is very possible that NixOS has another solution as well. I've actually dabbled a bit in NixOS. I haven't gone deep into it. I want to switch my NAS to Nix because right now I'm using OpenSUSE tumblewheel slow roll and I just want to be able to just rebuild it easily using a Nix file.

That would be great. But yeah, I need to look into that. And it's very possible that Nix has a solution for it. But let's be honest here. The one with the widest reach at this time is flatbacks. And it does solve a real problem. One

would hope that once Linux has a higher user base, we would see more software vendors actually providing their apps as flatbacks. Yes, it does take more space. flatbacks. Yes, it does take more space. I agree.

However, space is pretty cheap nowadays. Yeah, 100 gigabyte games, you know? 300 gigabyte games. That's a different thing, but we're talking about difference like a few, like 30 megs of difference between a flatback versus a non-flatback version. Well, yeah.

My point is we've seen the graphs of like, storage price. Like, a terabyte is... I don't even- how much can you get a terabyte SSD for now? I would say 150 Australian dollars, probably? If you're just looking at a SATA SSD? Seven... wait is it- Wait, is that- hold up. If you're just looking at a SATA SSD? Seven... wait is it... Wait, is that... hold up.

Uh... Here we go, here's a nicer one. Here is... Okay, two terabyte, four terabyte... two terabytes, two hundred dollars. And I've got a crucial... I've got a crucial one terabyte SATA SSD for $92 Australian dollars. Yeah, M.2 drive from Kingston $75. Again, this is Australian dollars, which are not real, so that's like

$50 US dollars. So... Storage is cheap. Yeah, a few extra megabytes. I'll complain about a few extra Yeah, a few extra megabytes. I'll complain about a few extra gigabytes, like an extra 20 or 30 gigabytes. But once you got into the stages of having multiple gigabyte drives, no one really cared about having additional bits being used

or extra kilobytes being used. Then when we get into the terabyte stage, you don't really care about extra megabytes being used or extra kilobytes being used. Then when we get into the, you know, terabyte stage, you don't really care about extra megabytes being used. And you could argue, yeah, maybe this is a bad thing and, you know, games stop being optimized. Yeah, absolutely. But at the same time, I'm not going to spend all day worrying about it. Yeah, and in that situation, it's going to be mostly the same thing

downloaded and downloaded over and over again and installed. Just use a file system with deduplication capabilities. Then it's basically free. So you do have options. And yeah, it would be nice to see more software vendors start adopting Flatbacks instead of just offering like dev packages and RPM packages for their software, which may work on your distro if you're using one of the mainline ones may not if you're not using one of the mainline ones versus flatback is pretty much going to work everywhere honestly i'm surprised that like with snap being you know the ubuntu thing and then pushing like they have deb package i'm surprised that like snaps hadn't become like the main thing that companies just distributed their software as

it is for a lot of companies but like I'm surprised it just didn't become the default yeah uh well it really depends on how many people are using Ubuntu and snaps in the enterprise space right uh which is not

going to be a lot so I think that's pretty much why we still see dev and RPM packages maybe there's a lot of developers at the companies that just don't like snaps and that's pretty much why we still see dev and rpm packages maybe maybe there's a lot of developers at the companies that just don't like snaps and that's why they don't do it yeah and there's also the other issue that a lot of tools are cli only and flat packs is not great for cli applications there's a misconception that it doesn't work for cli applications that's false it does it's just that you got to do flat pack run and then the the package id to run your thing which is not great uh one would hope that flat pack will come up with an alias system where it would automatically

no you can run it just as the the name of the flat pack and you yeah so if i oh yeah so like obs um um what is what is what is the obs package called if i if i just run com.obsproject.studio, that will just open it. Yeah, but that's a full package name, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be nice to have just an alias to say, oh, I want to open OBS, just open OBS. I kind of understand why they don't want to do that,

because they want to avoid collisions and stuff like that. But it is a bit more cumbersome to always have to remember like the full package name because sometimes the package name does not make sense yeah if it's an individual developer you don't necessarily want to remember like the full legal name of the developer if they're using that for a package name for example uh which could be an issue so if i've ever released like a package in flatback yeah for sure the package name is going to be ca.andrewmore.whatever the package i'm going to release because that's the domain name that i use professionally uh but do i really expect users to remember that not really do i really want to type that every single

time i want to use a cli tool that's not why i'm using the cli i want it to be faster even though you have auto completion but it is it is an issue that i would like to see solved but that said i just have an alias file that i manage and it works just fine one thing you mentioned earlier about um young developers not being great at dealing with error messages my understanding is people thought that the kids growing up with tablets and phones from a very young age would basically just learn how technology works through osmosis and they do understand really deeply how phones and tablets work it's the rest of the stuff that's a problem yeah and it's in phone and tablets, it's more sandbox environments. You rarely get errors showing up in your face as a user

versus on a computer, especially on Linux. You've got to understand, like, okay, well, and what does this error mean? And to be fair, a lot of error messages on Linux are not useful. I love getting error messages about some issue in a library for an application I didn't write. What am I going to do with that? Yeah, just give me something useful that I can share to the developer or that I can understand.

It feels like it's the old days of even Windows. Windows, when they first released their print-to-PDF drivers, if you would print a PDF and get the save box and do cancel on the save box, you would get an error message saying, operation failed successfully. That developer wrote that. That is not a UX designer that wrote that.

No, and it was something ridiculous like that. a UX designer that wrote that. No, and it was something ridiculous like that. It's just... There is a severe lack in Linux other than some DEs that have great UX designers. There's a severe lack of thought into

I want to say user experience. And it's understandable because most of Linux development is led by developers, which is great. We get a lot of things that we wouldn't get in another OS. But I think if really 2015 or whatever year is going to become the year of the Linux desktop, we need to start thinking about user experience. Because not every single Linux user is a developer or a technical user. And yeah, it's something that is severely lacking at the moment. We are definitely starting to see more of that, but you know, Linux doesn't have any any shortage of devs. But... Nope. When it comes to people

who are actually UX designers, like, right now, basically what you have is you have the... Both KDE and GNOME, I really don't like the direction that GNOME's going. I've talked about that plenty of times.

I think it's actually just making the experience worse. But outside of that and outside of like Cosmic, you know, people are kind of just up to their own devices doing whatever they want. And the problem you have when a developer is designing something is the same problem you have when you don't have any people testing an application. is the same problem you have when you don't have any people testing an application. You know how the application works. You know things that you can do in the application.

But the second you hand it to someone who doesn't, a lot of those assumptions, like, why is the button here? Why does the button have that icon? Why does it have that name on it? Or, you know, when I tested out the arch install script if you entered a Character that wasn't the correct character so it would like it would suggest hey press out Y or n to do yes or no I just pressed O and the application crashed and These are things you just run across if you are the only person working on the application Yeah, and O is not like an out like

an outlandish answer if you have a french user it's we or no for no if you would have you would have maybe uh used o as an answer because you're not thinking you're running an english script and you're used to french software so it's yeah it's it's something i'm not saying like you should handle o as yes and still go ahead, but you should at least like prompt the user and say, hey, that's not the answer I was expecting. Press Y if you want to say yes or no if you want to say no,

or N if you want to say no. But yeah, there's things like that where you don't necessarily need to be a UX designer, but always tell yourself when you're developing a software, will my grandmother understand this? Will a 10-year-old understand this? Well, something I thought when I was in university is just

assume that every user is malicious. Yep. Because if anything you leave there that can be broken will be broken. Even if it's not intentional. It will happen. Absolutely.

But yeah, assume the user is malicious and assume the user is not necessarily dedicated enough to use a computer. And yes, it's going to frustrate some people that are going to be like, oh, why is there so many warnings? There's so much text, it makes it slower to use. Yes, but you're making software to target the yes but it you're you're making

software to target the majority of people if you're making like a developer tool don't do that like it's it's an it's personally annoying yeah uh but if you're if you're developing a desktop environment if you're developing a software that's going to be used by the majority of users if you're developing a software that's going to be used by gamers for example make it as intuitive as possible to use it uh it's it's gonna it's gonna make it so that more people use your software yeah this is uh i do definitely agree about the dev tools the problem you have with dev tools is when they don't spit out useful errors that you can work out a problem with like i've i've run into libraries where it's not telling me a problem that i did it's telling me a problem with a dependency of the

library so i'm like i don't even know like what does that have to do with what i'm doing like i'm not using that library yeah because sometimes it's hard for as when you're doing like you have a stack tree that is error out it's kind of hard to know okay where the what's the original caller like yeah 10 items up the stack so i kind of understand why it's happening uh yeah that's a bit of a harder problem to solve i would say in that situation but if you want to look at something that's linux that i think is they're doing a fine job is bazite installing bazite on your device, if you go on the website and you say,

okay, I want to download Bazite, it asks you some very simple questions. First one, what's your hardware? Are you downloading this for a desktop? Are you downloading it for a home theater PC? Is it for handheld? And if you select any of the questions, then it's like, for example, if it's like handheld,

they're not going to ask you the hardware. They're just going to say, okay, fantastic. You're using a Steam Deck. What do you want? Do you want KDE like SteamOS? And they actually say, like SteamOS. They don't expect you to know what KDE means. They tell you that's exactly what SteamOS uses.

Or do you want GNOME? So it's very simple questions. If you select desktop, they'll ask you, okay, what do you have? Do you have an AMD CPU? Do you have an NVIDIA CPU? Do you have a Intel? And they even tell you, okay, what do you have? Do you have an AMD CPU? Do you have an NVIDIA CPU? Do you have a Nintel? And they even tell you which series to select. And then you'll download an ISO with all

the drivers, everything pre-configured for your specific device that you wanted to install it on. Huh. And it makes it really simple for end users to install. This is actually the best download page I think I've ever seen.

It's pretty great. They could put that all in the installer, to be fair. But the issue with that is that you're not guaranteed that you'll be able to boot into the installer because you might have bad hardware or if you require NVIDIA hardware, do you really want to boot to a screen that's like VESA compatible,

like 800 and 600, where you have stuff cut off? So they're really asking those questions beforehand to make sure that you have the best experience. Yeah, I remember when Bazit first came out, you would go to the download page and it was just a list of the different ISOs you could download.

Yeah, and that was a pain. But now they're doing a great job. And even when you download after that, they say, okay, well, here's your ISO download. So if you select Steam Deck, then KDE. And then they say, okay, well, here's the initial setup guide that is usually specific to your device.

I think for that one it isn't. Okay, no, they make you, they link you to another page. But they could link directly to installing Baz.on on Steam Deck if they really wanted to. But yeah, it's something that is user-friendly. And it's not very confusing for the user because they already, at that point, they boot, they install, and they already have a pretty good setup for what they were expecting to do.

Yeah, I definitely want to talk more about this. I'll definitely probably do a video on this. It was actually really cool. I was not aware at all of this system. They do that. So Universal Blue does that for every single one of their distribution. They also do that for Aurora, which is their... has it as well, do they? Which is their...

Yeah, so if you go Aurora, getaurora.dev, they have the exact same type of setup where they ask, okay, what do you want to use this for? So do you want desktop, laptop? What was that link? Getaurora.dev. I'll type it in. Getaurora.dev. Oh, okay.

Download... Which is another thing. Oh, okay. Download. Which is another universal blue distribution. But yeah. And they ask you simple questions and you get something that is tailored to what you wanted. That's really cool.

Hmm. Yeah, like I- I- I- This makes a lot more sense to do at this point, rather than like, you know, you'll see that- You'll see a lot of installers where it's like, hey, would you like to install- like Ubuntu, do you want to install the minimal packages or the full packages? And like, what does that mean? Tell mean tell me yeah and the worst example of that personally is open suza where it's gonna actually what do you want yeah what profile do you want where there's like a whole bunch of different profiles you want kd minimal minimal desktop like a whole bunch of different things and then after that you get into the practitioner

it's gonna say well we've done some magic you. And if ever you want to change that magic, good luck. You can, but then you have to make all your selections manually. It works, to be fair. As a power user, I've installed OpenSUSE multiple times. I know my way around the AST installer, but it's not great UX for somebody who doesn't know what they're doing. Right, Right. But, you know, again, lots of developers in the Linux world.

UX design is not so much. Yeah. While we're back on the subject of Bazite, if ever you want to set up a nice and you don't want to wait for the Fremont Valve machine, Bazite on a mini PC

for the living room is absolutely fantastic. Super easy to install. If you have an AMD GPU, you can get a SteamOS-like experience where you boot directly into game mode. It will not work right now for NVIDIA. I don't, well at least didn't before. Maybe Gamescope fixed the upstream issue, or Bazite did.

But you boot straight up into SteamOS. It's a great experience. If you have a Steam Deck, you can also easily install Bazite. You get all the trimmings of SteamOS. You boot directly into game mode. You can also fully encrypt your disk, which if you're going somewhere with your Steam Deck,

I'm sorry for a lot of people who think, oh, SteamOS has a pin screen, that's secure. No, it isn't. You can just boot into an alternate OS and I can get all your session tokens and everything. If I wanted to, they're full disk and not encrypted. and also I could get your pin.

It is plain text into a config file. The command to get it is... You just boot off of an Arch ISO and you can do everything you want. Yeah, exactly. Or even any Linux distribution is going to work. That's just a first thing that came to mind. Anything where you have a command line

where you can just install stuff, or you can message stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And you can read, just catting a file and then grepping, you can get your pin. Yeah, I can get the lock screen pin right away if your system is not encrypted. So it's not...

That's one thing that I wish Valve would improve, is just have full disk encryption by default. And there's a TPM in there, just unlock it automatically. It's not going to hurt performance. Valve would improve is just have full disk encryption by default and there's a TPM in there just like unlock it automatically like it's not going to hurt performance I personally don't use a TPM I use a FIDO key to

unlock my Steam Deck but again it's just on full reboot which I rarely do yeah it's a great Linux distribution for gaming like if you want to try Linux and you don't want to wait for Valve OS give it a go

install it on its own partition now dual booting does have its challenge my recommendation for that is have your Linux bootloader in a separate disk than the Windows one don't try to like integrate both together you're going to have issues not because Linux is going to mess it up Windows is going to mess it up windows is going to mess it up um so if you yeah if you just have your boot partition like on a

completely like for linux on a completely different disk then you can just use uh rely essentially on your on your ufi bios to have a selector to choose which one or you can boot on your linux disk and usually grub is pretty good at detecting Windows and then switching back to Windows and you will still have secure boot, you will have everything if you follow if you actually follow the mockutil prompts so yeah, there's solutions out there

yeah well on that note, we should probably be wrapping this up sounds good I guess, we didn't really talk about any of your stuff but let people know where they can find your stuff and anything else you want to mention yeah absolutely yeah you can find

me on blue sky now which my handle is andrewmoore.ca you can find me on my website I did set that up yes you'll find me also on the web andrewmoore.ca i'm also on mastodon uh which i'm not going to say my handle just find on my website because i don't it's final wolf.acaderm.io uh but saying that out loud just you'll forget it in 30 seconds uh and yeah i

sometimes streams it's been a year to be honest i usually stream retro games like mario rom hacks and stuff like that i'm final off on twitch uh but we'll see when i stream i don't know if i'm gonna stream uh often but yeah other than that's pretty much my socials awesome and uh now you're also uh you're also in my time zone which is at least temporarily and soon temporarily yeah yeah uh so that's gonna be uh that's gonna be fun yeah try to try to stay cool how how how warm did canada get i actually have no idea uh well in montreal we often have summer days that are similar to brisbane where it's like super humid and hot uh however good luck with that yeah that's not it was it's not that bad it's dry heat we love it my issue is i landed i landed in adelaide uh right in the middle of the heat wave was like

close to 40 uh i left montreal when it was minus 10 so that was quite a shock uh but yeah it's i mean it's my third year now so it is what it is like every single time i come here for the holidays to be with my partner it is a temperature shock and then after two weeks i just adapt so it will be good at least the winters aren't really that concerning it's ah it for you it's probably like shorts weather ah probably uh the issue is like when it gets cold when it was hot that's when that's when i struggle when it when it was hot, that's when I struggle. When it was very cold and gets to those spring temperatures, kind of like where you have here in winter, then, yes, it's short weather. But I fully expect to struggle during Australia winter just because I'm going to go from like 40 degree plus weather in summer to well on the worst of days eight five sometimes yeah so it is what it is yep yep well i guess we can uh we can we can wrap it up there so

uh my stuff uh i have my main channel is brody robertson i do linux videos there six-ish days a week i've got the gaming channel brody on Games. I will probably be streaming Nine Souls when this comes out I don't know what will be in the other slot. I need to decide on that I've got the react channel where I just upload clips from the stream And if you're watching the video version this you can find the audio version on basically any podcast platform It's on Spotify as well search Tech over Tea There is also an RSS feed if you'd like to find the video version, it's on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. I'll give you the final word. What do you want to say?

2025, the year of Linux consoles? That's going to be interesting.