Tech Over Tea - Creator & Author Of GamingOnLinux | Liam Dawe

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

Today I get an excuse to talk about Linux gaming for 2 hours because my guest is Liam Dawe the creator and author of GamingOnLinux, if you have even a passing interest in linux gaming you're probably taken at least a look at the site. ==========Guest Links========== Website: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gamingonlinux YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/GamingOnLinuxcom Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/gamingonlinux Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@gamingonlinux Personal Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@Sirsquid Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/thenaughtysquid ==========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. Welcome to episode, I want to say, 129 of Tech of a T. And today's guest, I don't know, a lot of you might have not seen his face, because he's usually just writing stuff. Welcome to the show, Liam, from Gaming on Linux. Not just from Gaming on Linux, you created Gaming on Linux. Welcome to the show, how are you doing? Yeah, good, thanks for having me, man. I don't get an opportunity to do this kind of thing very often, gaming on linux you created gaming on linux welcome to the show how you doing yeah good

thanks for having me man i've really i don't get an opportunity to do this kind of thing very often so this is kind of special well it seems like whenever uh someone you know does a podcast you post on your twitter account hey i'm happy to do a podcast like when i yeah i like doing them yeah they're definitely fun that's for sure yeah i just i don't really i don't really like being on camera too often i personally like yeah i find it easier just to do audio stuff or writing it's just nicer for me really but then being with other people like you doing stuff like this cool because i'm not really doing the work behind it you are so yeah yeah that's fair now now what was this about you saying you had a bad webcam this did you just find a new camera no it's usually really bad but actually recently i've bought which i've got either side of me right now some mini studio lights so the

frame rate is kind of okay because it's got enough light on it so i'm a bit more prepared than usual yeah yeah yeah right the camera that you're seeing like on the discord right now is not the one that's appearing uh on the recording that's just there so you know you're not staring at a blank screen the entire time my actual camera is my regular camera the one i usually use for videos just want to clear it up i know some people tend to think that i'm actually recording with that one um no this is a terrible c920 it's just i have it in a drawer somewhere it comes out for these and that is all i think that's what i'm using right now i'm really bad with numbers and stuff like that but i'm pretty sure that's what i've got it yeah, it can look good if you put literally

more than two seconds of effort into tuning it, but I've got the light set up for my actual camera, so it's way overblowing the C920, and it just looks bad for the most part, but

you know, your setup shows it can look decent i guess well i do have actually another camera i don't know if this will get in the picture oh it does i have this big one here which i use for recording the deck and honestly i've no idea what i'm doing with it i just press random settings and kind of hope for the best that's pretty much how i feel i just get it like tuned in a way that works this is why like it's good to use like you know studio lights and have windows closed because then everything is just good you just turn stuff on and it just works um yeah i i would

struggle having that window open like you have it would it would ruin everything i'm trying to do yeah i should probably close that. Never mind. Well, it's fine for now. If you suddenly just, like, fade into darkness during the middle of the show, we're going to know why. So why don't you explain... I'm sure most people watching probably know about gaming on Linux,

but if in case anyone doesn't, explain what you do. So I run the website gaming on linux uh i write about pretty much anything and everything to do with linux and linux gaming so that includes the steam deck now as well uh youtube twitch all that sort of thing been doing it for i lose track i think it's like 12 13 years. We had a birthday like last month. I should know this, but I don't. Yeah, it's been a long time. So I've been there through pretty much every up and down of Linux gaming. I think there is. I've been through it all.

So I guess we can just start with like, what was Linux gaming actually like back then? Because I started using Linuxux i want to say 2019 something like that so like well into proton being established well into everything you know pretty much just being mostly uh mostly good but things were not great back in the day let's put it that way i mean i've been there since there was a company called loki and they were like kind of like the pioneers of everything because they went along to other companies and ported their games over to linux but this is before steam for linux was a thing this is before so many things happened but loki was kind of the stepping stone to a lot more because one of the people if i've got this right who worked for loki made sdl and he now works for valve um and then

but then they messed up and disappeared and then you had a linux game publishing which they also tried to port games to linux like the bigger games and yeah it all sort of back then there was basically nothing and then eventually had like humble indie bundle and that was that was massive because suddenly you had this huge thing that was getting these really popular games ported and they were making you know millions but they don't do that anymore but yeah back then there well, you had a few open source games and not much more. Because Steam for Linux didn't come around, because Proton came later, but Steam for Linux didn't come around until the Steam Machines. It was a bit earlier than that. Yeah, it was a little bit earlier.

So Steam for Linux was, if I've got this right, 2013 is when it was officially released. And then Steam Machines were a little bit after that. Not much longer after that, though. I'm looking at the Wikipedia right now. It says 2015 for the Steam Machines. And then Proton... I don't know what Valve was thinking, to be honest. Looking back on the history of Valve's approach into Linux,

the fact that Steam Machines released without Proton at all being a thing that existed makes no sense to me yeah well i think back then they kind of well they messed up basically i mean everybody knows that now um because they i think it's two things they thought they had more market power for hardware than they did back then. And they weren't doing it first party. You know, they were relying on other vendors doing these machines. In fact, there's three points.

They were then also relying on companies to port the games, which took a long time. A lot of the early ports weren't exactly amazing. And Steam Machines, you know, fizzled out because at the start there weren't enough games, which obviously Proton has basically solved. Yeah, that's definitely... Especially now with... Now with basically the last problem being solved

is being put into developers, which is the anti-cheat problem. That was the last frontier of things just not working. I know that it's still, you know, well, it's obviously a game-by-game basis, but then there are the glib C problems that happen every so often where it just stops working. Yeah, well, you had that about just over a week ago where glib C put out an update and it broke Easy Anti-Cheat

and suddenly everyone's like, why are my games not working? And that is a problem that we've got to solve as well it's that user space needs to keep more backwards compatibility because it breaks just too often and that's an interesting point there because one of the code weavers developers so code weavers sponsor wine development and they work with valve on proton one of their developers I think it was on Hacker News, put a comment on a post about it basically saying like Win32, the Windows API with Wine is basically the stable API for Linux. And back when they posted that, I thought, no it isn't or whatever. But you see all these issues keep happening and then you think, well,

maybe they were right. Because everything can be fixed in wine that then fixes every other game, and then it's just fixed. And yeah, it is becoming a more stable target in a number of ways. So, yeah. Well, Linux, you're always going to have that distro problem.

There are certainly distros that can individually address problems like you're gonna have like silverblue for example let's say obviously silverblue is a weird example you probably don't want to game on that just because driver's gonna be a bit messy but you can have a system where you have certain aspects of it which are going to be stable actually i guess popwest is probably better example. And then the aspects that need to be moving, like the drivers to make sure things are... New game coming out, driver optimization, that those are getting pushed forward. But if we're talking generally across Linux,

you're always going to have... Arch Linux is always going to do something, is going to break something. Ubuntu, it's going to be running ancient drivers and something's going to break and it's just linux is a weird system to be targeting because there's not really any specific thing to target but i think that yeah that's been a problem for a really really long. And so Valve have tried to solve that in a couple of ways. Like they have the Steam Linux runtime, which is basically, well, nowadays it is a container full of the libraries that they need for games to work. And developers, you know, can target that.

And you can manually, in Steam, set games to be run through that as well. And, well, that's one solution. But then you have Flat through that as well. And, well, that's one solution, but then you have Flatpaks as well, and then Snap. And I'm sure there's other things, AppImage, and yeah. But again, it is Linux being a weird platform. Like, you have these so many different things trying to do the same thing. And that kind of issue is just going to repeat.

And it's one of the reasons I moved away from, well, people are going to hate me for saying this. I moved away from Arch Linux, but there's going to be Arch Linux zealots out there that will say, well, you weren't really Arch, you were Endeavor OS. But it's Arch. It's just a fancy installer for Arch.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. I mean, all the updates come from Arch. All the software comes from Arch. As far as I care, it's Arch. But it's breakage. Endeavor does have their own repo for some things. Maybe I'm mistaken about that.

But the main core system is Arch. It's not Manjaro, which is questionably Arch. So Manjaro, they bundle all the updates and then release them as a bundle in the name of stability. And then Arch just throw everything out.

And if it breaks, it breaks and you've got to deal with it yourself. And that, as someone who works on it, I couldn't deal with that anymore. I ended up moving to Fedora. And apart from a really annoying NVIDIA driver install and everything else just it works so so amazingly well and one day I'll move to AMD but you know money and so

on although technically I'm already on AMD with the Steam Deck so yeah you know. What are you running on your desktop? What NVIDIA card? The 2080 Ti which I should retract that because Nvidia gave it to me.

Well okay if you've got a 2080 Ti you can sort of sit on that one for a while. You don't need to go to AMD. You can justify not going to AMD for a while. Yeah to be fair though, people

say a lot of bad things about Nvidia and that was a joke. I don't mean that. All media ties cut off. Yeah. Historically, Nvidia always had the better drivers anyway. They always worked better anyway.

It's just getting them installed and updated has been the most annoying thing and it's still annoying it is it's 2022 why why can't it be a one-click thing it's like you download their installer and don't you still have to drop out of a graphical shell just to get it done i said i used amazing i couldn't tell you oh well okay AMD, you just update your system and it's there. Amazing. Yeah, when I built my system, I was already using Linux at the time. I specifically built it with Linux in mind.

I was like, I'm just going to go AMD. With that in mind, my GPU needs a bit of an off-grid. Because when I bought it, I wasn't much of a gamer at the time, so I sort of just bought something that was available. I got a RX 570. That's a pretty reasonable

card, though. Yeah, but compare that to like a 6700 XT. Like, look at the graph, and it's like triple the performance. I can play things just fine, but it's getting to that stage where modern games are going down to medium,

low. I'm waiting on playing Elden Ring just because I want to play it at a reasonable setting. So are you buying a Steam Deck then? I so are you buying a steam deck then i i actually don't know what the deal is with getting them in australia i don't have one on order oh right yeah i don't think you can actually get it i think you can like get it into the country but they don't have like you know the power they don't have it set up for being in

australia is is this where I basically do something like this to really annoy everybody who can't get them? Sorry! Could be worse with LTT's one where they just tear it apart and put stickers all over it. See, I did that kind of with that one.

Yeah, but that looks nice. Oh look, there's you! It doesn't just have a giant picture of your face on it. Yeah, okay, it doesn't have that. Don't tempt me. I might do that. Yeah, but could you stand staring at that all the time? I can't help saying it.

How is the Steam Deck? I have heard good things about it but you know it it's different to hear it from the perspective of a review and perspective of someone who's just you know generally using it it has honestly i mean i've said this before but it has changed my gaming life really because like like a lot of people who work at computers you don't want to be sat there in the evening you you want to just chill so sitting in bed or just on my sofa just yeah it's nice it is nice and the fact that they could get it at a price point where it plays most things i mean yeah you have to turn down the settings but i mean you can play the brand new spider-man on it what more do you want i did see your post about that that that's kind of crazy and well considering there's

also such a small screen like you can get away playing on fairly low settings. It's not... You're going to notice it if you're playing on a 27. You're playing on a TV. You're going to notice being on low. But surely it's not that big of a deal on something that small. No. So, I'll just load it up in the background if I can. And then I can show you in real time if it will let me.

All right, here we go. Just turn that down a bit. Can we do hardware in real time? Yeah, it's just, it is honestly amazing that obviously there'll be stuff coming out and the right stuff coming out that will be more powerful but you also you don't get any of the vendor support that you get from valve it probably won't have steam os it won't have the price point that valve have got on here like valve said in one of their original interviews for the steam deck that hitting the price point for it

was i believe they said, really painful. So, you know, they're right near the edge of, I assume, then, profitability for it. They're probably selling it like a console. Like, without... Yeah. Yeah. Probably. So you sell it at cost or a bit under cost and make it up on game sales. Yeah, that is it.

Because they, well, their cut is 30% of all sales until I think it hits like a million or two and then it comes down a bit. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I imagine they will make a lot more with it as well. Because even though like we joke about, oh, I'll get through my backlog on it.

But you're just buying more games all the time to play on it. I don't think I've cleared anything from my backlog because I'm just going, ooh, does this work? Yeah, it is absolutely amazing. Right, it's loading up now, so in a second I'll be able to show you. And it's absolutely crazy

the fact that you could sit on a toilet and play Spider-Man. Not that you'd want to. I mean, I wouldn't want to. Yeah. A bit gross. Play with your feet. Yeah.

No wonder. Don't. You'll make me try it now. Right, here we go. Okay, so if I go back a bit. There it is. Spider-Man. I'm playing Spider-Man. Oh no! But there you go. Spider-Man, the brand new one. But the coolest feature about this though, this

is where it's not gonna work. Right, I'm pressing the power button. Now it goes, it's saying bye-bye. Give it a sec, and then press the power button again. And it's not going to work, is it? Hold on. Oh, there it is! There it is! Look, we're back already. I was going to say, this is why every on-stage hardware demo is fake,

because it's going to break. Hey, but it worked. It worked, and it only took a couple seconds, and then you are back there in that exact moment that is my favorite feature so for anybody who's got any kind of like a busy life you just tap the button put it away and the power use when it's on standby is i think only single digits per day so you could pick it up two days later and still have loads of battery life left and you're in the exact same spot and that is yeah that is pretty one who's um just listening right now who's showing off putting the device into standby and then bring it back on and it

pretty much boots up like straight away maybe like a second or two yeah like two three seconds and pop it's there it is incredible it does sound really compelling i'm curious to see like what's going to happen with sort of handheld pcs as a a market segment because i know there are like some devices starting to show up but a lot of them are either really expensive or they're not really designed around gaming. There's not... I can't think of anything, at least off the top of my head, that is designed around gaming in the same way the Steam Deck is. There are a couple now.

So you've had GDPWin. GPD? I always get it wrong. GPD, yeah. win g gpd i always get it wrong gpd yeah um they they've been doing sort of handheld devices for quite a while but a lot of theirs are sort of like a clamshell design so it's got a small keyboard on the bottom and it's more like i don't like the feel of that because it's just a small laptop and oh yeah yeah yeah you've got um there'sYN, who I think it's the AYN Air or something like that. They're doing one more like the Steam Deck.

There's another company that's doing another one as well. Oh, I haven't seen this one. Valve have sort of reignited or even just set the actual starting fire on these devices. And I think there's going to be a lot more of them coming out over time because valve is showing that there really is a genuine market for it i think the switch is what first like revived the handheld gaming market because

like the 3ds you know it didn't do terribly but it was still like that lull in handhelds. You had the DS. The DS was an absolutely incredible device. Everyone loved it. Then you had things like the Vita, and it sort of fades out, and you got 3DS, and everyone's now, if they want to play games, are doing it on their phone. if they want to play games they're doing on their phone but then the switch came along and the switch showed that you can have an actual like you know regular gaming experience in a handheld and people genuinely want that like whether it's on the bus or traveling or anything like that

and then valve comes along and says why don't we just do it with the PC? And, you know, people are already playing games on PC anyway. I think that's more the point of it. Like, because it is essentially a full-blown PC. I mean, it has a desktop mode on it as well with KDE Plasma, which is, you know, really amazing. But Valve ignited the, you know, the PC handheld, really. Because it's, yeah, the Switch is, I own a Switch and I do quite like it. It's horrible to hold, though.

I mean, it's terrible. It makes your hands clam up and it hurts to hold. But the thing about the Steam Deck is not only are you able to play games on that, you can play those same exact games with your saved game without buying it again on a laptop or a desktop. And that is such a big added bonus that other platforms don't really have.

Microsoft is trying to do that with their cross-platform stuff, but Valve's cross... What's it called? Cloud... Cloud...

Cloud saves. That's it. Like, that just... It works seamlessly. Yeah, so Microsoft are doing the Game Pass. So they've got the Xbox Game Pass and the PC Game Pass, and I think, genuinely,

that is one of the biggest bits of competition apart from the Epic Store that Steam has, really. But even Microsoft seemed to get quite a bit on board with the Steam Deck as well, because they put out an official guide for getting

Xbox Cloud Gaming on the Steam Deck. They've also been announcing the verification for multiple of their games running on the steam deck they've also been like announcing the verification for multiple of their games running on the steam deck oh i miss that yes yeah they put out like there was a steamboat so because they're a publisher on steam and they have a publisher page they can do like news pub like publisher news posts and they basically put out you know big posts with loads of games in it saying here's how our games work on the steam deck and it's when you start seeing things like that

and you have to think this is a Linux handheld and you've got these massive companies like Sony as well putting they put God of War on steam and they were announcing how it was Steam Deck compatible. They just did the same with Spider-Man. It's a completely different world, man. It's amazing. If we're going to be pedantic, I know someone's going to be, yes, I know the Switch is running BSD.

That doesn't matter. It's a proprietary version of BSD. This is like full Linux. It's just running KDE. You. This is like full Linux. It's just running KDE. You can use it like KDE. It doesn't matter. Yeah, and that is the absolute beauty of it because apart from the obvious things

like the Steam client itself, the Steam Deck is all open source. Quite literally everything about it, the drivers, everything. And that is, and they were, what they did with it is something that not many other vendors do especially in things like the console space and even in the laptop space a lot of the time is repairability so before the sting deck was released valve did their own teardown video of here's what to do even though you shouldn't sort of thing and they're doing spare parts with

iFixit so you can repair it yourself if you want to and that as well is a huge bonus point a lot of people mocked that teardown video but I think maybe it was just present like people sort of presented it a weird way but I think a lot of people misunderstood what was

going on the don't do this part of it it's like they are trying to make it very clear like this is something that you should only do if you understand what you're doing like they're not saying don't fix it like that's not at all what they were saying but like batteries are dangerous please don't pierce the battery if you're gonna tear it down know what you're actually doing if you don't know what you're doing give it to someone who knows what they're doing i found it quite comical really i thought it was funny i thought the way they presented it was funny and some people did take it a little bit out of context like you saw you saw headlines from i won't say who but certain headlines were like you could die if you open your Steam Deck. And I was just like, for God's sake.

Although, whilst we're here, if you're going to open your Steam Deck, take the SD card out. Okay? Because otherwise you'll snap it. Wait. Wait, where were we? So,

right, the SD card on the Steam Deck is there. So you can see it. Oh! So you take the back off, and because it's sticking out, it snaps in half. I snapped a one terabyte by doing that. And I was very, very upset with myself.

What does a one terabyte cost you nowadays? Well, that sent me back like £150, I think it was. So... Yeah, I had a few tears over there i'm not gonna lie but i was quite lucky because it was uh not only was it a review unit but it was one of the one of the first ones they sent out as well and it had uh like a bad fan bearing or something so it's making loads of noise i So I had to send it off anyway, which is great because the other half of the SD card was actually jammed in the slot

and I couldn't get it out. Yeah, it was a double fuck-up. I'm kind of just more impressed by the fact that 1GB SD cards are that cheap now. That's cheap? Wow, yeah, I suppose comparatively compared to what stuff was like, you know, I'm remembering when like, you know,

a 32 gigabyte one was a couple hundred dollars. Yeah. It's expensive still as like a relative thing, but compared to where they were like, it's way cheaper. Well, they are coming out with like 1.5 and two terabyte cards now. And it's just cheaper. Well, they are coming out with 1.5 and 2 terabyte cards now.

It's just like... But they're going to be really expensive. Yeah, well, for a little bit. Jesus. But it's quite funny that a lot of people know who Linus Tech Tips is, obviously. Never heard of him.

So Linus snapped his SD card doing the exact same thing, and obviously I didn't learn from that. And I'm sure a lot of people who follow that are on the gaming side know the name Glorious Eggroll, who does their GE Proton. They just did it as well. They snapped it as well. Theirs was theirs was one terabyte card as well and it's like oh my god like only a week earlier i put a video an article that mentioned again take the friggin sd card out and it's like you're seeing other big names now do it it's like no

looking back on it it seems really obvious where the card is, but I can totally understand why you wouldn't think of doing that beforehand. Well, when you're looking at it directly from the back and undoing the screws, do you see the SD card? Okay, yeah, there's no excuse you ain't you see it so yeah it's just a rookie error i think well no one mentions it in the like early teardowns i don't believe valve mentioned it no they didn't yeah you've it means those are like the name like you guys are the people who have any name online.

I guarantee other people have done it, like just random people who tore it down. Yeah, there's been, I've seen multiple posts on Reddit, you know, over the course of however long the Steam Deck's been out now, like, oh, it's only been out a couple months, really. But yeah, there's been quite a few posts on the... Well, I say official Reddit, but the Steam Deck Reddit of people doing it. And it's going to keep happening because of the design of it, I think, really.

But I'm not sure how they would get around that while also letting you still easily get it in and out. I don't know. So what you're saying is if we have a Steam Deck version 2 and you were the head designer, that's one of the main things you'd want to see fixed.

Yeah. Yeah, because it's costing people money and tears. Messing mine. How long have you had your Steam Deck for? I presume since, like, the first batch? So, the first one they sent me was a couple weeks before it released to the public.

Oh, okay, yeah. Because I was one of the first hundred, I think they said it was, people that they sent it out to. So this one is actually my second one because this was the replacement for the review unit that i snapped the sd card in and had the bad fan right right uh and then my other one was my personal one so the one that i bought you know because i kept my reservation which i think is really a good is a good review of it is the fact that they sent me a review unit. I could keep it. I still kept my own in line

to buy it again. What more a review do you want? I bought one even though I already had one. I've got no need for the other one. What could you use it for? Actually, that's a lie. I've got the... I don't know how you say this actually

j j zooks how do you say this right how do you pronounce that wait it might be backwards for you say j s a what j s a u x j j zooks jesus j j i don't know but i would just say i don't know yeah i'm an australian i don't know i don't know. I would just say JSOX. I don't know. I'm an Australian. I don't know English. Well, I don't think they're English. I think they're French or something like that. I definitely don't know. Yeah. Well, they've started doing a dock.

So Valve was supposed to do their own official dock where you can plug it in and then put it to a TV, but that's been delayed. So they're one of many companies who are now do their own official doc where you can plug it in and then put it to a tv but that's been delayed so they're one of they're one of many companies who are now doing their own so actually my review unit is usually plugged into my tv downstairs and it works surprisingly well on like a 50 inch tv i will admit performance at 1080p and 4k is not amazing you know, lower the resolution for what it was designed to, and you get a pretty good experience when it's docked as well. These are not docks. Okay, this is a terrible article.

I look up Steam Deck dock. Here we go. Five things down, it shows me the first dock. The rest of them are like, hey, here's a... Okay, it says dock. What it is is a... What do you call them like it's not one of these is it it's literally that yeah that's not a dock it's a hub yeah there we go thank you thank you yeah but you you can get loads of those for like, I don't know, like $15, $20 or pounds off of Amazon.

And the one that I showed there, I did pretty much all of my recording with until JZooks or whatever sent me the doc. Yeah. But yeah, you can. Yeah, it's fine so if like now that you've had like this hands-on with the steam deck if you were to say to if you had like a direct line to valve and you're like these are the

things that i need i want to see change with this second version of the steam deck not software things those can like be updated be updated as we go, but anything that you think is fundamentally wrong about the way the Steam Deck is currently designed? Well, the SD card slot, move it, so we don't snap it, obviously.

But most other things are pretty good, though. I mean, it's got a good weight to it. I'm going to throw it at Nora. Don't do that. I don't want to break it though. It's my baby. How are the ergonomics with your hand?

I know that some people were concerned with the size of it. Right. This is kind of one of the things that bugged me. A lot of people have talked about how big it is. And yes, it is big. It's bigger than the Switch and well, there's no getting around the size of it, but I mean

My hands are tiny. I mean you can see and But I have no trouble reaching anything. Okay. Yeah, um So it's got you can see the buttons on the back as well the way you hold it you just tap them it's really easy well they're yeah they're massive buttons so you can kind of pretty much hit them wherever yeah it's it's the the buttons on the back are really good as well because they've designed them in a way that they're just they've got just enough pressure on them so that you won't tap them accidentally which is nice and so the shoulder buttons like you don't need to put your fingers right across it you can just tap the corners okay so so when you're like that you just tap it

right so if you had i think if you had larger hand you'd go you'd go more of like a round grip but if you with a small hand you can sort of like push the edges up and still get it just fine yeah so you can i see let's see you can go all the way along and click it in but for me with small hands you literally tap the corner and it clicks in okay and it's yeah it's honestly if the small hands or big hands it's fine i mean my my 10 year old has smaller hands than me and he has no issue with it either. Okay, there's no excuse then. So people complaining about it, I don't know what they're on about. I haven't heard any complaints recently.

I think the complaints were mainly just based on the early looks at it and the early, early reviews. I think now that people have their hands on it, I for sure haven't heard anything. Maybe you've heard differently. Well, I think a lot of people were just kind of more surprised about the size and weight to it. Because, yes, it is big, and yes, you can feel the weight to it. But they designed it in such a clear way that holding it actually feels really nice. Like the switch is really thin. All the way through, it actually feels really nice like the switch is is really thin all the way

through it's really thin and so you are you are like weirdly clamming onto it but the steam deck has you know the nice the nice rounded bits on it so your hands your hands hug it hug it quite nicely um but there was there was one um one reviewer out there who did a video, and they basically coined the term deck neck, because you're sat there like this. A lot of the time, you're staring down at it, and then you're like, oh, which is kind of a problem. Although, if I'm on the sofa, I just get a cushion on me, and I'm just sat there like that, and it's fine.

It's all about finding your comfort zone to play with it, I think. But then there's also people I know already that are using it as a full-blown 100% computer. There's one person in our Discord who has it hooked up as their main computer now to a monitor, a keyboard and everything. And the Steam Deck is amazingly versatile.

Well, it would be no different than running something like Silverblue in that way. Like it's not set up, you know, as nicely as Silverblue would be, but you can install Flatbacks. You can do all that just fine. Not an issue. Yeah. Yeah, so the difference is though that a lot of people

have been asking why is that i believe distributions like silver blue have something where like a layer where you can still install things but it doesn't touch like the root side whereas the steam deck doesn't have that which is an interesting one yeah i was looking in i don't know i was doing research on something earlier today, looking into... I don't know. Something in Silverblue came up. Oh, it was a video on myths about immutable distros. Yeah, that's why.

And I hadn't actually heard about the overlay stuff until I started looking at this, which I'm not entirely sure how the overlays function and how that's separate from like a regular system package. I think it's more along the lines of your packages. You can install packages normally, but it'll go into a user writable area right so then when you perform your main system upgrades it's not touching it that would make sense yeah people are already

working on things like that for the steam deck though and i've already seen a couple of them and it's quite interesting but i think it was a good idea for valve to do it because at the end of the day the steam deck is is mostly like a more console experience. You don't want people going in and tweaking and installing every little package and then breaking it. Whereas now you can just install a flatpack. Yeah, that was definitely an early concern

with when they first announced that it was using Arch, people were like, why are you using Arch? That doesn't make any sense. But knowing that it's os3 and it's an image-based updating system like it's from a developer perspective i totally understand why they're using the arch it just makes it easier to when they generate the new image have those latest things available but from the user perspective that because of those images you

don't have to worry about that the The fact that it's based on Arch is pretty much inconsequential. Yeah. It is based on Arch but it's not Arch. So it's using all the functions of Arch but they package all their updates as and when they want

them and release them as one thing. So they do have a slightly more Manjaro model, in a way. The way that they bundle it and then release it later. But they fully control everything. Which is probably the only way you could... Like, even if you were to base it on, like... On, like, anything else, really.

Like, if you went down the Steam Machine model and you did like, you know, Debian again or something like that, I think that the image system is, if you're going to go with a console-like experience, you have to sort of go like all in with that. Like this is, sure, it's a computer, but you're going to have, like it's just easier to push something out that we know is the same on every system.

So if someone has a problem, then you know exactly what that user is running. If they say they are using the Steam Deck with whatever version of the Steam Deck software, you know this is what it's running and you can then try to address those issues. Yeah, that's exactly it. It's

giving developers and users basically a baseline of the hardware and the software. And that's all there is to it. It's the only sane way to do it. Imagine a Nintendo Switch. If people could upgrade a random package and suddenly they can't launch games. I mean, it would be a nightmare

for Valve to have things like that. Yeah. Yeah, I think if they went like a couple years earlier, the availability of flat packs I don't think was really there, but now

Loot Truce is available, and you know, pretty much most things that people are going to want on a gaming focus system are for the most part there it's not perfect but definitely not perfect by any means but it's i think that's an interesting bit there because valve so valve went with flat pack so when you go into the desktop mode on the steam deck you load up the discover kde discover and the only things you can install are from flat pack so flat back is basically winning the next generation former because they've not they've now got you know a device shipping out to hundreds of thousands of people. I hadn't thought of it like that.

And I think it's great because I think Canonical... I don't know how to put it. I don't like snaps. This is a safe space for hating Canonical. It's okay. You can do it here.

I don't hate Canonical. I think Canonical are in many ways amazing. Sure, sure. But snaps aren't. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Snaps have so many problems, including... Well, in fact, I had a debate with, I think it was Alan Pope,

who used to work for canonical. I had a debate with him on Twitter about this recently. So I'm not going to go back into that again i'll just say flat packs are great and from when the steam deck has released with flat pack at the rate of apps going onto flat hub for people to easily install i'm sure has been just continued to grow yeah i i do know a couple of people involved in like maintaining flat pack i should ask them about and it and see how that's going down. I wouldn't be surprised. But I honestly never thought about that.

They do now just have this massive hardware install base. Yeah. That's... So now, if you want to get your application or, say, third-party game or launcher or downloader whatever if you want to get it to hundreds of thousands of people that have a device in their hands and linux desktop users just put it on flat hub done yeah it's basically solving the app distribution for linux

and again it's valve that have helped do this i think yeah well flat packs are basically in the position that snaps wanted to be in but nobody wants to adopt them that's sort of the main issue that canonical is facing you've got ubuntu which is canonical's thing and then a lot of the ubuntu-based distros are like, stop it. We don't want them. Like Linux Mint. Yeah, well, Linux Mint's the most obvious example,

but yeah, like we're just not going to do that. Like, stop it. The problem with Snaps and Canonical is they largely, in a lot of ways ways and i know some people that work at canonical won't agree with me but other people other people big you know higher up people will for a long time they completely ignored gaming in a lot of ways they did ignore the desktop and because they've been focusing on things like the Internet of shit, you know, the Internet of things, it's the Internet of shit. And Snaps is what they've been using on there, you know,

with like Ubuntu Core and stuff like that. They have quite a different audience, which is why I just, which is why, well, they're sticking with it. And they've started doing the steam snap as well which is interesting that's going to cause a lot more problems i think than it's going to solve yeah when it comes to snaps i i don't think they're an inherently bad technology like i i know there's going to be someone out there who likes snaps i think if we're talking about a situation where you want to deploy... Yeah, someone out there.

If you want to deploy to a server, for example, snaps do have their benefits. They do make that quite an easy process. Not the only thing out there that does that, you know. But I will give you that on the server side, there are benefits. And maybe you can make the argument on mobile as well, but Linux mobile is going somewhere. I don't know where, but it's going somewhere.

I don't think Linux mobile will ever truly be a proper thing outside of Android. Yeah. There's no big enough vendor doing it to make enough people care about well you can say android but wait until google's like well yeah fuck android let's go yeah i like that when fuchsia comes along um yeah well they're gonna have their linux compatibility layer and if nothing's gonna change but they're going to have their Linux compatibility layer and nothing's going to change, but they're just not going to be using Linux anymore. That's what's going to happen there.

Well, I moved over to iOS anyway, so it doesn't bother me. But my main issue with Snaps on the desktop is the loop devices. It just clutters the hell out of things like LSBLK. I know you can filter them out, but I don't like all the loop devices being made. I already have performance issues with flat packs. Snaps, from my experience, have been worse. I know there have been...

There's this long write-up series on the Ubuntu website about improving the Firefox Snap performance and maybe it's better now. I know they changed out the compression algorithm they were using a while back and that's probably dealt with a lot of things. Those are my main two issues. And the loop device one is a problem

that's not going to be fixed. That's like an architectural design of Snap, which is already enough a reason for me not to be fixed. That's like an architectural design of snaps, which is already enough a reason for me not to use it. The performance stuff I'm sure can be dealt with over time, and if you want to use snaps, fine. I'm not going to stop anyone from doing that. Yeah, so I'm just saying, I like the idea of snaps and flat packs and stuff because, again, container systems, Linux doesn't have amazing backwards compatibility in a lot of ways, like we've just seen with glibc, breaking is the anti-cheat, and so on. And the general idea of it is great.

But it's often just the implementations leave a lot to be desired. And so many people just don't trust canonical and and that is a problem even though it might be doing well in the internet of things but i hope flat pack wins in the end because we have again so many things doing the same damn thing and we gotta stop it it's so annoying i mean in one hand it is a benefit because you know people make new things that do the same thing but it might be better and eventually it might replace the last thing but yeah swings around about yeah there's definitely there's benefit to the whole like like, Linux desktop fragmentation, but I think there needs to be a point where something comes out on top.

And there was a time when I thought for, like, a little bit that was going to be app images. But then I woke up and I stopped dreaming. Then I realized Flatpaks it does, like the ones that Flatpaks have is they technically work for CLI tools, but you shouldn't use

them for CLI tools. They are designed around the desktop and that's where they work the best. See, Flatpaks do come definitely with their own issues as well that i have unfortunately run into a couple of times like so whether i'm using something like obs studio or caden live for you know video creation and then editing you you don't just have your flat

pack for the application you also then have the runtimes for the different libraries that they use and graphics drivers as well. And there's been a number of times where I've updated my system. So I've got, say, the latest version of OBS Studio, the latest version of Kdenlive. But the runtime for the graphics driver hasn't updated, but my actual graphics driver has. So they butt heads between what runtime it needs for Flatpak and my system installed driver version, and then the apps don't launch. Because there's, you know, a bit of lag between drivers updating from vendors and the people behind the Flatpak stuff, the more getting the runtime sorted and it's so it's not perfect and these things do happen but well no nothing's perfect and you're never gonna

move on and progress and improve these things if more and more people don't use them and so yeah again i'm really happy that valve picked flat pack for the steam deck because it's so it's solved a lot of issues as well about people who want their external software like if you want to say you want to install games from uh gog.com or the epic game store because epic games you know they give out loads and loads of free games and i claim basically all of them never really going to use them but you know i like building up my virtual library yeah yeah but um you you have the heroic games launcher and the people behind that are just amazing they're doing some really really good work so you can get your steam deck yeah yeah it's steam and then you install all your steam games but then you go down to the desktop mode

load up the discover store and install the heroic games launcher log into that and then you got your gog and acabit games as well and that's thanks to flatpak making it so easy and so they can release a new version of heroic and then everyone gets it at the same time because it's a flatpak and all they've got to do is update. Love it. I've not actually... Do we even have an Epic Gamester account? I don't think I do, actually. Everyone should just to get the free games.

Why not? Yeah, I've seen random stuff go through there and it's just... I think the reason I never made the account is just because none of the games caught my attention, but you know, it's not... I think the reason I never made the account is just because none of the games just caught my attention, but you know, it's not a bad idea. Not a bad idea at all.

There's a lot of people out there that are part of the Fuck Epic crew, and people are very religious when it comes to game stores for whatever reason. But free is free just register an account get all your games and then just if you're on linux or the steam deck just run them

through wine or proton or whatever it's free and i think yeah no that's that's fair i think a lot of people do get a little hung up on some of the things that certain people involved in various projects will say. Whether the conclusion that some people come to is correct or not is up to how you interpret what's being said. I know a lot of people don't particularly like the epic CEO and some of the stuff that's been said potentially out of context about Linux. Yeah, this is a lot of things that bug me about not just the Linux community. This happens in literally any online community

or even offline communities. People get, you know, trying to think of the right word, but very religious over things that they like, you know, and it's like the Epic CEO stated at one point about switching to Linux is like moving to Canada. You've got to fight for the freedoms that you have now.

It was something very close to that. People took it wildly out of context in the Linux community, saying all sorts of things. But people are missing, people miss the point so often. And they were just, like the Epic CEO was just trying to get the point across that they wanted windows to remain as open as it is now for other vendors of stores and so on and for people to install whatever they want and not be controlled by the microsoft store really that was what they were trying to say but people like to take things out of context and then use it to hate on the epic

store and so on but then there's the other side of things and it's like i i also understand why people in a way get religious in a way about valve and steam because they do put in a huge amount of work about so many things like look at the epic store how long did it take for them to get like a search bar or a shopping cart and so on like the absolute most basic features and what a steam got is kind of like remote play it's got steam inputs you can basically use any controller ever it's got you know vr stuff they've got the steam deck now as well and the list of features that steam and valve do just goes on and on. And they're also investing into absolutely loads of open source. Obviously, they've got their...

They are doing it for a reason. They're not a charity. They want to make money out of Proton and the Steam Deck and so on. But the point is, they are still doing it out in the open and supporting Linux. So I do get that side of it, but I also think a lot of people just need to get over the whole Epic hate.

Because at the end of the day, it's just a game store. If a game is on there that you really want, and it's not on Steam, and it's a good price, but you want to play it, just buy it and have fun. Who really cares? If the Linux community is good at one thing it is brigading projects that just may

slightly rub them the wrong way whether it's canonical whether it's anything that Pottering has ever breathed near I really don't get the system D hate people go nuts over it I really don't get the system D hate. People go nuts over it, but I'm like, I've basically never seen it.

It doesn't get in the way of anything. Who cares? Yeah, that's sort of the way I feel about it. It would be one thing if system D was unstable. You would know about it because your system would be crashing all the time. But it's not. you would know about it because your system would be crashing all the time but it's not it like or like there are some where i can understand like pulse audio when it first launched was bad because distros deployed it was a trash fire there's two problems with it it was

beta software and pottering told distros stop doing this it's not ready to be deployed and also they deployed it with broken configs so i i if i recall correctly he described um pulse audio on ubuntu as the audio system that breaks your audio he's's the guy who made it. He was literally telling people to stop using it because it's not ready yet. And that initial impression is going to stick with the project for a very long time. And even now, with Pulse Audio being mostly good, it does have issues here and there.

It's software. Every bit of software is going to have issues. But I still have people telling me the same sort of stuff that i can find on forum posts from 2009 about linux audio sucking yeah yeah about linux audio sucking pulse audio being unstable always crashing bluetooth i can give you bluetooth is messy um yeah but well you see you say that but well nowadays you have pipe wire which is taking over from pulse audio but it's also it's not just focused on the audio though is it it's the video side as well it's trying to do but it's also unstable in its own ways and has regressions as well and that's actually one

of the reasons that i moved over from arch to fedora because at some point i had upgraded uh pipewire and then my wireless headphones no longer worked for some reason they just played some sort of weird static sound whenever audio was played and i yeah so we're not quite there yet in a few ways but i mean you compare the audio on linux now compared to let's say let's say even three years ago it is amazing compared to what it was and that does bug me that there is a lot of outdated information that people keep parroting whether it's on twitter reddit and so on and it doesn't help but what you can do it's the internet well this is why i make videos like you gotta yeah someone's gotta put the information out there someone like for example

libadwaiter where people still think you can't theme you can theme with libadwaiter it just isn't what you're supposed to do like you can change the gtk style sheet it works just fine there's so much misinformation out there like that and another one there was a video that i watched recently on the steam Deck. And these people were reviewing it, and yeah, you've probably seen a lot of my tweets about stuff like this, actually. And if you're going to do a review

months after everyone else has done it, at least get the fucking basic details about the system right. So these people said basically, if it hasn't gone through deck verification, Valve won't let you play that game on it. Wait, do they

rule out having a Steam Deck? Do they just not try it? Yeah, it sounds like they've never even used it, but things like that annoy me, and I do find myself sometimes late at night, I'm on my phone, and I load up Twitter, and I go into the

trending bit, and I go into the trending bit and i go down to the steam deck section and i just look at all the wrong information and sometimes when i'm bored i've just got a reply like this is all fucking wrong and yeah it annoys me but what you can do sometimes i get bored and i want to correct everyone's misinformation this is why i don't have twitter on my phone because i i used to it's bad i used to religiously use twitter it it's a problem it is a problem it is a problem although tiktok for me is more of a problem nowadays but we won't talk about that i have opened up that that app like one or two times i'm just like I don't understand Zoomer humor, and I closed it.

Honestly, I can be there, and it'll be like five o'clock. I'll be going through. And then I'll look at the time, it's like midnight. I'm like, what? Yeah, so it's dangerous. Don't use TikTok, people. It's dangerous for your time. But, to be fair, I do watch quite a few

YouTube shorts, so it's not much better. But, my shorts algorithm has sort of been curated to useful things it's mostly like science and engineering stuff so i can convince myself that i'm not wasting time yeah you tell yourself that before you know the hours start drifting by youtube shorts is going to end up exactly the same as stuff like tiktok yeah i look as long as the dancing stuff doesn't get anywhere near me i'm i'm good i i don't understand the appeal of that what okay what do you actually watch on tiktok what what is what has grabbed your attention

i just i like a lot of like just funny animal videos and stuff like that and because i've TikTok. What has grabbed your attention? I like a lot of funny animal videos and stuff like that. Because I've used it for quite a few hours now, it's... There are algorithms and all these things. Learn what you like. Yeah, so

most of my feed, I swear, is just animals doing really stupid things. And yet I still sit there watching it for stupid things if they're good at like i still sit there once in four hours if they're like good at one thing it is they have basically perfected the art of stealing your data and making it using it a way to waste as much of your time as physically possible with the shortest like the shortest content they can make, but somehow make you just keep going through more and more and more by showing you exactly what you want to see

before you even know you want to see it. The problem with stuff like YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram has it now as well facebook has it as well now is that the doom scrolling is a real thing people want to keep scrolling whether it's twitter and so on and that's when you go on these video things then they are literally never ending and i think that's where a lot of it comes in there's a lot of lonely people out there that you know need need interactions so yeah these sites have realized that you've gotta hide pages like pages need to be there for like you know functionality to make the site actually work properly but they've got to be

hidden pages you can't have a next page button next page buttons they let people stop looking at stuff and you don't want that that's bad you don't want people to realize for like even a moment that what they're doing is a waste of time you want to make it as seamless as possible otherwise they might question what they're doing and you can't have that that's bad questioning means less money less money is not good for investors. Yeah, exactly. What a world we live in. How did we get onto TikTok from like open source stuff? You know, I don't know. This is what happens on the show.

I just let the tangents roll. Yeah, never let me talk about TikTok again. I won't shut up about it. talk about tiktok again i won't shut up about it oh i think it's how me and like it's how me and some of my best friends now just communicate is like we're just sending tiktok to each other it's pretty bad and i need to just throw this somewhere that i can't find it for a few days i think it's bad give yourself although that i tell you what that's interesting because i was thinking about this the other night of why another reason that i i like playing games on stuff like the steam deck is it's it's like having my phone like scrolling through twitter

and so on on my phone it's it's there it's in my hand and you sort of you sort of feel a part of it you know because you're there you're with it when you're say you're gaming on a sofa on a tv in front of you with a gamepad in your hand it's a bit disconnected and i feel the same when i'm here at my computer but with the steam deck you know you're you're there sat with it and it's it's weird to say but you feel more connected to it because it's it's right there in your hands right in front of your face and you know you're there cuddling up in bed and putting it putting it to sleep and all that don't know where it's going with that. No, I... That sounded a bit weird. Tucking in bed. I think there might be something to that.

Maybe this is just my nostalgia goggles, like, just taking over. But I remember, like, growing up... My first handheld was a Game Boy Micro, which is like a terrible version of the game boy advanced it's this do you know what a game boy micro is no one knows what this is if you do the micro that is the the rectangle one the little rectangle yes you're the first person who knows what the micro is man i've had them all every single one of them i started off on the not the not the very original game boy i had the pocket so it was a black and white screen you could barely see anything but i had the one where the see-through casing as well ah yeah they need to bring back see-through casing on everything okay imagine

if all your phones and the steam deck had see-through casings you see all the wires and the innards it It's so cool. I'm going to show it to you. I don't know if you'll be able to see it. I've got my Zetis and Pro. Yes, I like that. My pair of, you can't really see it. The camera's not focusing properly.

Pair of Zetis and Pros. They are very cheap. they're, like, 20 bucks, but they sound really good, uh, no, I, I, I kind of do like see-through casing, it's, it's certainly a look, that's for sure, but, um, yeah, where I was going with this was thinking back on playing on that, or playing on the Nintendo DS, there's something different about playing on something where it's like right in your hand because i've gone back and emulated uh like you know ds games or emulated gba games and it's yeah there's something different about it like it's the same game

arguably it looks better it's on a bigger screen because it's pixel art you can like upscale it perfectly but it doesn't feel the same there's just something different about you might be onto something with that disconnect there i'd never really thought about it but it's such a weird thing. Like, so... My main system is obviously Linux. Yeah, yeah. And I do the main gaming on Linux. But I do also have a Switch, a PlayStation 4, an Xbox Series X. I've got a Raspberry Pi. There's probably loads of other things that I'm forgetting about

that are, you know, stuffed in a drawer somewhere. I've got Stadia. You know, I've got the Stadia controller and the Google chrome thing i've got like so many things but i can't bring myself to play games on my series x or my playstation and i haven't even touched my switch as well since getting the steam deck but even when i had the the Switch, I was playing a fair bit on it, but in handheld mode, even though it hurt, because the stupid size of it, it sucks.

Yeah, it's so weird. Like, it's hard to explain that kind of disconnect. I can't think of the right words for it. I think you have to... Anybody who's into handhelds will understand, I think. Anybody who's played and loved the Game i think anybody who's who's played and loved the game boy the ds and so on it yeah like it's even when i go on my pc i mean i've got this 2080 ti i could play spider-man on here have it at 1080p and looking pristine in fact i could

put it on my 4k which is next to me here, and have it look amazing, but I want to sit in bed and have it on this handheld, you know, and run around slinging webs. Part of that also might just be the comfort. Like, you look like you have a nice desk chair there. I'm sure it's comfortable enough. It looks like it's falling apart less than my chair.

But, you know there's something nice about just i guess i've sort of i haven't had a handheld in that long i just i guess i forgot what it was like to just lay down in bed and play a video game i'll tell you what i've got a um a bit especially for this i i what, I've got a especially for this. I've got a giant beanbag in the corner. I'm sitting getting one. My Steam Deck corner. So I sit there slide

back, you know, merge into it with a Steam Deck. It's very nice. It's much nicer than sitting at a computer. Seriously. You should buy one are you saying you'll have to import it from somewhere being in australia i'm sure you can find some way to do it i'm sure or you know we'll see what happens with the steam deck too if they do want do you think the valve's actually going to do a... Do you think they're going to continue with the Steam Deck? Because I know some people are different.

You think so? Yeah, so they've kind of hinted to it already. In some of the interviews that they've done, they were saying how they saw it as a multi-generational device. So give it maybe three years earliest, I would say. Three years earliest, I reckon we'll see a Steam Deck 2. I don't think any earlier than that would make enough sense, really. Because it is a set design that I mentioned earlier on the hardware and the software.

And they're still building up the ecosystem around it, getting developers invested in it, building up the Proton compatibility layer. I think any earlier than three years would just, I think, destroy a lot of what they've worked for. It'll be too soon. Yeah, especially with the issues they've had with getting devices out.

There's going to be people that don't have them. with the issues they've had with like getting devices out there's going to be people that don't have them what like they there's probably still like another two years of waves probably i wouldn't be surprised yeah so they have so they've announced an expansion into asia and they're starting off in japan they also mentioned that everyone who had a previous reservation would get it this year so whenever this announcement was it was basically if you had a reservation before that date you would definitely get it this year and then they were saying like even new reservations obviously up until a certain point would also be able to get it this year so they've ramped up their production either massively or like they or they're covering up for i don't know like 200 000 pre-orders that disappeared but

it's it's more likely a case that they're building up their production up even more so i think by i think this time next year we're going to have a really solid idea by then of what Valve are really doing with it because they're probably shipping out from this month probably a couple hundred thousand a month even for a week. Well if they're expanding into Asia, Asia's pretty close

surely we can expand out to Australia as well, that'd be nice and places like Japan traditionally love their handhelds as well so i'm hoping it does well over there because obviously if it does well and it keeps on doing well it's good for me good for content yeah i think with the the terrible work culture japan has and being stuffed into tiny trains. I think that's a place where the Steam- like people already play a lot of mobile games there. Like, you know,

mobile gachi games are played in places like Asia. That's where they are born and thrive and there's a reason for it because people have a lot of time where they are not doing anything and can't play a console game, you know, a Steam deck might kind of fit in that environment fairly well. I'm very curious to see what it's going to do in those regions. I think

it'll have another knock-on effect as well with... So, only in the last few years we've seen more Asian games come over to the West, where traditionally they've kind of kept to themselves a bit more, outside of the obvious massive hits that come from Asian teams. But I think with stuff like this... Yeah.

But I think one of the knock-on effects of this is we'll not only see more of the Asian marketed games come over to the West and get translated as well, I think we'll have more of the asian marketed games come over to you know the west and get translated as well i think we'll have more of it be playable well hopefully on linux as a result of it as well a lot of that though links into like anti-cheat again like there's a there's a massive asian gacha game i'm trying to think of the name, but it's lost on me, but it's massively popular. Genshin Impact?

You know it. You know the one, right? So you can't actually play it on Linux out of the box, although there is a way to get it to work. There is a way to play it, yes. But my point is more like you might see games like that have their developers actually make it work officially and i'm hoping it is because games like that are huge and it would be really nice if

steam deck going into those markets will give that a boost basically what is it using it is using the same attitude as valorant uhorant. Uh, what is... Wait, that's the one... Oh, that's the kernel level stuff. That'll never work then. Yeah, that's not happening. I think Tower of Fantasy, that's the MMO

that just came out, which is basically stole everything from Genshin. I think that's using I want to say Xing code, which is that one that people use when they don't use EAC or Battle. That's one of the problems with the Asian market and Linux gaming as well, is they have multiple of their own anti-cheats as well. Because, well, again, they like to use their own anti-cheats as well because, well, again,

they like to use their own homegrown stuff a lot of the time and they keep it. So, yeah, the Steam Deck has, well, has already caused an explosion for Linux gaming in so many ways and now it's going into Asia as well. I'm hoping it has another effect there. No, I think that actually could push those developers to try and

support it and look if Genshin for whatever reason wanted to be supported on a Steam Deck I'm sure they could convince convince them to do some stuff and see what happens

when you're Genshin convince them to do some stuff and see what happens. When you're Genshin, I don't know how high up on the list of makes too much money, but I'm pretty sure it's fairly high up there. It's not like Minecraft level, but it's like, you know, probably within that top 10. But then we've also got to still, at some point, win over

Epic Games, because people like to complain about stuff like Fortnite, but it's still one of the biggest games in the world. Yeah. And the only way to play it on Steam Deck is through streaming, which is not amazing, is it, really?

Streaming's fine if you don't need ping, and you need ping in a game like Fortnite. You could play a game like, I'm playing through Stray right now on stream. Stray is a great game, and you can play it if, I don't know if it's on any of the streaming services,

but you could play it just fine through streaming. It wouldn any of the streaming services, but you could play it just fine through streaming. It wouldn't be the best experience, and, you know, compression and all that fun stuff, but it's playable. I don't understand why there are competitive multiplayer games on the streaming services. It's just not really ever made any sense to me.

I get it from, like, if you just want to play the game, but if you, it's just not a good experience of the game that you ever want to deal with. Well, yeah, it's not, well, some of them can be okay,

but the point is, it's never going to be even remotely as good as a locally installed game. Okay. A competitive shooter is definitely... If it's something where it's competitive but not that same

level of I guess, micro movement. You could probably stream StarCraft and it would be fine. You could stream Civilization and it would be fine. You could stream Civilization and it would be fine. Definitely Civilization. But you know, I think

Rainbow Six Siege is available on streaming services and just like, wow. If you want to, like fine, if you want to do it, like that's cool, but I know that I would never want to play the game like that. Yeah. Yeah, the ping's always going to be an issue with game like that. Yeah. Yeah.

The ping is always going to be an issue with stuff like that, which is why I hope that the Steam Deck just keeps on pushing. I hope there is going to be a Steam Deck 2, and I hope it brings even more companies and game developers, publishers, game stores over to Linux. Like GOG, G-O-G.com. They have this wishlist feature where you can wishlist for games, but there was a wishlist entry for GOG Galaxy on Linux. Now, originally, GOG said Galaxy was going to be on Linux,

and they kind of never did it but it's it was like for it since it's been announced it's been like the highest rated thing on their wish list it had like you know tens of thousands of votes on it or whatever And there's clearly plenty of interest in it. And in fact, for years, it had a note saying it was in progress, but they've just recently actually removed it

because, well, it wasn't in progress. It was never in progress. They've been saying to me over emails forever, it's not happening. Like, that is their official stance no no basically and get to sway companies like that as well if i've long said to so many people that we can have the greatest marketing we want for linux Linux can be as stable and amazing as it can be. It doesn't fucking matter unless there are hardware shipping with it. That is what matters. We've needed more hardware vendors for years. And this is why the Raspberry Pi was such a good thing,

because people are keeping Linux on that. And you see people using Linux on a Pi for so many amazing things. Like now they've come out, you know, with the little keyboard can Pi computer, like an all in one and people are just keeping it as, as Linux on that. And then, but historically we've had a problem of it.

Yeah. You can buy laptops and stuff with Linux, but they've been almost always at like the high end where not a lot of people will buy it although system 76 have been doing really well with that because you know they seem to be expanding constantly like building building up their factory bigger and bigger so they're obviously doing well and they don't just send the sell the high-end stuff they sell the mid and lower stuff as well which is really good but that is the point of the steam deck it is a piece of hardware with linux shipping ready on it out of the box we need more of it

basically we've always needed more of it i don't know if you heard about this but i know that lenovo is expanding their, their line of Linux laptops. I think this year or next year, they're planning to do that. Yeah, they said that. And then has anybody heard of them, heard from them since?

I, no, I think it was a little more recent announcement, actually. Maybe, maybe it was something that just popped up in my feed. Lenovo expand. Cause I do remember them

saying they were going to be expanding, but then I don't think anybody heard from them since. But then you had the HP Dev 1 with Pop!OS, which I've got, which is a really nice little laptop. Yeah, no,

I fully agree that, like, I've been saying this for a while as well that if you want people to be using linux you need oems you cannot just rely on people installing linux because frankly people do not install operating systems i know there are going to be some boomers who like who you who, you know, were using Windows, using computer in the 80s. And, you know, you install stuff and all that fun. People don't do that.

Computers are a general consumer device that they just, people just want it to be as simple as possible. I know people literally today running Windows 7. I know people literally today running Windows 7. Normal people do not, and not gamers who are like, I just want to keep using Windows 7. People who don't know what an operating system is,

they just know they're using Windows. Normal people do not install operating systems with the exception of macOS. The reason why macOS is an exception is because apple does the android thing and the ios thing where they treat it like a system update so it's like hey i don't know the current version of mac os is let's just say we're going from like 10.14 to 10.15 it's just a thing that happens it's not like like a big deal. It's not like Windows 7 to Windows 8. Everything changes.

Like, well, it's just here now. Enjoy. It's fine. Yeah. We need hardware shipping, Linux out of the box. It's as simple as that. So I've had arguments like on Twitter, as you do, with people who think they know how to solve all the problems.

And a lot of them are people who think we need better marketing we need marketing marketing no we don't you can't market something that just isn't there for people to get you need the hardware first but another point of that is what you were saying people don't know how to install operating systems a lot of the time people don't even know what they're running when it comes to like the masses they just think oh it's pc is and that's as far as like the knowledge goes but we have this problem on linux as well so even though we've got the steam deck now you know hundreds of thousands of people by now already have it it doesn't run Windows. It runs SteamOS Linux. And developers can either do a native Linux build or they will have their game,

their Windows game run through Proton. But a problem here is that a lot of game developers and publishers don't understand any of that. And I could give you an example just from today. So I get a lot of emails, obviously. Sure. From publishers and developers saying, hey, we've got a new game coming. Do you want to check it out?

And I reply a lot of the time. And now, you know, I've had to tweak what I say now to incorporate like a Steam Deck and so on. And so there was one, and I simply said, okay, do you have... Punch in my microphone. So I said to them, right, do you have any plans to have it compatible on Linux with Proton and the Steam Deck? And their reply was basically, we don't have anything to share regarding a Proton or Linux release, but we're submitting our games through Steam Deck verification. So, okay. So, Proton, basically.

They don't even know what they're doing when they're submitting through Steam Deck verification. It's because everything is still PC. Yeah, it's coming out to PC. It's going to be on PC. What about this one? Oh, it's going to be on pc what about this one oh it's going to be on pc okay but what about steam deck is it running through proton uh we don't know we're putting it through deck verification and so yeah it's still a problem that things like that need to cut through the noise a bit more and i think again this time next year a lot more people will understand all the ins and outs of it.

And I think we'll have a lot more developers testing their games with Proton as well. Or, you know, Pi in the Sky, a couple of years time, might be building for Linux directly. But until then, as long as it works and tested through Proton and it's supported like that, that's the main thing. But we've got to get developers to even understand what the hell Proton is, apparently. Because loads in my email don't even know what Proton is. Can I just say I want the PC equals Windows thing to just fucking die. I hate...

If you... Okay, it's one thing if you just don't know Linux exists. Fine. But if you know Linux exists and you see PC as Windows, stop. PC literally means personal computer. It does not mean Windows. That is a hill I'm going to die on. Seriously.

I get so annoyed by it. I reply to hundreds of emails every week and it's always it's coming to steam or it's coming to pc so i have to reply and be well it's doing it less and less nowadays because proton's just getting to the point where i can just go yeah i'll have a key and it will it'll probably work now but still the hell I will die on, just for clean communication, it's not PC. You don't install PC on your PC, do you?

You don't update PC on your PC. You update Windows or Linux or whatever. I'm going to die on that hill one day. I think the hill might murder me. I'm going to... Look, if you die on the hill I'll just join you up there it's all good

there's gotta be someone on this hill there's always gonna be someone to fight for a cause no matter what it is with the games mostly working I think that's generally true like just looking at just looking at ProtonDB

or just actually what i've done i've got my um my steam library sorted into the proton db categories so like the old categories not the new ones the whatever um where's like platinum go all that and i bought most of my library when i was on windows and most of it was just gold. I was like, okay. I think I had like 10 games that were bronze. I don't think I had anything that was balked. I don't play

multiplayer games, that's why. But just randomly buying games. Randomly buying games and most things would mostly run. Which, and that was, I did this sorting a while back so things have probably changed. That's impressive.

Like that's genuinely impressive. Like the state that Linux gaming is in. There are some exceptions. There are certain games which break for I'm not actually sure the reason why it's broken but Persona 5 Strikers is completely balked.

It has cutscene issues and then also the graphics don't load but Atlus games generally especially Persona-y games generally have issues which makes you very worried for when Royal comes to Steam.

Maybe it'll be fine but most things are good so that is again that's another one of the hurdles so it's not just anti-cheat you've got the the video codec problem which has been a problem for so long now but slowly valve are getting a you know around it so like Wine is being updated to work with Windows Media Foundation. I had to remember the name then. A little bit more with every release. The very latest Wine release had a note in their release notes about more games working with Windows Media Foundation.

And they are getting there. And one of the things one of the systems they put in was like they re-encode the videos into a format that works with wine and proton so once more people have played it and they've re-encoded it and sent it to people you'll see more things like that work and that's again why i'm hoping and praying that more developers will test their games beforehand. Because then they can see the videos don't work. And either redo the videos themselves. Or give Valve time to get the videos re-encoded into a different, more open format.

The cutscene one, there's no excuse for that one. It's not like you need to have these videos in this code. You don't. You don't need it. It works. Like maybe if we're talking games are like 15, 20 years old, fine. Maybe there wasn't something better. But if your game is coming out in 2022,

if random indie games can work this out, I'm sure your multi hundred million dollar company can work this out. I'm sure your multi-hundred million dollar company can work this out. It's not that difficult. Again, it's the whole PC, Windows equals PC thing. The developers are ingrained in the Microsoft and Windows APIs

and hopefully we'll get them away from it. It's not entirely bad. I do agree with something you said earlier with the Win32 API basically being the stable Linux API at this point for gaming. As long as things...

It's not perfect, obviously, but, like, that's not completely bad. The fact that we have something where devs can target and it can you know, if they do a bit of testing it can work, is good. And I think it's

definitely a much better state than we could be and that's for sure. It's a much better state than you know, everything having to be native or just not being functional. Yeah. you know everything having to be native or just not being not being functional yeah yeah valve were uh were obviously planning proton for quite a long time and the steam deck as well and they've they've solved the original problem that they had with the steam deck so

as it's it's no wonder it's been so successful the fact that you can just load up a game whether well whether you're on a linux desktop or a steam deck and you've probably got like a 95 chance that it will just work and that is it that is a truly amazing place for linux gaming to be in right now absolutely well let's go like sort of all i didn't usually i do this at the start we're gonna do it now um where like what actually got you into linux like because you started way earlier than i did yeah so i must have been i would have been 15 i think getting close to 16 and my granddad who passed away recently bought me my very first actual computer that was my own and it didn't have windows on it so he went on a website called ebuyer which probably a lot of people know

and for some reason they were selling desktops with at the time it was mandrake a linux distribution called mandrake which then eventually became mandriva and i don't even know if it's around anymore but like i loaded it up and i was like what the hell is this like what nothing i want works on it what is this what is linux and it just me i went from there because i wasn't always like attached to windows anyway growing up because i grew up with stuff like the amiga uh acorn and loads of other different types of systems so I already knew that different types of systems existed and because it was now on a computer that I owned that was mine I started messing around with it seeing what it could do and like every every year or so I would go back and maybe install a different distribution until I think Ubuntu came along, which is why Canonical and Ubuntu always do hold a special place in my heart.

And I'm sure it's the same for a lot of people. When the first few versions of Ubuntu came out, they were making things easier than basically any other distribution at the time. making things easier than basically any other distribution at the time and from there i just tried sticking with it really i always sort of had it had a bun to you i think on a dual boot from then for basically ever almost really so yeah well that's that's kind of kind of the story in a nutshell though really i think so what was your i presume you're 15 year old probably gaming what was your i presume you weren't trying to game with that system or maybe you're trying out some of the open source games what were you doing back then what was your what was your plan there there was stuff like frozen bubble and stuff like that you know little open source games which i was trying out but i was also

like learning php you know web coding and all that anyway so i started trying to do a little bit of that on there and it's funny really how much trust and faith you put in other people online when you're a lot younger so back when fedora was originally called fedora core and it was fedora core one then fedora core two this is going back you know a long time ago now i didn't really know how to set it all up so i at one point i downloaded fedora core it must have been two or three possibly i managed to install it but i didn't really know how to set anything up but someone online was like oh i'll i'll log into your system remotely and i'll set it up all for you and i was like i'm maybe 16 17 at the time maybe and i was like okay and so i just watched them on my computer doing

all this stuff and you look back at it and you think that was a really bad idea they could have done anything on it yeah I've got plenty of my own stories about doing stupid things as a kid a lot of them involved being dumb on RuneScape

I fell for a lot of scams there's a reason why I have a distrust of grifters online. RuneScape is a big part of that. Well, so from there, at some point you started gaming on Linux. Like, the website, not Linux gaming. When did that happen? So I followed maybe two or three other Linux gaming sites at the time,

and one of them was linuxgames.com, and I started contributing to that one a little bit, here and there, and just really i was looking at all these sites and i thought i could do better like none of them were really updated very often and there wasn't much to them even when they were updated and i i really just genuinely looked at them and thought i i could probably do better like i know how to make websites and so that that was it that was literally the reason i saw a few others not really doing anything and i thought well i'm gonna do it better and to this day you know 12 13 years later i'm here and none of them are yeah so that i think that says a lot like you you've put out like how many articles do you okay i was going to say how many articles did you put out a week

and I see you've put out like what's how many did you put out today today I think about seven okay well like since the first of July

until say yesterday I've done 198. Okay. But then that's on top of quite a lot of videos on the YouTube channel as well. but i mean it sounds like a lot but a lot of it is just general news tips so it's not like i'm reviewing heavily you know in depth a lot a lot of a lot of games and hardware and so on a lot of what gaming like linux is is just keeping people up to date in a central location of news tips, of news and new games coming out and so on, rather than people following, you know,

so I follow probably about 400 RSS feeds and loads of things on top of that to gather all the news together. And like, we're so established now that developers and publishers come to me to tell me the things. So then I put it out to everyone else and so yeah i mean it all comes together but i think some people don't quite understand that like especially reddit okay i was gonna ask you

about reddit or something because i know that is it linux gaming that doesn't like you? No, it's Linux. So I don't get along with Linux Gamecast because we have a bit of a history there. There's also the person behind Boiling Steam. We don't really get along together. But I try to get along with everyone. It's just sometimes people have an issue with me and they can't seem to get over it.

But Reddit, people on Reddit are very tribal, I find. Incredibly tribal. Some people, being on Reddit is their whole online persona. It's what they're all about. And they call it

blog spam and low effort and so on and but they're missing the point on what it is it's a it's a place to just go and get news it's not necessarily really long in-depth reviews if you want to keep up with the latest in linux gaming steam deck open source gaming and so on and you don't want to read up with the latest in Linux gaming, Steam Deck, open source gaming, and so on. And you don't want to read, you know, something like this long forever. You want your short news tips and so on, which is why we are, I think, why we are so popular. Some people just want to click through things and know what's where. And I think that's why, in a way, it is as successful as it is.

You know, I've definitely experienced the same stuff with like some of my videos like a lot of time like when i'm looking at you know individual pieces of software it's one thing but when it's sort of when it's taking some whatever news topic that's happening you you'll get the comments like three minutes of content for a 10 minute video it's like shut up make the video yourself then and what what's 10 minute video it's like shut up make the video yourself then and what what's actually happening is it's like a couple of hours of research going over all of these different things like all of these different things in all these different places where everyone's got their own sort of take on it i'm just trying to like i guess bring it down

into a digestible form and most like most people understand like most people are good like i'm sure that most of the comments you get as well are positive or arguing about something that doesn't matter and you're like what are you doing uh but you always get that like one or two people that think that their opinion is far more important than anything else in the world and reddit is a reddit is a a boiling pot for all of those people to live and thrive together and feed off of each other's energy yeah it is a hive of scum and villainy. Yeah, I... I've gotten to that point now where occasionally I get posted about on r slash Linux or any of the subreddits.

Ah, r slash Linux, my favourite part of Reddit. I'm banned from there. What did you do? Well, not only am I banned from there, gaming on Linux as a whole is completely banned from rLinux. What happened there? Right.

Where do I start? Well, so the main moderator of rLinux really doesn't like me. so Gaming on Linux was banned from it like foronix is banned from it as well oh my god ubuntu is banned from it like quite a quite a lot of domains that they claim is just pure blog spam they just have outright banned the domain so you can't post them but i got annoyed because a lot of the even though a lot of what i do is just general

news tips i also get a lot of unique information whether that's quotes from developers and interviews and so on and what annoyed me i got really annoyed one day because while we're banned there was a completely other different website that basically took everything that i done and put it in their own article and sourced me and linked back to me in the article but and they're allowed on it and i'm not even though reddit has they have a thing about going to the original source so original source so it's like right okay so they're going to this website who sourced me they're allowed there i'm not so i put a comment i tagged the moderator and but because i tagged the moderator in public

because i was just trying to highlight and generate a discussion on why that's allowed but we're not and someone someone else called cap name who i'm sure a lot of people will know yeah okay cap name came along said that i was harassing the moderator for tagging them in public. I was like, no. And then we had a bit of back and forth. And then Capname basically got promoted to be a moderator over the argument with me. And then banned me from that Reddit as well. And I've never been unbanned since.

If I recall, there was a post a while back where I think they tried to get him removed as a mod. I think ultimately he got removed or something. I'm not sure what happened there. Yeah, Capname got removed from the RLinux Reddit as a moderator because they are just... they have issues. Like, they... I don't get

people that are so power-mad like that. Like, they were really power hungry. And you could just see it in everything that they do. I think... It's crazy. Well, when Reddit is your personality, and then you basically become a Reddit

god, it can very quickly go to your head. But the fact that... Like, I don't know how you can call... Like, OMG Ubuntu makes no sense as blog spam. Like, Joey does amazing work on... Like, I don't use Ubuntu, but occasionally I'll see something on his site,

and, like, Joey does great work on this site. And then, for Ronix, it's the same. Like, Michael does great work on this site as well. I, like... I don't understand sure it's a lot of it's a lot of you know hey this is an update for something but it's stuff that a lot of people aren't going to see unless you're following like the mailing list for glibc or the mailing list for wine things like that that brings them to one place. And that's the exact argument that I have with people

who don't understand the difference between a review and a news tip and how both of them have a very valuable place online. And it's the same for Pharonix. Pharonix covers a lot of the really techno stuff that nobody is really gonna know has changed probably unless he's put a note about it but reddit doesn't get that so they will just go here's a link to what mailing list it came from this is blog spam send comment and yeah i don't get along with reddit very often i i i tend to source like occasionally you know things will go on go

through there and there are a lot of topics that i'll source from reddit but no i i do agree that reddit is it's i think some subreddits sometimes are sometimes good but as a general whole, as a general platform, I don't think it's that healthy of a way to have a discussion. Especially when everything is

The smaller and more focused the community is, generally the nicer it is. And the fact that everything is tied to a number, like your upvotes are very clearly visible, you want to get... I guess it could be worse.

You could have a character limit like Twitter, and then it would be nothing but hot takes. So I'll give it that. Imagine if Twitter had a Reddit... I guess it has. It has likes. I take back what I said. Twitter is way worse. Actually,

you say that, but... Are you on Android or iOS? Yeah, I've got an Android device over here. Okay, so they've actually rolled out... Oh no, what are you going to tell me? I'm just going to show a random thing here.

But there are upvote and downvote buttons on Twitter now as well. I don't use Twitter. What? I use on... That's... Wait, is that only on mobile right now? It's probably right now one of those things that they test on iOS first. Ah, okay.

But it's also only on replies. It's not on the main post. Main posts still only have the like. Okay. And I like system. I don't mind systems that use likes, but downvote systems, I hate them because they bring out people that want to be right

and demand to be right and will argue it and beat you up with experience on pretending to be right and you know it's a trial's playground basically i hate it twitter doesn't need anything more for it to be that it's it's or it's already bad enough yeah oh well before we get too sidetracked by that, when it comes to your articles, so what actually go... Just pick some random article. Let's say this Spider-Man one here.

What would actually go into each article you write? Like, what is your general workflow? It honestly depends what it is. I mean, some of them, even when they look as basic as they are can still have quite a lot of time behind them because what people don't see is chatting with the developers and the publishers about any issues or whether it's supported or not and you know it's things like that people don't see that side of. But it's also the fact that slightly less now because of just how busy I am,

but I always have a thing of something that I'm writing about. If it's already available, I will go and just actually test it and make sure it works, whether it's an app or a game. Like every single update to things like the Heroic Games Launcher

or the Wine Manager Bottles, every single update before things like the Heroic Games Launcher or the Wine Manager Bottles, every single update before I even just say, hey, you know, this update is out, I'll load it up, install something in it and check it works still. And I chat to, you know, the developers behind these projects all the time about, you know, any bugs that I come up with and like feature requests and so on. And yeah, so even something that might seem on the surface like a basic news tip about a new release of something you know 90 of the time i'm going behind the scenes and testing that anyway how long would it generally take you for each of your

articles and it could be anything from five minutes to hours or days, really. It depends. Well, yeah, obviously for a review it's much longer. Yeah, it's not something you can just pin a figure on like that because it's such a varied thing. Okay, that makes sense. I thought you might have had, like, I don't know. I've spoken to some people, like, I think it was have had like, I don't know I've spoken to some people I think it was NicoloV

the KDE dev has a YouTube channel and that is a giant bottle of Pepsi We don't have bottles of Pepsi like that here How big is that? It's taller than my head Yeah, I can see that It's two litres I guess it gets you through the day

i guess oh no it is oh it's just a skinny we have like a wider bottle okay sure yeah yeah we don't get those fat bottles we just get tall wide like thin pots okay well just throw me off um you know i've spoken to some people uh and like they have this like every part of their day is like fully planned out like down to the minute they've got like pomodoro timers they they work and they have their five minute break and go back to work and it's just like i can't do that oh yeah see i'm really bad with things like that. So I basically have a rolling to-do list. And if I look at this to-do list now, I'm scrolling back from today.

There's ones going back to the 10th of May that I haven't done yet. Ah, I can't remember. And there's ones before that that don't have a date on that I've missed, and they're in my missed items to-do section. Yup. that don't have a date on that I've missed and they're in my missed items to do section so getting to getting to some of these can take absolutely months I'm really behind on some things but some of them are things that I just want to do that I might might get around to eventually that I might you know keeping around for a rainy day sort of thing. But yeah, there's no pinpoint time that an article

or even a video will take me because I'm not calendaring down my time like that. I mean, especially because I'm in the UK and I'm sure a good 99% of what I write about is in US time because most developers seem to live and work in the US or they don't, but they still work to those times anyway because of steam and steam has its big set releases at like 6 PM,

usually my time. And so there's, there are times I'm not kidding you where I will check my phone at like one o'clock in the morning and I'll have to get out of bed come down and start an article or a video or something it can be a bit killer with the time zones that's the only thing so sometimes i'm like rolling out of bed midday because i was up until like three in the morning working yeah i've committed to i have stuff out when i have it out it's gonna go up at the same time i don't care if it's like i don't know 12 hours old that's that's fine by me i because

i have the same problem um where us prime time is like i think it's maybe like eight in the morning for me i'm usually that's usually when i'm like rolling out of bed so if i want to get I think it's maybe like 8 in the morning for me. That's usually when I'm rolling out of bed. So if I want to get something done just before that I would have to be up all night. That's not going to happen.

Maybe if I was just doing YouTube I would, but as it stands I'm happy to just have it be a little bit late it's good yes i have absolutely no strict schedule i i'm i'm happy i finally speak to someone who also has no idea what they're doing they just like it just it just happens to work out they just they make it work. The way I see work is the same way as I see my life.

Everything is just YOLO. I'm completely winging everything that I do. How did I become the biggest gaming Linux news site? I don't know. Did that happen? It's like on Twitter, I've got like over 50,000 followers now. And it's like, that's quite a bit of power that I have to be careful with on what I tweet.

Yeah, it's a bit weird thinking that I have that much influence in some ways. Yeah, just don't think about it. It's a bad idea. like that much influence in some ways yeah just don't think about it it's a bad idea well i like to think about it because i like to think that in a lot of ways i'm a good influence i try to be a good influence not about people's wallets because you know people end up buying a lot of games because of it but you know try and be responsible yeah don't don't just i don't know i probably think of a bunch of dumb things. Jumping in on like any drama that's happening, for example.

Oh yeah, I do that though. Okay, well, yeah. Sure, but there's like, there's plenty more drama you could jump in. I mean, I could tweet a poop emoji right now and not say anything about it and just leave it there. That's then going out to over 50,000 people in their feed, just a poop emoji. In fact, I'm going to do that just for people watching the show.

So if you see a poop emoji, it came about as a result of this show. There it is. Right. Done. And you heard it here first. it came about as a result of this show there it is, right, done and you heard it here first I have too much responsibility and I'm terrible with it oh my god you know what, that's

if we're going to end it anywhere I think that's as good a time to end it. Poop emoji. Poop emoji. Well, let people know where they can find your stuff, where they can find you, all of that fun stuff. Yeah, just GamingOnLinux.com, GamingOnLinux on Twitch and YouTube.

Easy enough. Awesome. Do you have anything you want to shout out? Anything you want to mention? Buy a Steam Deck and keep me in business. Yeah. Okay. me in business. Yeah. Okay, well, as for me, my main

channel is Brodie Robertson. I do Linux videos there. Generally, it's other tech stuff every so often. The gaming channel is Brodie Robertson Plays. I'm probably done with Stray and DMC at this point. I don't know what I'm playing right now, actually.

You'll find out. Maybe I'm playing a JRPG, maybe I'm not. I don't know. I'm probably playing Kingdom Hearts. We'll work it out when we get there. And if you're listening to the audio version of this, the video version is available on YouTube at Tech Over Tea, and

the audio version is available basically anywhere you can find podcasts RSS feed, iTunes, all that fun stuff yeah I know I already retweeted it poop emoji poop emoji cool poop emoji poop emoji um cool

uh I'll give you the last word what do you want to say thanks for listening I'm out