this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Linux Gaming

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Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.

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[–] [email protected] 130 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I dunno how to pronounce that acronym, so I'm going with "You'll Wiggle."

[–] jerrythegenius 46 points 9 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Those star trek spin-offs are getting ridiculous.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Thanks? I hate it lol

[–] naticus 26 points 9 months ago

Lol when it was first announced, everyone said that people would fork it just to change the name for this reason. I prefer to keep it this way.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

I love it! 😄

[–] JustUseMint 86 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Fucking stoked to see all these extremely talented devs work together.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago

I'm actually kind of surprised that they're all working together at all. Normally they all wanna have it done their own way and it ends up just being another random project, that everybody loves until the next person creates another project because they want it done another way.

[–] Rooki 37 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thats good news for the Steamdeck.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Probably a good news for Linux gaming in general, too.

[–] Rooki 5 points 9 months ago

Yeah good for everything.

[–] ZariZari 29 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Finally linux developers started to understand a bit of "make an app great and keep it like that".

Usually linux has parcour in terms of apps.

[–] datelmd5sum 9 points 9 months ago

Yes and no. I could hop on to a 50 year old Unix machine and operate it pretty much the way I use my contemporary Linux computer, thanks to the standard Unix tools being both great and ancient.

[–] CosmicCleric 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Usually linux has parcour in terms of apps.

parcours
nm
(=trajet) journey (=itinéraire) route (SPORT) (=terrain) course
parcours du combattant assault course
(=tour) [+golf] round
[+ski] run
[+circuit] lap vb

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don't know much about linux but as far as I understand it says linux get more compatibility?! Monkey sees monkey upvotes and shares

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

There's a lot of projects to help get Windows games working better on Linux, and this effort is basically all those projects coming together to work on making the 'ultimate' project that will make it easier than ever to game on Linux! :D

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There is a ton of typos and some misunderstandings but ir's awesome that this is geyting some press in more mainstream gaming websites

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Duh, I ain't writing an article for a magazine online. I am writing replies on a forum on my phone. I would at least double check if I was the author

[–] WhiskyTangoFoxtrot 16 points 9 months ago

Still funny, though.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Can it pre-load shader cache like steam games does? Because that's a big plus to running games on the higher half of the graphics demand side. Otherwise you'll still need games to be steam in order to get the best performance.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yeah. Good point. The problem I see with that is that SOMEONE has to store the shader caches that you download. With some games, it's megabytes and some games it's gigabytes. Also, the shaders are different for different hardware configurations. Who is going to not only store, but share all of this data when only a small portion of people donate to FOSS? Steam, gets a portion of the sale, and moving people to Linux is a far sight goal that they are monetarily incentivized to help towards.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

In theory this problem is already "solved" with torrents.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

True, but complex and probably a tad unrealistic. My old days of using torrents taught me that people don't typically seed.

Ignoring that, if you automatically download torrents and start seeding them many people wouldn't understand them and will have their internet overwhelmed and blame Linux, or Google it and come to the conclusion to "turn off the seeding feature".

Also, Shader Caches get changed/updated CONSTANTLY. When I first got my Steam Deck, I was getting Shader Caches updates every time I turned it on for nearly every game. That has slowed down a lot but torrents specifically wouldn't be the best solution for something that changes frequently. You can re-check so that you can just only download new caches with the latest torrent. But the re-check can be computationally expensive as well.

Idk the answer and I love the idea of P2P. But, we'd have to be careful to implement it well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I wonder if a program could be built that would do it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

A program will not fix it. The problem is shader caches need to be stored. Storage costs money. Who is going to pay to store all of them?

Maybe it could be like a P2P system but that would add a whole lot of complexity!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I was thinking a program that would pull, create, and store all the shader cache of a game locally on the system.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Magicland, I suppose. I guess it would need to spoof that it's a steam os installed game in order to download the cache from valves server and then move the cache over to the appropriate folder for the game. I guess it would be a lot of work for each game, since the cache folder isn't going to be named the same and in the same spot.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Even then, the shaders for steam deck wouldn't work on other devices with different GPU architecture. I think it might require the same CPU architure as well. But, I'm not confident on the second part.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I wasn't talking about other devices. Just the steam deck. If it's a game bought through steam you get the pre-cache files. If it's a game you're playing on the SD, but was purchased/obtained outside of steam you can still play it but you won't have the pre-cache files to use.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I only just heard about ULWGL from a nice Threadiverser a couple of days ago, and now TIL!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

So all the codebases won't be merged into one, but a new codebase is made to launch games through existing launchers?

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Well the interesting part of this is that they will collaborate on the engine but the frontend will still be independent.

I think this is a sound strategy (if I understood it well) as the key differentiators remain but the hard parts (running the damn things) become collaborative.

This also IMO helps a lot user experience, as dealing with broken scripts, mysterious wine settings and keeping up with version changes makes playing a game a big ordeal compared with other platforms (In some cases like old games, it can be worse).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

If you are correct, this is indeed a great stride in the right direction! Thank you for the input.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0