atmur

That's a great question, and unfortunately I don't remember since I did this like 5 months ago. Sorry :(

Reposting this from reddit so I can delete my original post (and soon my account hopefully).

Link to GameImage gitlab

GameImage basically just lets you fuss with getting the games working on Desktop first, then turn that into an AppImage file that you can just copy straight to the Deck.

I made a video guide for this a while back, but it's fairly outdated at this point.

100% agree. Snaps are kind of neat for server stuff (easiest setup of Nextcloud I've ever done, even though I switched to Docker in the end), but man the desktop experience is god awful.

I had to setup an Ubuntu VM at work to run something I couldn't do on the Windows host, I tried to open Firefox and it took ages to start. I literally began trying to troubleshoot why it wasn't opening before it finally started. Completely unusable and I have no idea why Canonical thinks this is an actual competitor to Flatpak.

Having to prefix commands with "flatpak run org.whoever.whatever..." gets old quickly, and setting aliases to get around it isn't user friendly. It's certainly possible, it's just not practical (which may have been a better word to use than "feasable" in my first comment).

I'm in the camp of thinking Flatpaks are definitely the future for GUI applications. While there are definitely cons...

1. CLI applications are not feasible as Flatpaks. This isn't what Flatpak is designed for, standard package management will still be needed here.

2. Dependency duplication wastes storage space, but I'm personally willing to give up a couple GBs for the benefits I get.

3. Developers might package their application incorrectly. This is possible, but it hasn't caused any notable issues for me in the 2 years that I've been primarily using Flatpaks.

4. As far as I'm aware, Flatpak doesn't have a way to allow applications to set udev rules. This generally doesn't matter, but for something like Steam Input, you will need to install the steam-devices package or setup udev rules manually so it can manage your controllers. Google's Android Flash Tool also doesn't work out of the box in the Chrome Flatpak last I checked.

...The pros more than outweigh these (in my opinion at least).

1. Non-distro-specific packaging means you can use Flatpaks on whatever distro you want. You can have more up-to-date applications on stable distros like Debian, or on smaller distros that don't have the resources to package every application possible. Rather than Red Hat spending a significant amount of time packaging LibreOffice for RHEL/Fedora, they can just rely on the Flatpak and spend time on more important elements of the distro itself. There's also Bottles, which enters dependency hell if packaged incorrectly, they had a blog post about this a while ago.

2. Application files are stored in one place in ~/.var/app. For some apps this doesn't matter, but it keeps applications like Steam from cluttering up your home directory with random game saves and other garbage. This also makes backups easier since you already know where all applications keep their files.

3. It makes immutable distros actually usable, which I believe will be the future for some use cases.

4. Permissions management. Even if no one is setting privileges for their applications correctly right now, having the groundwork for this in place will be important if more proprietary applications are going to be ported to Linux in the future.

Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation) coined the whole “PC Master Race” joke ages ago, and even he regrets it, lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSJKffmWZSk

I think the Duelsense controller is my favorite, being an incremental upgrade over the great DS4. Comfy layout, nice feeling bumpers and d-pad, and gyro controls.

The Xbox Series controller is equally comfortable and definitely gets points for using AA batteries instead of a built-in battery that degrades over time (my DS4 barely holds a charge anymore…). However, lack of gyro sucks, especially when everyone else has it.

If you want to count the Steam Deck as a controller, it’s a close second behind the DS5. All the features you could possibly want, plus trackpads and back buttons, and only loses points for being less comfortable to hold than the DS5 (but it’s also an entire console, so that’s fair).

I’ve been gaming on Linux since Proton first launched. It was good back then, and at this point I can play just about everything in my Steam library (nearly 1000 games). From indies to racing sims to triple a games. It’s great.

Anti-cheat is still hit or miss, but I don’t really play any multiplayer games, so that doesn’t affect me luckily.

I’ve been happy with Cloudflare’s registrar service, plus it keeps all my DNS stuff in one place.