Valve's plan to bring SteamOS to more devices is a promising sign if you want to stop gaming on Windows
Valve's plan to bring SteamOS to more devices is a promising sign if you want to stop gaming on Windows
The recent news that SteamOS may soon be shipped with third-party devices could be particularly important for Linux gaming on desktops.
Even gamers nexus' Steve today said that they're about to start doing Linux games performance testing soon. It's happening, y'all, the year of the Linux desktop is upon us. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
Edit: just wanted to clarify that Steve from GN didn't precisely say they're starting to test soon, he said they will start WHEN the steam OS releases and is adopted. Sorry about that.
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The only bastion left is anticheat. Everything else are just (bad) old habits fueled by marketing.
Anti-cheat systems already have to make changes, since Microsoft have plans to significantly restrict kernel mode access after the major Crowdstrike issues earlier in the year. Kernel mode code is very invasive, difficult to get correct, and can result in major security holes or stability issues if not written correctly.
A bug in userland code may crash that one app. A bug in kernel mode code can (and often does) cause bluescreens, that people blame Microsoft for. I'm sure they're tired of being blamed for buggy code written by other companies.
Running the anti cheat code in userland will (in theory) make it easier to run on other OSes too.
Yes indeed, I've followed that from afar (as I generally mostly play offline, definitely not competitively) so I hope this will be the final missing piece.
I also only play games offline, and these days it's usually on my Xbox rather than on PC, but I've been following this since I'm a software engineer and it's interesting from a development perspective. Kernel-mode anti-cheat has a lot of similarities with malware/rootkits.
Well put.
...and VR. VR is already finicky on its own, gaming on Linux can be finicky in different ways, and the issues multiply if you have two things like that.
Tends to depend on the headset you own, some work perfectly. Also, Valve is very likely releasing a headset based on SteamOS, which should help.
I work in VR, I play in VR, including Windows games, all on Linux. No specific problem for me on that front.
How do you work 'in' vr?
Apologies I wasn't clear. I actually I work "on" VR, namely I'm a software developer who write VR/AR code.
Still though... I also do work "in" VR as I have numerous demo where I'm coding in the headset. Most recently you can check this 1min video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGvc4kNXiUY that I did for https://futuretextlab.info/ and it's all open source, cf https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/text-code-xr-engine/src/branch/fot-sloan-companion . To clarify a bit I drag&drop file on my (Linux) filesystem and they are reflected in AR in that example. I can open them, manipulate them, if it's code (here JavaScript and AFrame) it can live reload part of the scene, etc.
I'm also working "in" VR for the NLNet sponsored project xrsh aka XRshell https://nlnet.nl/project/xrsh/ where thanks to WASM we basically put a (small) Linux system with its terminal on a Web page and thus can code and work in the headset.
Maybe they mean that they use flatscreen applications in VR, or maybe they take all their meetings in VRChat.
Not exactly, clarified ;)