Always porting not-yet-upstreamed patches to new release kernels is additional work to the upstreaming work towards the latest development tree. The Valve engineers interviewed around the very first Steam Deck announcement said their goal with moving from Debian to Arch was to minimize the patchset maintenance burden. Their approach surely has that goal in mind. There are only two variants of Steam Deck with minor differences between them. If backporting patches from newer kernels is less work than forward porting their patches, they just stay with that version for a while. Updates to drivers for hardware they don’t use and filesystems they don’t use aren’t relevant to them anyway.

When a normal person talks about a topic, they don’t have to continuously clarify that they still talk about the same topic, it’s assumed.

It’s a new statement in a new paragraph.

Oh, now we interpret according to the intent of the author?

Accept that you misunderstood and move on.

The guy said he bought games, and those don’t work as well natively.

No, he didn’t say “those”. He made a statement about commercial Linux games in general (edit: in a separate paragraph).

if he didn’t buy them it won’t change his experience.

Shouldn’t make a generalized statement like that then.

Yeah, fuck those Linux users! Only sell those games to Windows users!

No idea how you get to that from my statement that’s advocating to make unmaintained games free. 🤷

https://dearrow.ajay.app/

Proton is the gateway drug to us getting more Linux native games.

It’s not when Win32 apologists keep making insane claims how stable Proton is… “Proton is great, it just runs all the Windows games” is the mess that got us to the place where games we buy just start crashing suddenly because nobody of those developers realizes that each major release of Proton must be treated like its own OS with proper QA targeting that. Proton works great for old games because these old games no longer change. For modern games that still get updates Proton is a gamble because a reverse engineered version of the Windows API just isn’t stable.

Linux is a total pain in the behind to write applications for, because of API and ABI instability.

Flatpak

Not a single commercial game runs as well natively as it does through Proton.

It’s funny when people like you make such statements because someone needs to literally name just a one commercial game and you’re already being proven a liar. OK, I start: Selaco.

But the sad reality is that it costs money to maintain software.

So what? They should stop taking money for unmaintained games then.

Win32 has somehow become the most stable Linux API.

Windows is a moving target. Wine/Proton is a reverse engineering chase of a moving target. WINDOWS GAMES ON PROTON BREAK ALL THE TIME! Stop making stuff. It’s great that Proton exists but it’s not like Java. What does not break? Flatpak Runtimes and Steam Linux Runtime.

I know that I can (I did with another one) but that’s not what being a paying customer is about.

The God of War one is the boot video with the most obnoxious sound I’ve ever encountered. Too bad Valve still didn’t care to add a mute option for boot videos.

I am almost certain that steam keys are actually free to developers, which is the whole reason for the policy.

Yes, they are. That’s what many of the Kinguin etc. keys are. People/bots pretend to be game reviewers/streamers and ask for free keys. I have a “Game Press” license for a game because back then I didn’t know of that method. I was under the impression those were keys sold by the developer in foreign markets for adjusted prices. Now I know better.

Weird that the drivers are that dramatically different for the OLED version.

The WiFi and BT modules are completely different (the OLED’s product page says this since the announcement), hence new drivers required.

Why did you subscribe to services you couldn’t use?

I’m convinced that is about bringing Oculus/Meta Quest VR games to the next Valve VR headset which is rumored to be stand alone and run SteamOS.

I would prefer the official YouTube client and web browsers properly developed for touch to be available in game mode. The best touch browser is currently Angelfish and that’s not a robust browser.

I’ll try that, thanks

Only regular SteamOS.

The ONLY problem I have had with this, is the controller on the system itself defaults as controller 1, so SOME games it takes a little fiddling to use different controllers. But I have done this and it works great.

I don’t know if you’re talking about in-game fiddling or Steam Input but to clarify for others here: Steam allows to reorder the controllers, so the thing I usually do at the beginning of game party is to move the Deck’s integrated inputs to the last place.

Really spoiled the online stages

And now this change spoils single player.

As a hardcore Linux fan, the only way I see game devs publishing native Linux ports is when when it has a >30% market share.

For Valve Linux isn’t just another OS. It’s their Steam Deck platform which they could promote towards publishers the same way as console makers promote their platforms. This story once again shows that chasing Windows compatibility without using Windows is a stepping stone but not the final answer.