Posted by todsacerdoti 1 day ago
What problems have you seen?
Some popular examples of this;
1. Baldur's Gate 3: It has Verified status, but the community unanimously agrees that the performance is very poor around Act 3, and makes the game nearly impossible to finish on Deck.
2. Spider-Man 2: It had Verified status at launch, but performed poorly in terms of graphics and visuals. It was recently downgraded to Playable status, meaning you have to change the graphics settings to comfortably play the game.
Personally, I think Valve's definition of Verified [1] is too vague. The 4 criteria don't actually mention anything about graphics or performance - it only says it should have "good default settings". What does that actually look like when you play it? Additionally, how much of the game is tested when evaluating those settings?
Valve doesn't actually advertise the process of how the badge is assigned, that I'm aware. Is the game 100% completed in evaluation? What percentage of input is there between Valve and the developer? Are certain publishers or developers given any bias or leeway? That part is still opaque to the end-user.
I think the Verification process is a good first cut at standardizing PC specs, where before there weren't any. But it can definitely be improved.
Developers are unable to opt out of the system and Valve will just put a "verified" tag on a game with zero input from a developer.
Valve needs to set proper expectations of who to be mad at when a game breaks on the Steam Deck if the developer themselves never pledged support.
Most users don't understand what an OS really is or how a game works on the Steam Deck (SteamOS) instead of Windows.
This is a big claim, is there evidence for this? I'm an end-user, not a developer, but there are plenty of games in Unknown status. I would assume that should be the default, not Verified.
I can see an argument that Valve has incentive to have flagship games get that Verified badge, but there is also precedence for them downgrading popular games after launch. For example, Spider-Man 2 recently went from Verified to Playable (rightfully so, in my opinion).
Since when? You can easily run your self-built / third party apps on Android WITHOUT ROOTING and without paying / getting verified by google. Not-rooting only prevents you from circumventing the Android security model (dedicated toggles for each permission)
To push for equity is to discriminate and dehumanize people, so it's certainly good that valve does not put this value ahead of anything else let alone allow them to take precedence over taking care of their customer base. They are perfectly inclusive as well, though they are not "inclusive", the kind where they discriminate against people on the basis of race to please some misguided quotas.
There's no single way to do this but people have lumped them all together and called them "quotas" (they're not, at least not in responsible processes). It really does a disservice to the fact that it's encouraging meritocratic hiring. Because for most of the 20th century (and even still today) employment was and is stratified by race and gender, not ability.
It's not the people criticizing them that have lumped them all together. People in support of these programs have failed to self police entirely, for example IBM/Red Hat, google, apple are suffering very firmly evidenced racial discrimination lawsuits for discriminating against people with white skin using quotas, firing hiring managers for refusing to discriminate, and so on. These lawsuits were initiated long before the 2024 election, it's not a trump thing for example though he has made use of it because his dem party opponents support these practices.
If someone makes a blatant racist comment on twitter with their employer directly implicated, if the target race is white that person does not end up being fired in today's companies. These public and frequent appearances of unfairness stack up in the public eye. It's enough evidence there's a failure to self-police within the general DEI and HR landscape and i think people are very much done with the entire concept.
It appears to be a common view of many that "you can't be racist against white people" (direct quote of a kotaku journalist journalist, who was not fired for the statement, they also had a couple statements supporting racial violence against whites, big surprise), but obviously such a view is in itself race based discrimination that generalizes and dehumanizes individual experiences on the basis of race.
You can also look up the Dani Lalonders racist tirade, she's a game developer who has not been fired from EA for her comments despite openly admitting to illegal discrimination and only hiring black people to her team and just generally being insane.
But the US hates teachers (and now, education Nas a whole) and can't think long term anymore. So these are merely pipe dreams as of now.
The problem isn't just hiring, but helping hiring will help with the other two by addressing those cultural problems.
It's a complicated topic, but no we have not always been doing merit based hiring. However, merit based hiring does result in imbalanced race and gender distributions due to long term societal issues and demographic distributions at earlier stages.
Basically, there is a skewed class distribution at the source. You have to fix it at the source via equality of opportunity and making our society more equal. I'm not a conservative, i'm very far left and strongly believe in making society more equal in general. However. Trying to fix it at the destination is called racial discrimination and is dehumanizing and evil and anyone who does it should suffer prosecution.
You don't get to dehumanize and discriminate against individual people for the greater good, i will personally go out of my way to see you receive consequences if you try this and you're doing it somewhere i can see. There's a lot of us with this opinion, hopefully your stance starts getting chilled from fear of blowback.
I have a question for you. Is there anything humanizing about the hiring process? Or is it one of the most dehumanizing things most engineers experience?
I look forward to you and your army of white men marching on me saying they're tired of racial discrimination in the workplace. I'll send you guys right over to HR, and tell them that you're tired of me hiring so many black people. I'm sure it'll go well.
> I look forward to you and your army of white men
We know, the secret is out, you and all the other racist lunatics never saw anything wrong with prejudice. It's the same type of thinking that fought against civil rights in the 70s that just moved straight over to the hot new forms of racism and discrimination just because you think it's socially acceptable.
> Is there anything humanizing about the hiring process? Or is it one of the most dehumanizing things most engineers experience?
You are saying this in order to defend racist hiring practices. Whether or not the base hiring process sucks is not part of the discussion on whether or not we should allow racial discrimination in said hiring process.
In the end it's always individual innocent people that get hurt, not broad identity groups that you think deserve it.
How would you go about these "consequences" as you put them? Do you actually think anyone will take you seriously when you complain about not enough white people being hired? Surrounded by too many women? Sounds like a personal issue to me.
It's natural for you to feel attacked, as you're used to living under a white-supremacist system. I guarantee you would have been one of the MLK haters back in the 60s.
Also, on the prejudice thing. You actively make the decision every day to have shitty, racist opinions. Black people do not have the choice to become white, but you can become a better person. You simply choose not to. There is a huge difference, and your lack of ability to see that is telling.
Discriminating against people on the basis of race or gender is unacceptable, that's the bottom line, going "do you think anyone will actually take you seriously" and accusing me of being an uber driver (?) is the theme type of language i'm talking about. Segregationists in the 60s and 70s constantly used this exact style of derision and appeal to marketability, spend some time just reading the writings of segregationists at the time and you will see yourself. Sorry but there's a simple objective truth here and you're on the wrong side of it, trying to call me racist while you're defending racist practices is just pointless, it looks like a fish floundering.
And it's actually really amazing how your post boils down to 'You're white so you deserve it, nobody will take whites seriously!' despite you not even knowing my race!
The problem is that there is a large market segment that would enjoy the greater variety of games that are available on PC than on any given console, but they simply view a gaming PC as another "console". I have a friend who I would consider a "gamer" (a long history of console ownership, hundreds of hours logged on his Nintendo Switch on "hardcore" games), whose only PC is a laptop that is too weak to run any modern games, and feels that buying another appliance just to play a handful of games he can't currently access doesn't make sense.
The Steam Deck bridges the gap by providing a console experience for PC games. Developers only need target one hardware and software configuration to ensure that any Steam Deck owner can play their games. The Steam Deck operating system indicates which games run well, and provides out-of-the-box settings for controller and graphics configurations that ensure that a Steam Deck owner can buy a game and be reasonably sure that they won't have to spend any time updating graphics drivers, remapping controls, tweaking settings, or troubleshooting PC-centric issues just so they can play a PC game. It inhabits a handheld form factor because that is the best selling form factor (see Game Boy, Nintendo DS, etc.) with the added bonus that it can be docked and played like a regular console. The same combination that propelled the Nintendo Switch to massive success.
People outside the HN echo chamber don't care about the arcane hardware and software issues that cause many to turn away in disgust, they just want to buy a device that gives them access to a library of games they wouldn't otherwise be able to play. At present, the Steam Deck is the device that does that the best.
First paragraph pretty much confirms my belief that some people who aren't hardcore gamers don't buy the Steamdeck to play games, they buy it because they are Steam/Valve fanboys.
Steam doesn't give a flying f if it runs the games on Xorg or Wayland - the Wine project made Wine run on Wayland, not Steam. What Steam does is hire Crossover developers to hack compatability to newer games, because thats all that matters from a business perspective and Valve is as corporate as any other.
Don't forget that Wine has been a a several decades long project before Steam hired some Crossover devs to fork it and take the limelight from the original project, the gamer-stupidity seems to forget this and give all credit to Valve which is ignorant and disrespectful to the work Wine has put in over several decades.
Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm.. Rocket League and many other games simply don't see the reason to maintain their Linux ports. Linux ports are being cancelled more than ever.
Honestly, this shift towards running everything in Wine disgusts me. If you told me before the Steamdeck released that they would try to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds. Software crash can happen at any time, thats life with Wine.
Another thing is that I know people who own Steamdecks who have zero clue what games to play on it. It ends up being pirated Nintendo games or emulator games. Often they have to fiddle with control maps, settings before playing.
My idea of a handheld is that I don't want to tinker with it. I want the integrated out-of-the-box experience - maintaining another system despite my own PC is not something I prioritize my time on, same reason I don't buy an Android phone, really..
Native Linux ports matters!
You seem to be forgetting that Steam Machines existed back then, and Wine barely supported D3D9.dll in those days. Valve and Codeweavers did the majority of the work bringing up DXVK, without which there would be no DX11/DX12 game support on Linux at all. It's not exaggeration to say that the Steam Deck would not have been a success if DXVK never existed.
There's certainly cause to celebrate Wine's accomplishments reverse-engineering Win32. But it's far from the only thing required to get games running, and I think you've oversold it's importance.
> Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm..
Shocker. Given the way MacOS is treated by game developers, I'd much prefer translation be the focus instead of courting native ports that will break in 2 months from a glibc update.
> to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds
I'm not sure why. The GPU is where the lion's share of power consumption happens, and Proton uses the same Vulkan API that modern, native Linux titles target. Sure, you have to wait for shaders to cache, but you have to do that on most Windows PCs nowadays too.
Thats like saying you think I've oversold Chromium because Brave has done the heavy lifting (I bet you use Brave too, I sure don't nor ever will).. You sound incredibly confirming to the gamer-stupidity that revolves around the Steamdeck community.. You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to shine on a fork that is a few years old. You're exactly the type I'm talking about- get a grip.
I'll even go a step further, really - Wine isn't as technically impressive as DXVK. They're both large and complex projects, but the reverse-engineering required to get DX11 to run with Vulkan in realtime is a head-and-shoulders harder problem than mapping Win32 syscalls to a monokernel. Graphics performance was one of the biggest struggles Wine faced back in the OpenGL days, and the performance deficit still persists: https://linuxreviews.org/Wine_6.3_Built-in_vs_DXVK_1.8:_A_Co...
> You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to shine on a fork
Calling Proton a "fork" of Wine is like calling Fedora a "fork" of Linux. You're patently incorrect, and you're not really identifying how this is a bad thing for Wine or Proton users.
You just plain out refuse to see it, cuz you totally drank the kool aid.
Steamdeck have literally zero AAA-games compared to Nintendo, because thats the joy of owning a Steamdeck! Smearing diapers in Nintendos face and pirating their games like a true neckbeard, right?
Steam neckbeards are such manchilds. The "idea" of a Steamdeck sells more than the actual games and this is what this article proves. Sad, but true.
The catalog of games on Steam suck, objectively. Unpopular opinion maybe - to those that are addicted to browsing shitty new soulless games on Steam.
Wouldn't you have more software freedom on Windows? Because you can run both Windows and Linux software (via WSL2).
I use macOS, Windows and Linux daily. They are all pretty open to installing and running your own software. And all of them have some sort of security measures that prevent you from running arbitrary apps unless you close some scary warnings or bypass it with some flags.
Often we talk about software freedom in the context of open-source development and free-software licenses like the GPL. The Free Software Foundation stated as a bootstrapping organization to write open source software for the GNU platform (Linux/Unix standard userspace environment). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation
Valve is pretty well respected from that perspective. SteamOS is built on Arch Linux. They publish the source for most of their Linux tools https://github.com/ValveSoftware/. The development of Proton, their in-house compatibility layer that uses Wine under the hood, is also open source and developed with community involvement. Single hardware platform makes it easier to handle the morass of driver development. They upstream their changes to other projects. There are actually open source forks of things like Proton (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom is a popular one).
And they made sure to integrate Flatpaks into their base OS image and the default image ships with the Flatpak market/browser, because Flatpaks can be easily installed and managed without conflicting with the base OS that they are managing... and it works. It really works. Even out of the box and without penetrating their management, you have a lot of freedom, and the fences are just advisory.
I'm sure they're not interested in it but they've got a decent solution for someone to start selling managed Linux desktops and laptops for end-users if they wanted to.
But calling Windows more free than Linux because you can virtualize Linux is a noteworthy statement alright.