Games For Everyone #2: Linux Gaming Is Winning

Nick (00:00)
I don't know.
Jason (00:02)
All right, how do you guys pronounce Cachy OS Let us know in the comments. So I started playing with that About Cachy. Yeah, it makes sense
Liam (00:10)
I just say catchy, catchy OS.
Jason (00:13)
English
is dumb, okay? English is dumb. ⁓
Nick (00:17)
saying that as a Frenchman.
stupidest language in all Europe.
Jason (00:24)
So I saw it. Man, that's kind of harsh.
Welcome everybody to Games for Everyone. I am Jason and I am joined by these handsome young devils. ⁓ Nick from the Linux experiment. How you doing, man? Hey! ⁓
Nick (00:48)
doing great. Thanks. I'm
happy to be here and yeah, let's talk some gaming a little bit.
Jason (00:52)
And Liam, founder, creator, writer, gamingonlinux.com. Good to have you back. Good to have you back. Are you well caffeinated today?
Liam (01:06)
Little bit too much, think.
Jason (01:08)
Well good, that'll make it more fun. Missing in action today, unfortunately, is Gardner Bryant. ⁓ If he happens to join us a little bit late though, we'll just let him sneak in and we'll just keep the show rolling. So with that, let me say it has been 92 days since the steam machine and the steam frame were announced. And this is what's funny is I had this same note because we were originally going to record a week earlier.
than we are right now. And so I had, think I said, you know, it's been 84 days since the steam machine and steam frame were announced. And later that day, Valve had the whole blog post about ⁓ the non-delay or further...
Nick (01:58)
Delaying the announcement of some elements of the things maybe
Jason (02:02)
Yeah, there we go. There we go. Because people called it a delay. You know, steam machine, steam frame are delayed. And I think we're all in agreement going, well, no, because Valve actually never said Q1 of 2026 when this stuff is releasing. They said early 2026, right? And so who knows what Valve's definition of early 2026 is? It's probably their same definition of the number three.
I don't know. Do you guys want to chime in at all about this non-delay?
Liam (02:38)
I didn't think it would be really this early anyway, because we all saw what was happening with RAM storage, AI expansion and all that. And you've had, who was it? Micron pullout of consumer RAM and it's only going to get worse before it gets better. And they have to be so careful because the earlier they announce anything, the more chance it is the price is going to have to rise. They've got such a...
ridiculously difficult position. I can't imagine what the valve offices are like trying to work this out. It's utter madness.
Nick (03:16)
Yeah, I think the issue is whether prices keep rising or get lower. They're kind of screwed both ways because if they say, hey, it's going to be a thousand bucks because yeah, prices and then let's say a month afterwards, like RAM prices are halved because miracle something happens, then they have to say, yeah, well now it's 800. So sorry, early adopters, you overspent. Maybe we're giving you some Cachy back, but we did pay those prices for the RAM. So can we reimburse? I don't know.
And if it's the other way, they're gonna have to raise the prices. We've seen how unpopular that has been for the Switch 2, for the PS5, for the Xbox. They all increased their prices recently, at least in France. I don't know if it's the same in the rest of the world, but it's super unpopular. So I don't know how they can handle this.
Jason (04:01)
It's it's a no-win situation for Valve. And I feel like it's a no-win situation for anyone in the world right now who wants to build a PC or who wants to buy a new PC or a new console or it's, you know, or, or a stick of Ram. Yesterday, I was looking around, just kind of researching the price of NVMe drives and the cheapest one I found was $323 for a one terabyte WD Black. That's, that's half the price of a Steam Deck.
Nick (04:29)
That's it.
Liam (04:30)
It's
just madness. It's mad. When you look at all the prices of everything, it's going to be even worse for the smaller hardware vendors, know, like A &E, One X player, GPD, and so on. Any of those companies that are going to be doing new hardware, whether it's handhelds or their mini PCs or anything like that, they're screwed. Like I've seen some of the prices on the stuff they've just recently announced and they're multiple thousands. It's like already.
Jason (04:58)
Multi-
Liam (04:59)
They were already a niche. Now, some of them might not survive past the next year.
Nick (05:06)
Yeah. Are you really going to pay like 1500, 2000 bucks for, let's not say unproven, but maybe more niche hardware from manufacturers that I wouldn't say are established as something like Valve, Asus or others? Are you taking that chance? I'm not sure.
Jason (05:24)
it's ugly. It's ugly. I don't want to, I don't want to kick this off with too much bad news, but, but, Steam decks are out of stock in the U S in Canada and Asia. Do you want to talk a little bit about what's going on?
Liam (05:41)
Yeah. So, you know, like the price of RAM right now, people are like saying how it's like, you know, bars of gold sort of thing. Looking at the Steam Deck OLED at my desk right now, is the price of that gone up in value now? But it's crazy because this was bound to happen at some point. mean, are not a massive hardware vendor like Sony.
Jason (05:55)
Hahaha
Liam (06:06)
How Sony announced only recently, you know, they've bought up loads to cover the entire holiday season for the end of the year. Valve don't really have the power for something like that. So their stock levels, I imagine, are a lot closer to what they're actually expecting to sell. And because of the prices rising on so many components, well, obviously at some point they were going to run out. now...
the Steam Deck. It's last I checked out of stock in the US, Canada and Komodo were saying it's out of stock all across Asia as well.
Jason (06:41)
Man and so the the steam the one terabyte steam deck OLED has been retailing for 649 us since it launched and So like I said like that's something a lot, you know ⁓ a one terabyte NVMe drive is half of that
Nick (06:59)
Even if you buy multiple tens of thousands of them at once, it's probably not going to drop below 250. The other 200, that's still a third of the price of the thing.
Liam (07:06)
Yeah.
Jason (07:10)
I guess what makes all of this ⁓ hard to speculate is we don't have any insight into what Valve's contracts look like, what their stock looks like. Okay. So I think we should run down what are the theories about why it's out of stock. And I wanted to lead this off with, back when I was at Forbes, a similar thing happened with the original Legion Go. There were messages popping up on the Lenovo storefronts online.
that said, ⁓ this item is no longer available. was kind of a nebulous, like not saying it's discontinued, not saying it's out of stock is just no longer available. And so all of the rumors started swirling like, they're going to announce Legion go to, they're going to announce something else. And two and a half months later, they announced Legion go S Legion go S powered by steam. S and Legion go S or Legion go to, but I just want to put to bed any theory that, that valve is.
about to ⁓
Nick (08:13)
time possible to try and announce something like the Steam Deck 2 right after they delayed the announcement of the rest.
Jason (08:21)
It's bad. Yeah, exactly. It's just bad optics. I mean they they have to get Either the steam frame or the steam machine out the door before even talking about what's next for Steam Deck
Nick (08:33)
Pierre-Lou Griffay kept repeating like on multiple interviews that yes, of course they are looking at what they could do, but they really don't want to do it that close to the initial launch. They were saying they were looking for a more transformative new APU or something like that. So they're probably looking at stuff, but judging from what they told in what they said in interviews like six months ago, it seems way too soon compared to how they were framing it at least.
Jason (08:59)
Yeah,
agreed.
Liam (09:01)
Yeah, between the processor power and the battery, the battery, especially, there's not a big enough jump because you look at all these more powerful handhelds and to get that higher level performance, they're pulling more watts. So they have to stick bigger batteries in. So the device is heavier, more expensive.
Jason (09:21)
There's one that debuted at CES in January 2026 that just ships with an external battery pack that you like smack onto the back. mean, they're just like, okay, we're throwing in all the power, but we're throwing in all the weight too.
Nick (09:36)
Pro style where you your battery back glued to the side of your pants
Jason (09:40)
So I guess I guess they're you know, the other possibility is I guess the more likely possibility is they're just out of components. Yeah Or they're gonna announce a price increase
Liam (09:56)
That's probably both.
Jason (09:58)
that could happen or they're going to announce like another iterative hardware upgrade to the Steam Deck. I just don't, I just don't see that happening. They won't call it a Steam Deck too, but it would be kind of like that, that mild bump in, in overall specs that the OLED was right. wasn't just a brand new OLED screen. It was other little details that made it an overall better package. But I just.
I don't know. think it's just component shortage. I wish it was something else, but...
Liam (10:34)
The biggest problem is with the age of the Steam Deck hardware, if they did increase the prices on all of the models, you've got to think about it really massively struggles to run basically any new game that's coming out on the price to performance ratio. Is it going to be worth it for people to still keep buying it if they put the prices up? And I think that if they do, that's going to be something people are going to be really looking at a lot closer.
and just not buying them.
Nick (11:07)
Yeah, you can have the argument that this device is not meant to run AAA titles, that it can do it, but you shouldn't buy it for that. But at the end of the day, you're still selling the Steam library on a handheld device and you're still expecting to be able to play those games, lower frame rates, lower resolutions, but you would expect to play them. I think maybe the logical explanation is just they have their stock really close to how much they think they can sell.
people expected maybe a price increase with all of that stuff. So people bought a little bit more, maybe, Steam Deck than what they usually did. In expecting the prices maybe to go up in two months, maybe they just sold what they had and they hadn't anticipated it. And then there's the fact that you cannot really renew your stock because everything is too expensive. So they're maybe just waiting a bit on it.
Jason (11:58)
boy.
Liam (11:59)
complicated.
Nick (12:00)
Yeah, it's all the speculation and the...
Jason (12:03)
Yeah, that's all we can do. I don't think they can expect consumers to swallow even a modest price increase for a device that's been out for, I don't know, definitely two years, two years and three months, I think is how old the Steam Deck OLED is.
Nick (12:24)
Even 50 bucks would be too much of an increase.
Jason (12:26)
Even
15. Yeah, you're exactly right. Yeah, anything right now is too much, especially with the age of the the overall like overall hardware inside. It's tough, man. I would not want to be valves business unit right now trying to figure this out. I don't know.
Nick (12:44)
Maybe they just grabbed all their Steam decks and linked them together to create a massive AI data center. Hey!
Jason (12:51)
That's what people did with the PlayStation 2 when Sony allowed people to install Linux. They built these massive super servers with like 50 different PS2s.
Nick (13:01)
With yellow dog Linux
Jason (13:03)
Wouldn't be cool. No one should do that for AI. absolutely. Any closing thoughts about that, about the bad news? ⁓
Nick (13:13)
You
just have to wait.
Jason (13:15)
In the meantime, would encourage anyone who's ⁓ upset that maybe their PC will not run the latest and greatest AAA unoptimized titles on their Steam Deck or something, go play some indie games. Cause there's a ton of those out there. There's a ton. There's enough fantastic indie games to keep you satisfied until you die. So right now we just have to, we just have to, I don't know.
ride this wave and hope that either this AI bubble bursts or that, I don't know, Valve opens their own foundry. Valve opens their own foundry to produce memory and their own CPUs like Apple did. That's the future. I don't know. I don't know. All right, let's... ⁓
Liam (14:03)
We got enough money.
Nick (14:05)
Yeah,
and the issue is they would make like version one of the CPU version two and then it would stop because they don't know what the number three means. ⁓
Jason (14:14)
Yeah. The only thing I'll add to this is that we know, thanks to AMD's announcement earlier in the month, that they are producing the next generation SoC for Microsoft for their Xbox. And they say it's launching in 2027. Which I feel like they beat Microsoft to the punch there. I don't know if that was planned.
Nick (14:44)
There were rumors, but I don't think Microsoft had confirmed anything.
Jason (14:48)
Yeah, right, right. We can assume that the performance boost that Valve wants for the Steam Deck 2 experience is probably in development. it's probably close. Knowing how far out they have to plan these things years in advance to do the R &D and to do various iterations on it. It's in the works. We just don't have a timeline.
Is it time to leave Discord?
So I'm sure everyone has heard the news by now, that Discord is going to be requiring age checks for what they call adult focused content. I don't remember the exact.
Liam (15:36)
Yeah. So it's going to be team by default, basically, but they've got some machine learning in the background to gather data from your activity on Discord to put you in an age bracket. supposedly you only have to do face scans or ID scans if their special machine learning thing can't put you in a box, basically. a lot of people are going to be on the
a different side of fence compared to me here because I'm not necessarily saying everyone's going to need to leave Discord because it's not Discord's fault. This is the fault of governments the world over bringing in all these new legislations and laws that are about protecting children.
A deemed in some way to be social media is going to have to have all of these checks. It's not a Discord only thing.
Nick (16:37)
I've seen but you'll correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't looked a lot into this but it seems that this started in the UK right it's the UK mandating those social platforms to implement that stuff and Discord decided to do it the world over anyway just in case.
Liam (16:55)
It was UK and Australia, I believe was the two places they rolled it out because Australia has gone like really hard on stopping social media. Yeah. With the UK is currently discussing and debating along with attempting to stop people getting VPNs and also like the world is just, the internet is going to be a lot more controlled over the next few years.
Nick (17:05)
Media under 16.
Jason (17:23)
My issue with what Disco... Okay, well I have two issues. And you guys can feel free to disagree. I just don't like the fact that Discord is using AI to estimate your age. Like, I'm sorry, that's not gonna be accurate for many, many people who are sort of on like 19 year olds and 17 year olds and you know what I mean? It's just... And not only that, but like only a few months ago...
Discord had a leak of 70,000 IDs and sensitive information that leaked out,
Liam (17:58)
People are going to think like I'm some sort of apologist for companies or something at this point. I just like to make sure people know.
Jason (18:05)
No,
you're a journalist. You're presenting the facts.
Liam (18:11)
The issue with what happened with Discord previously was not directly Discord being breached. was a third party service they were using for customer support that was breached. Okay. Not Discord directly, but it still underscores a point that they're rolling these issues out worldwide for age checks, age assurance, whatever you want to call it with different companies. ⁓
Any of these companies could be hit at any point. And then if you've done a face scan or your biometric data, given over whatever your ID at some point, it could be leaked. then because they are using AI in the background, they've built this massive profile on you that could then be leaked as well. the other side of it is, well, we already all have our smartphones. We're already on the internet. Every company out there is building a massive profile on us anyway.
Everything you need to weigh the pros and cons of your privacy on everything. But the main point is every company is going to be doing this. They have no choice. Their choices are do this or attempt to fight it where the government will find them if they don't do it, find them massive amounts of money or completely block them. And then it makes it even worse for everyone because everyone either has to find a different service or use a VPN just to connect.
to it. People say things like, just, go and join matrix or this, or go back to IRC or whatever. You can't just up thousands of people from one thing to the other. We've seen it before. doesn't happen. People will stay on Discord.
Jason (19:55)
Of course they will. there will be an uproar right now and things will settle and the majority of people will stay on Discord. But my second issue with it, I really want to go back to where knowledge and information was actually searchable on the open web and not locked inside of a maybe it's pinned or maybe it's not a FAQ response or, and you can't like you can't go into any search engine and search anything that's inside of a Discord server.
And I hate that. just, want to, I want us go back to forums and.
Nick (20:30)
That's been a big pet peeve of mine at every company I've worked at because ever since Slack was introduced, people jumped on that saying, it's going to revolutionize communication. Sure, email, just channels for specific things. And then they started adding file uploads and documents and pin messages. And those things, which were supposed to just be communication, turned into knowledge bases, storage areas where the stuff isn't linked properly to the right place. And it made
things a nightmare at every company I've ever worked for, whether it was Teams, Slack, we use Discord at another company as well. It's not fit for that purpose at all. And it also makes completely impossible to just up and leave because you have all those documents that are not really stored in a comprehensible manner. You can't search for everything. The search feature in Discord is absolutely abysmal.
It's just bad. It's not meant for that. It's meant for a quick chat and all the features they added just made those platforms really annoying to use to me. So I use them because I have no choice. I've got some conversation groups. People will just never move out of Discord for that. They don't care. So I'm going to have to stick there if I want to talk to them. But I think most people will just have the same argument. Like I just can't move. My friends are there.
Jason (21:51)
Yeah, it sucks though, because the communities become more and more fragmented as time goes on and as things like this happen. there's solutions that are out there like you can just bridge Matrix to Discord, but that's a mess. And Matrix is not the most intuitive software on the planet, especially if you're using multiple devices. It's just a nightmare. When I worked at Thunderbird, we actually had a Slack channel.
that was just for the purpose of when the Matrix ⁓ instance went down. And we were there like every couple weeks and you'd wake up in the morning and go into Matrix like, what's going on? have all these people in Slack going, is Matrix down for you? Is Matrix down?
Liam (22:36)
The issue with like bridging between these services is that it makes moderation sometimes completely impossible. Like the last time we tried bridging the gaming or Linux discord with the matrix we had at the time, like we don't officially have matrix anymore because it was just such a mess. You couldn't mod anything to do with that. You'd have to be in the matrix channel to do it. just the design of matrix makes everything a hassle.
It's, and you look at what their target is a lot of the time and it's organizations and governments and so on. True. Which kind of makes sense. I don't think Matrix is a good replacement for anything unless you're a big organization that wants to roll your own chat.
Jason (23:21)
And forums, I mean, forums have their weaknesses, obviously. They're not as robust. You have to have a different login for every forum that you're on. Right. And that's, that's a problem because we're all, we're all, we all have account fatigue at this point. We don't want to, we don't want to set up another account just to talk to somebody about this very specific interest or something. I guess, gun to your head, you've got to get off Discord. Where are you going? IRC?
I wouldn't. TeamSpeak? There's a new TeamSpeak in beta.
Nick (23:51)
But.
So my main example is ⁓ I play Warhammer. I am in the local group of people who play Warhammer locally where I live. And so we have two servers for that. We have one server for everyone who wants to go pay us a visit and play on a table and just subscribe to the association, the nonprofit we have around this. And you have a second server for everyone who wants to play competitively joining a team.
I have no idea where we would go for that stuff because I would never suggest them moving to Matrix. Maybe a WhatsApp group that's just not as flexible. Just something like Slack maybe. don't know. No one would set up a Mattermost instance or anything like that. I don't know.
Liam (24:39)
That just underscores the problem with proprietary platforms that are as big as Discord because the simple fact is, speaking just for myself here, I like Discord for what it has in terms of the features and there is literally nothing that compares to it. That's a big part
Jason (25:00)
It's
just kind of wild that there's, I mean, I guess there are kind of Discord clones that are open source, but they still lack, their appearance is similar, but the feature set is really lacking compared to Discord. And I think that the problem is these open source alternatives would need significant funding to match the feature level of a product like Discord, right? And that's always been a problem in open source.
Liam (25:27)
Like I recently, as of yesterday, put myself back in the Gaming on Linux, our old IRC channel.
Jason (25:36)
How's that doing? ⁓
Liam (25:38)
Yeah, yeah, there's a few hundred people in it, but it's like, ISC is so old and everything about it is old and confusing. You can't get people back into it because it's just, can't even, you, where's all my memes and all my images and stuff.
Jason (25:59)
My guess is, within maybe a year or two, we'll see, because of this, we'll see some mature Discord competitors. At some point, I feel like something will happen that'll cause kind of a max exodus of people from Discord to somewhere else. We'll see. Wow. All right.
Liam (26:20)
It'll
be in shitified at some point. They've got to your money.
Jason (26:25)
It isn't, isn't it already sort of in shitified? I mean, I know that when I use it, get, I get blasted with like nitro advertisements everywhere constantly.
Liam (26:37)
⁓ yeah, but it can get worse.
Jason (26:40)
It can always get worse. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's true. God, can always... We need some good news. What good news do we have in our show notes?
Liam (26:51)
Bye!
Jason (26:56)
We have the open gaming collective.
Do we want to talk about that at all?
Liam (27:02)
was an interesting one because a lot of the time in the Linux world, you get announcements of things and it's somebody reinventing the wheel in some way, right? Yeah, we've seen that time and time again with a new desktop environment, a new distro, a new window manager, a new app store, another form of packages. It never ends. But now you've got the open gaming collective. A bunch of people have come together.
to repeating the cycle of making something new and that they're working together for a few things. So it is good news.
Jason (27:40)
Yeah.
They define ⁓ the Open Gaming Collective as building a unified set of gaming focused components to use across the Linux ecosystem. And their mission is to provide a collaborative framework for upstream changes to the various gaming components that will benefit all projects. We build this one thing, we improve this one thing. Every distro benefits and not just distros that are part of.
The open gaming collective, know, ⁓ distros that aren't part of it, like Cashew S, like Chimera, like Fedora.
Nick (28:20)
You could imagine someone making an Ubuntu gaming edition and they would just pick the open gaming collective kernel, the various tools that they made to better support gamescope maybe, maybe packages for drivers that are specifically tailored, stuff like that. Everyone could pick from that and contribute to that, which I think is good.
Liam (28:39)
It's multiple distributions that are included in it. And a lot of the time they have their own set of patches for the kernel, their own little patches to major the graphics drivers and so on. And now instead of doing that, they'll all pick from the same thing. They'll all work on the same thing and they'll all work towards getting these upstream to the main Linux kernel. So then everybody benefits. So it is a good thing.
But there's one interesting bit about it, which you put in the show notes there, that ⁓ a company called Playtron are involved in it.
Jason (29:12)
⁓ Before I address that, let me correct myself. Chimera OS is part of this collective. there are, Nobara is part of it, and Glorious Agrile is, know, just having him as an active part of anything is awesome. Because that guy gets stuff done. Yeah, and my question in the show notes was basically like, why is Playtron part of this? What have they contributed? Or what is the motivation?
for them to be included and for the OGC to include them. I don't understand that.
Nick (29:47)
them, it's kind of obvious. Like for them, it's a big benefit because they can just put their name linked to something that is a nice collaborative open source thing. So they can maybe start like polishing up their name and say, Hey, look, we're participating in something. But I don't really know what they've contributed already or if they contributed something. So what does the open gaming collective get out of it? I don't know. Maybe they were just, Hey, you want in, you get in. We're just working together.
Liam (30:18)
Playchon are the weirdest company because they made this big splash about making this new Linux-based gaming system that they were going to take on Windows, they were going to take on Steam, SteamOS and so on. And they pulled in developers from Heroic Games Launcher, Lutris, ⁓ ChimeraOS and a few others. Like, you know, some pretty well-known prominent open source developers.
are working for Playtron. And all they've done so far is make this big splash about taking on the world. They got their Playtron OS on this weird web three crypto handheld. They announced their own cryptocurrency because of course they did. And they've announced nothing since then, which I think we're coming up on like a year since then. So it's like, what are they doing?
Jason (30:56)
Very good.
Yeah, if you want to very quickly alienate gamers to all the companies and developers out there, here's what to do. Either include ⁓ crypto, NFT, or AI. Integrate that into your anything and you will alienate us right now, okay? There's another thing that stood out to me surrounding this announcement is the absence of a certain distro. And that's the absence of Cashew OS. And Liam, you actually covered this at ⁓
at gaming on Linux, right?
Liam (31:45)
Yeah, because the catchy OS founder went onto Reddit to say why they weren't involved in it. And it was basically to do with Playtron because they want nothing to do with them. And I thought, well, that's kind of fair enough. mean, any company that's going in on crypto and web3 and blockchain and stuff needs to be scrutinized a bit more.
Jason (32:09)
Yeah, I'm going to read their statement since you included it the article. They said, hi, we've thought about this, but we opted out since we do not see too much benefit from our side. Handheld stuff is not our major focus. Also, we had some concerns that this could get a bureaucratic loophole, which seemed to be more or less true so far. Do you have any idea what they're talking about there? Bureaucratic loophole.
Liam (32:34)
Okay, knock, play.
Jason (32:35)
⁓ Additionally, to us, all this quote, initiative, ⁓ looked like an emergency rush thing so that Bazite finds new kernel maintainers and for other technical stuff after kicking the maintainer, which basically made most integration work for them. And then as you said, we neither want to be associated with Playtron. There are more reasons, but I'll keep them out of the public. It's, it's a very, ⁓ opinionated, ⁓ statement from
from that team.
Liam (33:06)
I
think it's fair enough. mean, if they don't want to get, get involved because there has been some drama with Bazite and kicking out a maintainer and Playtron as well. Their name is just kind of stained by the crypto and stuff. If they want to just carry on and do their own thing and they're doing really well, just as they are right now, like CatchyOS is becoming really popular. Nobody in the open source world has to work together.
Jason (33:30)
Yeah, you're right. And I definitely applaud this though, because, you know, we do see kind of a lot of people duplicating efforts across the ecosystem. And it's nice that, you know, like the Open Gaming Collective wants to, wants to work on their own gaming centric kernel. And that's awesome. And they want to kind of ⁓ unify the plumbing of the, of the systems. And, and I think that will, that will benefit a lot of people and hopefully prevent a lot of, you know, duplicate efforts.
Nick (33:58)
And I think even if CacheOS doesn't want to join, I think they will still work together. They don't have to be in the collective for the collective to access what open source code CacheOS makes and vice versa. So in the end, it doesn't prevent the Open Gaming Collective from working. They can still integrate patches from CacheOS. CacheOS can still use some of the stuff that is developed by the Open Collective. I don't think it's a big issue. I think the reasons they gave were like...
nebulous enough, I'm not in the know enough to understand what exactly they were. So I think it cast a little bit of shade on the thing as a whole. I don't know. I don't get into that drama anymore. My comment section is
Jason (34:40)
⁓ That's a really that's a good that's a good move that's a good move Nick ⁓
Let's talk about the Legion Go for a minute. ⁓
Liam (34:55)
Yeah, well, so in our first episode, we all had our little things that we thought was going to happen. And mine was there's going to be another SteamOS device being announced and then the Legion go to with a SteamOS just announced.
Jason (35:12)
It was like a week after that or something, ⁓
Liam (35:16)
Yeah.
So my other one from the first episode was I, it was either between like four and 5%. And then like only a month or whatever later we hit like three and a half percent. I was like, we need to slow down a bit because.
Nick (35:32)
All my creations are done by February!
Liam (35:34)
I we need to... I need to predict some more outlandish things, don't I?
Jason (35:41)
Exactly,
your bold predictions need to be little bolder next time.
Liam (35:45)
We're gonna see Half Life 3 by August. ⁓ There's my next prediction. And the way things are going, I seem to get my predictions right. ⁓
Jason (35:53)
you
Yeah,
Valve, if you want to give some goodwill back, just announce Half-Life 3 right now. Right now! So, I mean, yeah, I don't have a lot to say about the Legion Go 2 Steam OS version. think, ⁓ obviously, it will be a better user experience, and it might be a little bit cheaper than the Windows version, but the Windows version is not cheap. The Legion Go 2 is a pricey, pricey device right now. But you...
actually got some experience with the first Legion Go after all this time. What are your thoughts on that? ⁓
Liam (36:31)
That's you guys.
yeah. So I got tired of waiting on an eventual Steam Deck 2 and like, don't get me wrong, I still use the Steam Deck all the time anyway. But one of my Steam Decks, cause I had two, has gone on to a family. So they're using that. So I've only got one left. And there were certain games that I do want to play in bed or hooked up to a TV and whatever. And the Steam Deck just didn't, doesn't have enough juice.
you know? And so I thought, well, I had just a little bit of money and I thought, well, I'll treat myself. I'll treat myself. I've been a good boy this year, you know? So I bought the Legion Go because I found, to be fair, I found a really good deal on it with the dock as well and the case and it had a screen protector on it as well and it's literally pristine condition. So I was like, let's do it. So I got it.
And the size of it is quite surprising when you're used to the steam deck. It's been like, ⁓ it actually is quite a bit bigger and not really as portable, let's face it. And the thermals on it are quite different to the steam deck as well, because it is a Hossa unit. know, it's got a, it's got a more powerful chip in it. And the first time I used it properly, I've sat in bed.
And you've got to be way more careful with the intakes on this compared to the Steam Deck. I think because of the size and the shape of it as well. Like I was laying in bed and it sort of propped up as you do on a, a gamer pillow or anything, just a pretty standard pillow. your hands and stuff ache after a while. Cause it's not exactly light. You know, you can't just sit there like that. might drop it on your head.
Jason (38:31)
Shameful admission, I have dropped the Steam Deck on my face.
Liam (38:35)
Yeah, I think a lot of people have been there. so I had it propped up, but the vent must have been ever so slightly covered up just a bit by the pillow and it just turned itself off because it got too hot. Whereas I've literally never in the years that I've been through multiple Steam decks had anything like that happen.
And so I tested it. tested covering up just a little bit and the temperatures absolutely skyrockets. It's insane. You've got to be so much more careful. ⁓ from that, I mean, it's really good. And what's really interesting though is the power difference at the higher wattage between the Steam Deck and the Legion Go. Look, I wasn't really sold on the newer handhelds like it.
because you look at all the benchmarks and stuff and you think, okay, yeah, there is a difference, but is it worth it? And turns out it is. If you don't really care about the battery level because the battery.
Jason (39:43)
That's a big if. Big if. Just to kind of paint the picture, know, the Steam Deck's APU ⁓ maxes out at 15 watts and the Z1 Extreme on the Legion Go maxes out at 30 watts. So it's literally double the power. It's not quite double the performance, but yeah. And that's why I ended up getting the Legion Go S because it felt like a Steam Deck 1.5.
Liam (39:46)
It sure really sucks.
I know I need to double the performances.
kind of wish that I went for that one, but the deal on this was so good because the issue is, it's the controllers and there is some wobble to it. And I've said before the show started, like I'm walking around one hand carrying it around and I'm like, is this going to detach? And is a hundreds of pounds going to hit my
Jason (40:30)
It looks just massive sitting in your hand. you show us the front again? Doesn't it have one large touchpad? ⁓ Does it have a large touchpad? Yeah, okay, so it's got a Steam Deck sized touchpad. Which is nice, that opens up a lot more. Have you tried Arc Raiders on it or anything? Yes.
Liam (40:39)
I say.
Surprisingly,
⁓ games like Ark Raid and stuff actually work quite well on it. I've been doing God of War Ragnarok on it as well. yeah, surprisingly good. All it does is make me want a Steam Deck 2. Because I've seen what a little bit of extra generation can do in terms of performance. But we want that higher performance with the battery level.
This would be better and just Valve, save me. Please.
Jason (41:23)
Yes. Save us from the ridiculously overpriced MSI clause and Legion Go 2s and, and I mean, yeah. If, if Bill from Nerd Nest is watching this, I feel like Bill right now because he's always the guy who has to drop the bad news on people. But I don't know. I don't think we're going to see a Steam Deck 2 even announced until, until this, this rampocalypse and AI bubble, you know, goes away. So.
Liam (41:36)
I'm sorry.
Jason (41:52)
But I'm glad you're enjoying your new toy. I don't have any new toys to talk about, but ⁓ that's okay.
There was a GDC 2026 report.
Nick (42:05)
with the developers testing their games on the deck.
Liam (42:09)
So the GDC report was, which platform have you used for your most recent game or project?
Jason (42:18)
PC
by the way stands for Game Developers Conference.
Liam (42:20)
And in response to the question, the Steam Deck was at 28 % and then Linux was down at 8%. Which is,
Jason (42:32)
Double, I mean, which is, I thought that was high, actually.
Nick (42:36)
And even on the Steam Deck, we have to remember that all Linux gaming on Steam itself is less than 4 % in terms of market share. So if 28 % of the developers making those games are looking at Linux as a platform, I think that's pretty big. I think it shows that you don't need 25, 30, 40, 50 % market share to actually get the games and the testing and the support. It's kind of the same situation as Mac OS, which for a while never really
cracked above 10%, now it's way higher than that, but for a while it was like 10 % and they still got the applications, some amount of games, a developer attention. I think it shows that we don't need to have like 20 % overtake windows. With 10 % market share, can probably just have enough attention.
Jason (43:24)
Yeah.
Liam (43:25)
If you look in the further details of the Atul survey, they had another question of what were developers interested in building for there. The Steam Deck shot up to 40 % and Linux by itself was at 12%. So there's a lot of interest in the Steam Deck, but it all goes back to Proton. Developers don't necessarily have to be interested or have to be working.
Jason (43:46)
Yeah.
Liam (43:53)
on Steam Deck or Linux because Valve has done most of the work for them.
Jason (43:59)
What stood out to me about this report is the way that the Steam Deck was framed in a lot of the coverage. And the question is which platform or platforms have been used for your most recent game or project. Now, unsurprisingly, PC is at 83%, right? PlayStation, 47%. Xbox, 40%. So when you look at it, when you look at those three and seeing Steam Deck at 28%, that's really impressive.
just under Xbox, right? But here's what stood out to me is that more developers, more game developers were using, were targeting Steam Deck than they were Android or iOS. And I don't, my understanding of GDC, because I've attended GDC before, it's not just a like non-mobile gaming game developers conference, right? The largest gaming platform in the world is still mobile.
I know we don't really acknowledge that, but it's true. We don't like to talk about it because we don't, we don't game on those platforms, but, but that's huge. That's huge to me. The Steam Deck was higher than the Nintendo Switch in that survey. Also huge. So it's, it was just interesting to me that it was framed as, you know, the actual headline is less than a third of devs are interested in Steam Deck.
Liam (45:19)
Well, that is part of the problem with clickbait media and all these content farms though, isn't it? They all try and hook people in with outlandish stuff, with super negative stuff. They're always going to pick apart something to make a fancy headline to make something better than it is or worse than it is.
Jason (45:40)
Because know all the Steam Deck fans were flocking to that article going, RAAAGH!
Liam (45:44)
Yeah
Nick (45:46)
And all the Steam Deck haters when they're saying, see?
Jason (45:51)
Linux only 8 % but man that's huge! mean I thought that was an amazing like positive bit of news coming out of what has been a lot of bad negative news in the gaming world. So I recently started playing with Cache OS and how do we pronounce Cache? Is it catchy? I've heard catchy and cashy.
Nick (46:16)
Most people in my comments tell me it's catchy because it's based like on Cachy. But I've also seen people saying no it's catchy because it's the cat shit.
Jason (46:21)
Right, CH.
All right, how do you guys pronounce Cachy OS? Let us know in the comments. So I started playing with that About Cachy. Yeah, it makes sense
Liam (46:37)
I just say catchy. Catchy OS. but now I'm questioning.
Nick (46:43)
You look.
Jason (46:44)
English is dumb. English is dumb. ⁓
Nick (46:48)
I'm saying that as a French man.
Liam (46:49)
Yeah
Nick (46:52)
Stupidest language in all Europe
Jason (46:55)
So
I saw it, I saw it. Man, that's kind of harsh.
So I saw this video on YouTube and it was a benchmark comparison pitting Windows 11 versus Cache OS on a Radeon RX 580, which is from 2016 or 2017. After I saw that, I was like, okay, I gotta check out Cache OS now. I'm finally gonna jump from Bazite and tinker around with Cache a little bit.
You know, the results were mixed as they normally are between Windows and Linux gaming. ⁓ But what was hilarious is he just did these side-by-side, you know, split-screen benchmark runs. And the first one was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and it just wouldn't run on Windows at all. was just sitting there like with an error message while the cachey OS version ran.
And I later discovered that the amazing wizards who were working the open source graphics stack, the Mesa stack, they implemented some kind of ray tracing emulation so that a card like the Radeon RX 580 that doesn't have any ray tracing capabilities can still run this game that you can't play on Windows. And it actually performed reasonably well.
at 1080p. I was like, that's really interesting. And then later on in the video, they tried a Spider-Man remastered, believe, and that just threw another driver error on Windows while the Casio S benchmark is just, you know, running without any issues. And so that was really interesting. That prompted me, I haven't finished the video yet, but around the same time, I was doing a Bazite versus Windows 11.
gaming comparison on this little Ace Magic mini PC, which uses, I don't remember the exact, because the AMD's CPU names are just ridiculous, but it's like the Ryzen 9 AIHX something, something, something, but it uses Radeon 890M integrated graphics, which are pretty good. And so I thought, well, this will be an interesting test. So, you know, I updated everything. I loaded up like six different games.
And a really interesting trend emerged when I was looking at the side-by-side footage and while I was actually playing those in full screen, in terms of average FPS, Bazite won every single benchmark. Windows, on the other hand, won when it came to the 1 % lows, which are kind of like, this is the best bad experience that you can have.
So that's a good way of measuring what the actual experience is like. Windows, for the most part, won all of those by two or three frames per second. But when you look at the video, there's no debating it. The Windows versions of all of those games have terrible screen tearing, they have micro stutter, whereas the Bazite versions, even though they weren't just blowing away windows, were super smooth and stutter free.
I made the title of the video, FPS Isn't Everything, and it's clearly not. I don't know if that kind of behavior ⁓ will persist on a stronger, ⁓ more performant, dedicated AMD Radeon graphics card, but I was genuinely surprised to see that. I wasn't expecting the Windows visual experience, like how it feels to play that game, to be so terrible.
Liam (50:46)
It
brings up an interesting point then when you talk about, especially with like older GPUs, know, stuff that AMD, Nvidia and so on have moved on from a long time ago. It's a stark comparison between proprietary drivers and open source drivers because going back to your mention of the Radeon RX 580, which is, you know, is quite old and even older stuff. When it comes to the open source Mazer graphics drivers,
A lot of what goes into it is not glamorous work. It's not going to be earning companies money and so on, but because the drivers are open source, anyone can go and look at them. Anyone can go and improve them. And this is what happens. This is what happens all the time with anything related to open source. And we see it constantly in open source graphics drivers. They're improving so many little things all the time for cards that aren't just from the last couple of years. It's such a huge benefit.
Nick (51:45)
We've seen that with, I think it was cards for AMD cards based on the GCN 1.0 and 1.1 architectures, which are cards from like 2012, 2014. And they ported them from using the old Radeon driver to the new AMD GPU driver, which means that now they can have Vulkan support. And so they can use DXVK and VKD3D and run some games. Those are older, I think, than the RX 580. And so now they can use DXVK and play Windows games.
Jason (52:15)
I mean they're much older I think.
Nick (52:19)
Like those 70,000 series or something. pretty, pretty. Yeah. And these will now be able to play some games using DXVK, probably older games, but they use the modern driver that every other card uses, which is insane, I think.
Jason (52:22)
7000 series.
That's
it. mean, as far as I'm aware, that's not that's simply not possible on Windows, right? I don't think it is. I don't to stick one of those cards. You would just get driver error after driver error like this card's not supported. Forget it.
Nick (52:39)
don't think so.
Liam (52:42)
think of you.
And a benefit of open source, what company is going to be going back to their GPUs that are 10 years old?
Jason (52:56)
⁓
Fine wine. It's something that it's like a prophetic thing that AMD has said for more than a decade about their GPUs. They age like fine wine. And now I'm realizing, you know, I first heard that phrase when I worked at AMD. Now I'm realizing they probably have always said that because of the wonderful open source community that helps them age like fine wine, where everything else is just, I got upgraded after, you know, four years at the most because nothing is supported anymore.
And I feel like Linux is in such a great position right now, especially in light of the rampocalypse and the fact that, know, PC building is not a thing people are going to be doing in 2026. You know, they're really not. It's going to tank. but having all of this older hardware supported and being able to get, literally get free performance out of these older graphics cards and this, these older CPUs even.
is wonderful and I think that might even have a small knock on effect for how many people migrate over from Windows to Linux in the next year.
Liam (54:03)
I could argue the other side though that this is not some sort of free performance boost or anything. This is a performance that perhaps we should have had a long time ago. There's only more of a focus on it in recent years, but that's not to just get it all the way that's going into it. The people doing it, you know, are amazing. They're about a billion times smarter than me. But the point is, again, it's open source, so anyone can go in and find.
Jason (54:26)
That's a good
Liam (54:31)
where this performance has been left on the table and get it in there. Propriety drivers suck. Let's have open source drivers for everything.
Nick (54:40)
We see this in all areas. It's mostly AMD, but we see this on Intel. We have those good efforts on NVK, Nuvo or Nova, which might at some point take over when they're done with it. And we've seen some Vulkan extensions also being added specifically to target using DXVK and emulating the way DirectX does things.
We've seen a new Wayland protocol being proposed for ⁓ better timing, so better frame timings in full screen applications. So all of this combines, I think, to just not only maybe catch up on the performance that we might have had or might not have had compared to the equivalent Windows driver, but I think it will at some point add up to overcome this, maybe to surpass it, at least on recent hardware, I'd say. It's not all sad news.
Jason (55:30)
Yay, happy stuff.
It's not all bad, Yeah.
Liam (55:34)
We do have some sort of good news.
Right. So we had GeForce Now, they've officially launched the native Linux app for their cloud gaming service. So they originally had it just for the Steam Deck. It was only supported on the Steam Deck and people had various sort of workarounds, but now it's officially supported starting with Ubuntu. But because it's a flat pack, you can try and run it on basically anything. So I had pre-release success to it.
I tested it on Fedora, even though they said I really should have been doing it on Ubuntu. I was like, I'm going to do it on what I run. Thank you.
Nick (56:22)
You could ask them why they made a Flatpak if the platform that they support is Ubuntu, which doesn't come with Flatpak pre-installed.
Jason (56:22)
You
Ha
Liam (56:31)
I did consider making a joke about that, but it wasn't worth it. with GeForce now, the tech behind it is genuinely really impressive. 99 % of the time, unless I'm literally really studying the picture, you cannot tell that it's not running locally. And they have done some absolute magic on the input as well. Because again,
I couldn't tell that it wasn't local. was playing like Call of Duty Warzone, Rainbow Six, Siege, can't talk today apparently, Fortnite and a few other games.
Jason (57:11)
so you were clearly targeting Windows-only games.
Liam (57:15)
Yeah, yeah. So games that we couldn't play necessarily on Linux because they have a complete block due to their anti-cheat, which is where cloud gaming like GeForce Now can be a bit of a savior. And it does work really, really well. If not just if your internet is good enough though, but your router needs to be good enough. And as I found out the wifi chips.
in your laptops need to be reasonably good as well so I was testing it on the
Jason (57:48)
Wi-Fi
6 or 7 at least, right?
Liam (57:50)
Yeah, so I tested it on my desktop, ethernet, direct to the router, absolutely flawless. ⁓
Then I tried it on my laptop and I got a bit confused because I tried it over the wireless, made sure it was over a five gigahertz connection. Now I've got a modern router and this is a semi modern laptop. And I thought, well, okay, I'm only playing at 1080p on the laptop. It was, it was awful. I was, it was dropping frames all over the place. It just couldn't handle it. So I plugged in a USB to ethernet connection and then on the laptop, it was, it was perfect.
But on my Steam deck, GeForce Now is perfectly fine over Wi-Fi. yeah, it's really weird. it just seems like certain Wi-Fi chips are just not good enough to do it. So there's a lot of downsides to it. Like you need the bandwidth for it. You need a good router. You need a good Wi-Fi connection to your router or the ethernet. And you got to pay for it every month. Let's not forget that. Like it's not cheap. You're renting space.
Yeah. In the cloud, it's somebody else's computer in the cloud somewhere, you know, and for even their most basic level outside of, you know, playing for free where you got hard limits of like an hour, you're paying nine, nine pounds 99 a month. And yet you've still got a hundred hour limit. it's, yeah, it's, it's a tricky one because I've seen a lot of comments from people talking about how
especially with the AI price rises that we touched on earlier how you will own nothing and you will be happy about it and stuff. I'm sure some of you have heard that line.
Jason (59:33)
and be happy about it. Well, let me tell you about a completely unrelated news topic, Sarcasm, sarcasm intended. There are multiple, and in my opinion, believable rumors that Nvidia will not release a new consumer grade graphics card until 2028 because of the RAM shortage. So it's interesting, isn't it? I would not put it past someone
high up in the C-suite at Nvidia going, you know, we should, we should, I mean, we've got all of this AI hardware. We've got all these data centers. Now is the perfect time to just push GeForce Now onto everybody since we're not selling new GPUs. And I'm a little suspicious. I'm a little suspicious of it.
Nick (1:00:18)
It could very well be that. still don't think that many people would jump on it because as you said, Liam, if you have the connection, if you have the chip, if you have the proper internet hardware in general to run it, the experience can be fantastic. And I think that's fine. And I think that really helps also for Linux. We might say anything we want about Nvidia as a company about how they treated Linux in the past, how they still treat Linux in some ways, but
It is still a way to play some games that you wouldn't be able to play otherwise on Linux. So it is a help. It is helping hands to transition to Linux. I don't think it's going to work for a lot of people. Me personally, my gaming PC is in my office. My office just simply cannot access ⁓ ethernet because it's just way too far away from the router in the house. So I have to use Wi-Fi and the speeds is just never going to be good enough.
So I could never rely on that solution. And I think many people just do not have fast enough internet all over the world to use that. But it's still pretty helpful. I think it's still pretty good.
Jason (1:01:26)
I guess if I remove all my hate for AI and data centers and the rampocalypse and all that, it's interesting, because I didn't actually, to be honest, I hadn't considered the fact that people could jump onto Linux, sign up for GeForce Now, even on the free tier, and play a little bit of Call of Duty or Fortnite or any of those. That's interesting. That's an interesting angle.
Liam (1:01:51)
The problem with the free tier though is there's a lot of hard limits on it. You don't get the full catalog. You only get about an hour a session before you get kicked out and you have to go back in again.
Jason (1:02:02)
⁓ yeah. All right. Well, I will acknowledge that it is pretty, it is, is pretty cool that Nvidia is putting effort into developing a native app for Linux. I think that any, any large company that's developing a native app for Linux, kudos, you know, because content is king, right? And where there is software, the more software that people have to use, then the more attractive the platform becomes.
Of course you can. You can always have a rant, man. Go for it. ⁓
Liam (1:02:40)
So why is it that seemingly every consumer device ever made nowadays needs some form of blinding light on it? What is going on? Everything seems to have a light that, especially at night in my bedroom, I'm a really light sleeper as well and it all keeps me awake. But touching back on the Legion Go for a moment, if I may.
Whose bright idea was it? Oh, bright idea. Whose bright idea was it to have, when it's in sleep mode, the button every three seconds will flash. And if that's in a dark room at night, it's literally like you're being flash banged repeatedly every three seconds. Whose bright idea is it to do things like this? how else would you? I could turn that off.
Jason (1:03:36)
How else would you know it's
Liam (1:03:39)
Right now it's asleep, but you wouldn't know that.
Jason (1:03:42)
Yes. My, my Legion Go S does the same thing. And it is confirmed to very annoying. Yeah.
Liam (1:03:50)
It's because it's not it's not exactly a low light either. I mean, it's quite a flash. Why does everything need it? It's so annoying.
Jason (1:04:02)
I have so many devices that do that. It makes me kind of angry. By default, I have this, I mean, I've seen it on two laptops that I've owned, both Asus laptops for what it's worth. And one has this like red, it has this lighting strip around the bottom base. And by default, you can turn it off, but by default, you can turn it off in Windows, I should say. So if you don't...
If you don't turn that off in windows and then move over to Linux, you're kind of stuck, right? You're stuck with this, this behavior. unless the, the ASUS, ⁓ ASUS Linux kernel solves that, which I might have to look into anyway. It has this light strip and it flashes red when it's in sleep mode. man. I'm like, and it's, know, it's a 17 inch laptop. It's bright. So I always just shut it down because anyway.
This month, we want to hear about your most surprising gaming experience on Linux. Yeah, just tell us in the comments. Just whatever, like whatever has surprised you, pleasantly surprised you for Linux gaming in the past few months. And Nick, you got something to say about that.
Nick (1:05:26)
Yeah, because turns out I had never really swapped GPUs on my gaming PC running Linux. So I recently found out that my RX 6650 XT was starting to struggle a little bit. It was plugged into a 4K TV. used FSR. I used Nobara on that PC, but we talked about the experience previously, but it's not the best. ⁓ So the upscaling worked, but performance was...
iffy in a few titles so I just said yeah just like Liam like hey I'm gonna treat myself as well I want to buy something new so I bought a 9060 XT which is a big boost in profanity
Jason (1:06:08)
It's
serious upgrade, yeah.
Nick (1:06:10)
And so I opened the computer, just plugged the card in, rebooted, and I had to do literally nothing for it to work. And I was not used to that. I've been using Linux for a long while and I know instinctively that, the driver is up. They're there. They're the same. Shouldn't cause any issues if it's at least AMD. And yeah, so I just opened the games and they just ran like 40 % better. I could just crank up the resolution, put on ray tracing.
Jason (1:06:37)
That's awesome.
Nick (1:06:38)
FSR on the highest quality possible and I've got literally the same frame rate but twice the graphics quality basically. I was like yeah that's that's kind of cool like nothing to install no drivers to look up nothing to uninstall to reinstall something else just just nice.
Jason (1:06:54)
It's nice. Linux, it just works. No, I recently interviewed Ed Crissler from Sapphire Tech. I don't know if you guys have heard of Sapphire Tech, but he does North American PR for Sapphire Tech, which is a AMD Radeon graphics card partner. And he recently switched from Windows to Linux after like, I mean, a lifetime of Windows gaming. And he kind of expressed the same. He was shocked.
by the fact that he's obviously using AMD hardware, right? He's got whatever he wants at his disposal. And he threw a 9800 XT into his Bazzite box and he was just waiting for something to go wrong and he just didn't understand why is it just working. I didn't have to do anything. So cool.
Nick (1:07:41)
Yeah, I knew that was the expected experience on Linux like you have your drivers. They're installed They support that card there should be nothing wrong But I was still expecting something to go wrong like a config not updating a resolution mismatch or something, but no nothing just yes, that's
Jason (1:08:01)
Or
maybe FSR not being implemented right or HDR or something, right? There's a lot that can go wrong. I guess my expectations of that were kind of shaken when I did, back in the day I reviewed the Radeon 6800 XT when I was at Forbes. And obviously I tried it on Linux too, and it just... You got a 6800 XT? It's a great card. Now it's a fantastic card. It's awesome card on Linux. But when it launched, like day one,
Liam (1:08:19)
That's what I
Jason (1:08:30)
That thing would not run on Linux. would not.
Nick (1:08:33)
remember
your coverage on this at the time. Yeah. You had to go to a like development version of Mesa and compile something.
Jason (1:08:40)
It was crazy. had Wendell from Level One Techs was trying to help me out and it still didn't work. And like that guy's literally brilliant. ⁓ So yeah, we've come a long way since then. All right, I guess for this last segment, before we say goodbye, let's talk about what we're playing. Because we haven't really talked a lot about what we're actually enjoying in the Linux gaming. We've talked about Linux gaming, but not actually what we're playing. So who wants to go first?
Everybody don't know.
Liam (1:09:17)
I've been building up a bit of an army of cats lately in this tiny little indie game that no one's probably ever heard of before called Mew Jiddix which is actually massive like they've had an incredible steam release and I think they said they made their development budget back in like 12 hours or something stupid like that I think it was three
Jason (1:09:42)
Pretty sure it was three hours. years of development cost. made it back in the first three hours of release.
Liam (1:09:49)
Wow. Neugenics is a fantastic ⁓ tactical strategy game where you build up an army of completely screwed up cats, basically. It's the only way to describe it. It's mental. And if you've played ⁓ the Binding of Isaac or The End is Nigh, it's by the same people who made that. So it's got their very dark and...
Jason (1:10:01)
It's
Liam (1:10:17)
interesting style to it, know, where there's a lot of poop involved.
Jason (1:10:22)
Edmund McMillan has made the binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy and The End is Nigh. So I guess we understand now why it's selling so well. It's got a pretty good track record. ⁓
Liam (1:10:37)
Apart from that, I actually jumped back into the original XCOM game, UFO Defense, because there was news recently that OpenXCOM is sort of switching hands. OpenXCOM is a modern open source game engine to run the original XCOM games. So you get all the modern features of high resolution and so on. ⁓ It's still one of the best turn-based strategy games ever made. And the audio...
still really creeps me out to this day because I originally played it on the Amiga if anybody remembers that the Amiga was amazing back in the day.
Jason (1:11:12)
Didn't know that was on the Amiga. That's
Liam (1:11:14)
Yeah,
I had the proper boxed version of it. I wish I still had it because that is such a gen. Also, literally in the last day, Diablo 2 had a Steam launch with a new character in it as well, a new character class that you can play in it. Diablo 2. Yeah, what a classic.
Nick (1:11:36)
Is it the remastered remake or is it the original?
Liam (1:11:40)
No, it's Diablo 2, ⁓ their newer edition that they did, but then they've updated that again and done a new class for the game. So I played it for a little bit this morning and it's even got gamepad support nowadays. So I was sitting back like, ⁓ this is amazing. ⁓
Jason (1:11:40)
Remaster.
Dang it, Leon. Yep. Well, I know the rest of them knew and that what I'm doing this weekend. That game's evil. Okay, ⁓ do you have to have a Battle.net account or Blizzard account to play it though?
Nick (1:12:17)
in for the third time, let's-
Liam (1:12:26)
Steam Deck verified, so it's supposed to be click and play, but the store page, interestingly or weirdly, I've got to bring it up to just double check. On the actual store page, you have to scroll down all the way to the bottom in the fine print below everything else it says, internet connection, Battle.net account and Battle.net desktop app required to play.
So what it actually does is it needs you to at least once every 30 days check that basically you have a-
Jason (1:13:02)
like to check in.
okay well that's not egregious that's not terrible
Liam (1:13:07)
There's no third party battle net app that actually loads. game, it is a native Steam game. It loads directly into the game. So think they might have copied and pasted that from something else somewhere.
Jason (1:13:20)
That makes it even more appealing in my opinion.
Liam (1:13:23)
It's just pure nostalgia. ⁓
Jason (1:13:27)
hate when I have to do anything involving Ubisoft Connect. ⁓
Nick (1:13:35)
It's gonna be my next game I'm gonna talk about.
Jason (1:13:41)
Go for it, go for it Nick. What are you playing?
Nick (1:13:43)
Yeah, so I know this game got a lot of flak when it released, which is Star Wars Outlaws. A lot of people really, really dunked on that game because it's Ubisoft, it's the Ubisoft open world. It just, at release apparently, it just ran really badly. There were some very annoying missions with auto fails, stealth sections, whatever. ⁓ They updated all that, they patched all of that out and...
I finished that game in about like 40 hours and I'll be honest, it's much better than what I thought it would be. I picked it up because it was pretty inexpensive during a steam sale. And it's not the usual Ubisoft formula. Like you don't get a map with a constellation of question marks that you feel obligated to go to. There are some of those, but a lot of the missions you just pick up by walking around.
leaning against a wall, listening to people talking, and they don't give you a map marker. They tell you, hey, you might want to go check out a, I don't know, a watershed thingy behind the little arch that looks like an L at the western end of this place. And you have to go look for it. They're not telling you, hey, this is where the treasure is, go pick it up. You have to go find it. And in a lot of missions, they just don't hold your hand everywhere.
to the point where some of the missions I just couldn't complete because I couldn't find the thing. I was running around and I like, where is that mine? I'm not seeing a mine and I never found it. So I just moved on to something else. But looking for the mine, I found other stuff on the map. That was pretty cool. You have a little bit of space combat, which is fine. You have a little bit ⁓ of a speeder bike that you can run, which is fine. The combat is nothing special, but it works. The stealth is nothing special, but it works.
but you do have that really cool Star Wars feel. Like you move into a cantina, you talk with the underworld people, there's no Jedi's running around cutting everyone to pieces, which sometimes is cool to not have that in your Star Wars stuff. It just has that nice Star Wars feel. You feel like you're like a smuggler or something like that. It's cool. It works well. ⁓ I think it's not as bad as people made it out to be, but it does need the Ubisoft launcher.
It will auto-connect, probably auto-linking something with your Steam account, but...
Jason (1:16:08)
If you've already connected those right otherwise you have connection problems
Nick (1:16:10)
you've already connected it.
Then sometimes when the game crashes, it will tell you, hey, there's a mismatch between your local cloud save and the one you'd have to click on something. But if you're playing with a game pad, you can't select that. So you have to go get your mouse, go click on something. There's no game pad support at all on this thing. And it also creates some controller problems because if the controller you used ⁓ was already connected to your PC when you start the game,
in the middle of your PlayStation, will disconnect. And so you're gonna have to start the game with a controller and connect another controller once you're in the game's menu and use that one instead because that one won't disconnect. That's stupid. It's reported all over the ProtonDB page. It's not just me. I looked it up. Some people don't have the issue, but I had it with the DualShock 5 and with an Xbox One controller as well. That was very annoying. apart from that, decent game.
Jason (1:17:08)
I gotta be honest, I avoided it because I was just so burned out on the typical like Ubisoft open world formula. Like I don't wanna just dump 80 hours into a bunch of fetch quests and you know, having my hand held during everything. But that's okay. That's kind of refreshing to hear.
Nick (1:17:23)
You have those aspects if you want to do them, but none of them are mandatory. There's no player level, there's no gear gating, whatever. You just need to do what you want. You can find pieces to improve your ship, your blaster, but you do them at your own pace. You're going to try a mission, you're going to say, okay, these guys are just tanking all my shots. Maybe I need to upgrade my blaster, but it's not like, ⁓ you have found a blaster level 15. It's a blue rare item or whatever. You just...
Go pick up a piece that you need to upgrade the blaster. You know what that piece is. You just need to find who's going to sell it to you or where you're going to find it. And then you go back to your workshop and you upgrade your blaster and you're good to go. So it just removes a lot of the tedious stuff, the level gating and all of that stuff that can be super annoying in Ubisoft titles sometimes. means you can probably finish the game in like 25 hours without doing most of the side content. I definitely didn't 100 % the game at all.
but you can still just pick the things that you find fun.
Jason (1:18:24)
is
good. There's definitely no grind like required. exactly. ⁓ that's good. That's good.
Nick (1:18:31)
Other games I played, Tabletop Simulator, is something that probably not a lot of people are familiar with. Basically, we use it to play Warhammer 40k when you cannot meet in person over a gaming table. And it has a bunch of plugins to replicate all of that experience. Like, you have all the cards that you can draw for the missions you have to do.
of dice and all the miniatures have been modeled in 3D so you can just import them and drop them onto the thing and you have your actual miniatures painted and all of that. It's really cool and it's a native Linux game as well. You don't even need Proton.
Jason (1:19:08)
How are all those assets added? Is it just community adding those assets?
Nick (1:19:11)
Yeah, it's community stuff.
You have a complete plugin system that implements basically a full gaming table, all the terrain that you need on it, all the objective markers and whatever. And then you have another one where you can just say, hey, I'm importing my army list that I made for my 2000 points army of Warhammer 40k. And it's automatically going to go fetch the miniatures online, download them, and you can just drop them onto the table. And there you go. Super fun, really cool.
Not as good as a real in-person game of 40k of course, because you don't have the beers and the banter, not as much, but it's still pretty cool, pretty fun. And native Linux game.
Jason (1:19:49)
They, a lot of people use that for like D and D, right? Okay. That's really cool.
Nick (1:19:53)
That's so cute.
And then I've been dabbling a little bit with Crash Bandicoot 4, which I already finished, but my completionist brain sees that you've only got 36 % of achievements and I'm like, I should push that a little bit over the top. And then I look at everything that is in this game. It is mental. You have to replay each level like 20 times to get everything. And I just gave up.
Jason (1:20:18)
⁓ I will I would never much I will never try to Try to hundred percent a platforming game because that's like my weakness as a genre I I suck it and crash bandicoot 4 is gets hard. It pretty difficult
Nick (1:20:33)
Yeah, it's difficult. like, there's, I think, 10, 20 gems per level if you do the mirror version of each level, which means you have to finish them like, yeah, 10, 20 times, sometimes without dying, which means you're gonna have like a thousand tries on that level before you manage that. It's insane. So I just gave up. I said, you know what? Screw that. I'm never going above like 40 % achievements. That's it. ⁓
Jason (1:20:59)
Well, I've been playing a lot of games lately, more than usual, but I'm not going to talk about all of them. If I had to, to recommend strongly, strongly recommend one game that I've played in the last month, Super Woden Rally Edge. So this is a racing game. It's a rally racing game developed by a single developer who also did the super, there's a Super Woden GP series.
And I believe this is the third game in the series, but it's quite different in terms of like how it feels and how it looks. So it's a rally racing game that is sort of a mix between an isometric top down view and a behind the car view. what's in it's, I'm gonna have some footage because I have recorded a whole lot of footage for this game. It is a bit like art of rally. Yeah, it's that same kind of approach, like more simple graphics. ⁓
Liam (1:21:49)
Art of Rally then.
Jason (1:21:56)
and a, you know, not quite a top-down view, but more of a behind the car from high up, right? And what's great about it is it just, has sort of the soul of old Gran Turismo and Sega Rally games from both the visuals and the music. The music, I would actually, like I would just sit there and play the soundtrack, the in-game music room, and just listen to the soundtrack because it's just banger after banger.
Liam (1:22:26)
you
Jason (1:22:28)
you
amazing soundtrack for a $12 game developed by one person. And he did half of the music as well. And there's another, I think, band or musician that contributed the other half of the soundtrack. But absolutely like the best soundtrack I've heard in years in a video game, no lie. And it's just great. It's a bunch of like fictional tracks.
It's what you would expect out of a rally racing game. It's intense. have a co-driver who's shouting out the next turn just in time. So you just like barely have enough time to react to like a, you know, to like a hairpin right or a bridge or an obstacle on the road. you're in, it's just, ⁓ it's an absolute blast. And it performs really, really well in Steam Deck and handhelds. And I mean, it's 13 bucks and it's got like head to head.
It has, you know, you're racing on ice, on gravel, on asphalt, all these different surfaces. It's got local multiplayer, split-screen multiplayer. It's a pretty good package for a $12 indie game developed by one person. I'm just, I'm in love with it.
Liam (1:24:11)
So
And it has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam as well, so...
Jason (1:24:24)
How many, if you're looking at it, how many ratings? ⁓ wow. It's grown a lot since I last played it. Wow. That's really cool. So another, another game I wanted to shout out hasn't really been talked about anywhere that I've seen. It is called game with balls. But it is a, it is designed with Steam Deck in mind. ⁓ it's designed for Steam Deck actually.
Liam (1:24:29)
Over a thousand. ⁓
Jason (1:24:53)
And do you guys remember as a kid, did you ever play with those like marble mazes? There was like a single marble inside of a kind of a wooden carved maze and you would, and you would tilt and rotate until the marble, you know, you found its way to the hole. That's what this game is, except you use the gyro sensors on the Steam Deck to do that. And that's all it is. It's very basic. They look like a ton of different hand carved mazes and it's like $6.
And if you don't have a steam deck, you can use a dual sense, a sunny dual sense controller to, do the, the motion controls. It's great. Simple mechanic works perfectly well. Feels very realistic. Like the, you know, the physics react the way that the marble reacts the way that it should. And it's just, yeah, it's a lot of fun. I also have been playing Karen. What? Just tell me what's your, what's your reaction?
Liam (1:25:49)
I bought it the other day and I haven't started it yet but I really want to play it.
Jason (1:25:56)
stressful. It is such a stressful game, but I love it. So let me, all right, let me set up for people who haven't heard of it. This is essentially a climbing simulator. So the main character is tasked with climbing this kind of Everest style peak that has a reputation for killing people on the way up. And it is gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous.
everything around you just just stunning scenery. ⁓ But you actually the the core mechanic of the game is climbing and so it's so hard to describe because I'm not a climber and so I don't know all the technical jargon but you know you'll end up picking up like all the equipment that you need on the way and there's a survival element to where you have to make sure that you're rested and you're fed and you have
You know, you're going into like rivers to do fishing or you're, you know, you're collecting water from a waterfall so you can have water and it's sort of interesting because It's almost like you're working in tandem with the main character so you're choosing Where to climb like what is the right crack? What's the right foothold? You're taking into account like the angle of the of the of the rock, you know, are you on an overhang?
Are your hands chalked up? There's so much to it. But in almost every surface of the game's rock climbing, there is a route. There is a way to get up the mountain, but it just takes a lot of like patience and studying and understanding of physics. And it actually made me feel like it made me want to go climb and I'm scared of heights and I still want to go go climbing because it's just so inspirational.
I don't know how else to describe it. It's ⁓ really intense and it's really, really well done.
Liam (1:27:59)
So, Karen is like a really serious version of Peak. Peak is a online co-op climbing game. If you like playing games with friends online, it's a genuinely good one.
Jason (1:28:18)
Interesting. let's check it out. Is it only co-op or can you play by yourself?
Liam (1:28:23)
And
you can play by yourself. It's challenging either way. But Can and Peek are like two sides of the same coin by the looks of it. Peek's more funny. You're with friends, whereas Cayan's really serious and like really simulator. Yeah.
Jason (1:28:41)
Yeah. I really appreciate that they have a lot of different assists. So if you don't want to play as hardcore, you can like, for example, just turn off survival so you don't have to worry about eating or resting and you just focus on the climbing, right? If you want to, you can manually take over which limb you're controlling. Cause normally the game will sort of automatically choose which limb you're controlling while you're climbing. But you can take that over manually. And like I said, there's just so much depth to it.
And then if you want, I think once you finish, I haven't finished the climb yet. And a lot of people have not. There's a lot of dying involved. but you can actually do like free solo with permadeath and free solo means no harness, no safety equipment. And when you're dead, you're dead. So, pretty, pretty crazy.
Liam (1:29:33)
I'm gonna have to load that up tonight. Yeah, you saw that on there.
Jason (1:29:37)
Just, ⁓ just, I will just say Liam, it's going to work. It's going to run okay on your, ⁓ your Legion Go, but on your Steam Deck, it's going to be pretty. Like dipping below 30 FPS frequently. So even though it's Steam Deck verified. Anyway, what are you going to say Nick?
Liam (1:29:54)
Yeah.
Nick (1:29:59)
I was gonna say do not look up free solo videos online of real people actually doing free solo because that is absolutely... There's one guy called I think Alex Honnold which does a lot of that stuff and the guy climbs like buildings, towers, like 30 story buildings full of just made out of glass and he's climbing that without any harness.
Jason (1:30:06)
It's terrifying.
Let's
the Taipei 101.
Nick (1:30:25)
I think that's what he did. And he did a lot of mountains as well. sometimes even the cameraman in one of the documentaries, the cameraman just wants to stop filming because it's like so harrowing to him to see that guy dangling like hundreds of meters of the great. It's insane. Yeah.
Jason (1:30:41)
Like I went hiking with a buddy of mine once in Yosemite and he went like up to the edge of a cliff and sat down and had his legs dangling over the side and I couldn't even look. That gave me anxiety so. I'm very afraid of heights. wouldn't be able to handle that.
Liam (1:31:01)
I'm not necessarily afraid of heights, but I get vertigo quite badly. I can't even look up something really high without being like, ⁓ It'll be interesting to see because I really enjoyed in depth stranding the movement mechanics to it and the travel and stuff, which is why I think I would quite like the climbing in Cannes. We'll soon see.
Jason (1:31:27)
I you will. mean, you feel so accomplished in that game, even if you're even if you just scale like a ⁓ 12 foot rock face, you know, and get to like a clearing, it just feel you feel so accomplished after every short little section. The last thing I want to mention really, really briefly is I finally discovered Exodus. And ⁓ I guess that's been around for like five or six years, but I finally got it. And holy crap, is it amazing? It's it's like this collection of a very
lovingly curated collection of old DOS games. And there has been a Linux patch enabling you to run it perfectly fine on Linux. And I highly recommend getting like, there's a, there's like a media package, a huge, I don't know, like 60 gigs or something. It's just absolutely massive, but it makes the experience so ⁓ immersive because like, for example, I'm playing Wing Commander 4 right now.
in the library, in the interface, the Exodus interface, like you can look at behind the scenes videos of Wing Commander. You can read all the reviews that came out. It links to like CNN news stories about the game and just all kinds of stuff, behind the scenes, everything. And it really, it's like just this expansive multimedia package for every single game in that collection. And I can't imagine the amount of effort that went into
putting all of this stuff together in the name of game preservation and it's free. yeah, highly recommended. EXO DOS, EXO DOS. That's all I got. So don't forget to tell us about your favorite, no, not your favorite. Don't forget to tell us about, don't forget to tell us about your most surprising Linux gaming experience lately. And you guys want to plug anything?
anything you're doing, any videos you want to point out, any articles, anything.
Nick (1:33:27)
Not specifically. Nope.
Jason (1:33:30)
And as usual, we will not be sharing our social media accounts for whatever reason because it just doesn't, I don't know. I don't know. it's been a lot of fun engaging with all of you guys in the comments from the last videos that we did. And I'm just really happy that you guys are enjoying this. anyway, until we chat again, you guys take care and take care of each other and we'll see you in the next one.
Liam (1:34:01)
you