Russ

I can’t speak for Epic Launcher games (I know that Heroic Games Launcher exists but I’ve not personally tried it with Epic games) however Blizzard games absolutely can be played in SteamOS - you can utilize something like Bottles or Lutris to install the Blizzard launcher, and then download the games from it as normal and run them. It is how I originally played Diablo 4 on my Deck before I picked it up again on Steam. I swear I remember both Bottles and Lutris even having an “Add to Steam” option to integrate shortcuts directly into Steam (and thus, coming up in the Gaming Mode UI) but don’t quote me on that one.

Blizzard games are actually some of the earliest non-Linux-native games that I remember running very well back in the days where we just had Wine (before Proton, DXVK, etc) which is something that always impressed me.

This statement is false!

Turbo Golf Racing

It’s pretty much “Rocket League meets golf”, with two different types of modes:

• Racing: Everyone has a ball that they’re pushing in real time as quickly as they can to the goal
• Golf: Everyone has a ball that they’re trying to get into the goal with as few turns (its a turn based mode) as they can

Doesn’t have any microtransactions in it (aside from a couple of supporter packs that grant you a few cosmetic items), has an in-game “store” but they’re cosmetics that you unlock with currency that you get from playing and doing challenges (they can’t be purchased with “real” money).

I enjoy the fact that I can pick it up, play a few matches, and then put it down, which is one of the reasons I like to play Rocket League every now and then.

Do note that for the most part the game is multiplayer-only, like Rocket League. It has a time trial mode that can be played offline, but that’s about as far as it goes for offline/singleplayer content.

Runs fantastic on the Steam Deck (it is Deck verified) and I can easily reach 90FPS on my OLED Deck. It also of course runs perfectly on desktop as well via Proton.

Just ran into this exact problem this morning which was incredibly frustrating. Performed a routine system update, and I’m pretty sure I had a kernel panic (all input was non responsive, couldn’t even switch to a tty) in the middle of pacman’s upgrade phase.

While I was able to chroot into my install and reinstall the kernel, half of my system’s packages were left in an inconsistent state so I still couldn’t properly boot - and so I just nuked my root subvolume and reinstalled Arch (I suspect I could’ve somehow got the packages reinstalled if I wrangled for a while with pacman but it was just easier to reinstall at this point).

Atomic distros like Bazzite are designed to prevent that exact situation I ran into, unfortunately I just haven’t had enough time or energy to try to make my own custom image that has what I need in it (got kind of close with NixOS but that had its own issues), otherwise I’d probably be running that.

I had one of these done for an endoscopy - it ended horribly. It got “stuck” so I ended up having to have surgery for it to be removed.

Getting that surgery coordinated and scheduled took months all the while my health was declining. Eventually it got so bad that I couldn’t hold down food and I had to be pre-admitted to the hospital a month before the procedure and put on IV nutrition…

Granted I do have an autoimmune GI condition which is what prompted that test in the first place, and the chances of this happening is supposedly quite small but… Yeah I’ll take the endoscopy and colonoscopy over even that small chance of going through all of that all over again…

Let us know how it goes, and if you have any further questions, feel free to give us a shout!

Ah, gotcha - yeah that is definitely one of the pitfalls of Linux gaming still, which is the “there’s so many different configurations and some of them just work, others don’t” issue. I have an AMD card so perhaps it is an Nvidia issue - hopefully those sorts of issues smooth out once NVK is fully ready to go.

What issues does Forza have on Linux? I can’t speak for the Motorsport series, but I’ve been playing 4 and 5 on my Steam Deck and desktop for a while now without issue.

I haven’t tried it myself, but I believe the OC is referring to the webcam USB mode that Pixels (idk if this is an Android feature or a “Pixel” feature) have. To enable it, connect over USB then you’ll have a notification along the lines of “Charging this device over USB”.

If you click that notification it’ll let you enable Webcam over USB mode, which I assume just causes the phone to act as any other webcam device would.

Congrats on the new home!

Things are also constantly improving over time as well, so its very possible that OP’s setup was somewhat problematic a while ago but have since been resolved.

Which would also make sense if the hardware itself was super new at the time, and didn’t have proper kernel modules for it when it was originally released perhaps.

Well, aside from this I hope it all went well OP!

Yeah, that’s more than fair! There’s zero chance I’d have considered it if it weren’t for it being on sale (for $20 USD which I don’t see Activision dropping the price any further than that).

Thankfully it seems after playing around with the settings and ensuring that the video settings wasn’t set to ultra, which I somehow missed on my first pass of the settings, it seems to be playing much better and I can easily see getting my $20 out of it.

Call me crazy, but I just picked up Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare today.

I haven’t been interested in playing the Call of Duty multiplayer modes for a very long time ago (I don’t even think the servers are still available), but in the past I did enjoy some of the campaigns. Infinite Warfare’s campaign seems very sci-fi “ish” which actually kinda scratches an itch I’ve had for a while. Another game that looked similarish to this was the Crysis games which I’d never actually gotten a chance to play, but when they were last on sale I found out they didn’t have cloud saves and I like to bounce between my Deck and PC a lot so that was a deal breaker for me.

I’m thinking about picking up Advanced Warfare too, since I had it when it came out on Xbox One and liked the campaign for very similar reasons. In general I’d love to find more games that have the same style to them, which reminds me I’m overdue for a replay of the Titanfall 2 campaign…

They happen to be on sale right now till the 8th, I’d absolutely never pick them up at full price.

Edit: The game definitely seems to have some rough points when playing on the Steam Deck. It plays fine on my desktop via Proton with no problem, but some of the in-game scenes just absolutely tank the frame rate till I’m pretty much forced to hard reset the deck because it goes completely unresponsive. Hmm. In addition, all of the config settings seem to get synced via cloud saves, however when you launch the game on a different device before it actually starts it asks if you want to reset the settings to be tailored to the device you’re on.

Same with my Stadia controller - funnily enough, Windows is the one that required me to purchase some third party software to be able to use it wired or wireless…

Gotcha, no worries I’ll see what I can track down - thank you!

but I did set up OBS already and managed to get HW encoding to work on an AMD GPU.

Did you by chance use any resources for this, such as any guides or any of the OBS docs? I’m looking to do the same thing and it seems I’m only running into outdated information, as well as debates on whether its even worth doing GPU encoding vs CPU encoding.

Definitely keep us in the loop!

They have their own hosting plans, but you can also self host it.

As strange as it may sound, my favorite controller so far has been my Google Stadia controller. It feels very sturdy and has a nice finish - and I can hold it for hours without my hands cramping up.

Also a big fan of the fact that it charges over USB-C, and that it works perfectly for me over both Bluetooth and wired.

However, I haven’t had too many controllers in the past (Nintendo’s controllers - GameCube, Wii, Switch Joycon/Pro, the Xbox 360/One, and the DualShock 3), so that could be part of it. I don’t know, I just haven’t had any complaints with it as of yet.