Steam 4K Remote Play & Lenovo Legion Nintenchucks

4K Remote Play comes to Steam! Dwarf Fortress (2022) Linux beta, RIP gaming Chromebooks, Lenovo Legion handheld has chucks, WTF is ULTRA RAM, Crowsworn scope creep, and Ratchet & Clank Linux updates.

Listen:

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:12 Kernel optimizations
02:37 A really cheap testbench
02:56 Baldur’s Gate 3 multi on Linux
04:27 Horny D&D players
04:59 Tyred Pedro
STEAM NEWS
07:07 New minimum price for Steam games
09:12 Microtransaction warnings
10:38 Steam 4K remote play
14:18 ProtonDB device filters
14:50 Failed attempts at game search
16:50 Do you still check games for compatibility?
18:04 Dwarf Fortress Linux beta
18:53 Dwarf Fortress without Linux was wrong
19:43 Crowsworn delayed due to scope creep
23:39 Challenges of making a metroidvania demo
26:37 Ratchet & Clank Linux patch
28:03 The problem with WINE / Proton games
29:59 Outdated Windows NVIDIA control panel
30:46 No Epic exclusives for Postal
NEWS
33:26 Lenovo handheld has chucks
34:58 Lenovo bonus software
36:25 Why the Steam Deck is better than the rest
37:51 Refurb Steam Decks back in stock?
39:03 Thinkpad quality in 2023
39:36 RIP gaming Chromebooks
40:04 What is wrong with your HANDS
42:54 Weaponizing expensive Chromebooks
44:54 WTF is ULTRA RAM?
47:39 It’s like SGI UMA
51:09 UMA in 2023
52:13 Fast flash drives
53:11 OBS 30 Beta 1 and Intel QSV
54:20 What is QSV?
56:20 Giving up buying an Intel ARC 770
HATE MAIL
57:17 Send in your hate mail!
59:10 You wacky ARCH users
01:03:09 Weird ass-build systems
01:09:25 The Steam Deck runs ARCH for a reason
01:10:22 Your oldest Linux install?
01:13:06 $25 Amazon reviews
01:14:15 $80 toy microwave

Colour key – Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Minimum Price Thresholds

As with all updates, how was this being abused?
Somehow, I think this may have had something to do with certain million dollar games.
VALVe doesn’t do anything unless there’s significant enough uproar to motivate it.
It’s not that they care about how many laws their stuff allows people to break, it’s how much shit is being talked about them online.
Fair play! As AAA publishers go, VALVe is probably the one with the least worst image.
They’re also pushing the steam microtransactions API so this might be them trying to funnel the nickle and dimers over to that side of the business

4k Remote Play

Is that really necessary?
- Samsung does sell 4k smart TVs with the steam link app installed so theoretically there is a demand for this feature
The overlay fixes for BPM are much more welcome, though.
It has options for HEVC, don’t know if that’s new or not.

ProtonDB Filters

No more scrolling past Deck reports.
Would be great to see this expanded to say filter by GPU or CPU, Distro, Kernel version, etc.
I was reading some ProtonDB reviews and apparently Dead by Daylight now makes with the working?

Steam: Game Updates

Linux Dwarfs

Linux is on the public beta branch.
They’re gonna be putting out the call for volunteer testers
Beeg hippo.
9 months after release and here we are.
Having a DF game without Linux support is just, wrong.

Crowsworn updates

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mongooserodeo/crowsworn-a-dark-and-mysterious-action-packed-metroidvania/posts/3879584

Hey, they are working on a demo.
The Dec 2023 release date has been pushed back due to scope creep.
Yeah just cuz you got 10x your funding doesn’t mean you need to make the game proportionately bigger.
Hit your main goals, hit your stretch goals and then use what’s ever left over to polish and enhance what you got.
I was hoping this would have been out by now to tide me over.

Ratchet and Linux

Not just the Deck but actual Linux gets brought up.
WINE was the answer all along.
- Pretty sure that’s not how you spell steam Deck
Sony’s upcoming “portable” offering isn’t really that, so it behooves them to get some sort of mobile offering on the table.
This was a NVIDIA fix, huh.

Based Postal

Oh, it’s the reverse Epic excwoosive.
Do the unofficial Early Access on Steam, after the actual Early Access, and only then bring it to Epic.
Are they somewhat annoyed because Timmy didn’t offer them money?
Or was it because he did?
Dance with the one that brought you.
“If our games are still too expensive for you, you can pirate them until you have enough to support us.”
Never delivered on that Postal 4 Linux port.

News:

Lenovo Chucks

Nintendo’s gonna sue somebody!
I still need to see the price.
Removable controllers, but I don’t think it’ll quite work like how the switch does it as there are the same number of buttons on both joycons so each can be a single controller
One of those has a touchpad
It’s still running windows 11 so enjoy that or whatever crappy frontend Lenovo slaps on top of it.

Gaming Chromebooks

There was some industry skuttlebut about some chromebooks with integrated 4050s
Now there’s more skuttlebut that those boards have now been quietly axed
Most of ChromeOS’ gaming prospects have been cloud based but some folks have been holding out hope for local gaming on chromeOS
You can get a better experience running actual linux though
Did Steam on Chromebooks ever officially come out?

Ultra RAM

FOR ULTRARAM! – shouted the dyslexic 40K Ultramarine.
Hibernation in a PC context, S5 in ACPI table, is when the system writes its RAM contents to local storage.
Which basically spells out how this is intended to work.
A special flash cache module which is non-volatile and quantum resonance tunnelled.
No, I don’t entirely know what that means and it wouldn’t surprise me if neither did the people who wrote it.
I suspect any practical application of this will just be a bigger, faster, cache module, built into your local storage device along with or replacing whatever DRAM they already have built in.
I remember the big promises of XPoint
This would be super cool if some folks start using it
Would be cooler if this results in a shift in personal computing
I’m not holding my breath.
This wants to replace DRAM and flash memory with a low output thermonuclear reactor?
SGI had UMA with the O2 way back in the olden times for system & GPU memory.
One thing I don’t see mentioned anywhere is speed.
Intel already tried with Optane RAM but it could only manage 1.4GB/s compared to the 17 GB/s you get with DDR4 2133.