Gaming

I received my Steam Deck two weeks ago after a wait of roughly half a year. Thus, I wanted to write a blog entry to jot down my first impressions of the device. If you don’t know anything about it yet: the Steam Deck is a PC running a fork of Arch Linux with a read-only file system in the form factor of a handheld console. It’s tightly integrated with the Steam platform and offers a gaming mode in which you can seamlessly buy, install, manage and play games from your library....

So I have a bone to pick with how some games approach their world design. The concept of an open world is not new and often provides gamers with an immersive experience where you can go where you want and do as you please (within the game’s boundaries of course). There are so many great examples for this of which I have played only a small subset but the Assassin’s Creed franchise comes to mind here....

The Origin launcher is a blight upon the galaxy. Period. It just sucks. Unfortunately the company making it and forcing it on people happens to be the publisher of some of my favorite game franchises, namely all of the current Star Wars games, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I’m not willing to refrain from playing any of them because of ideological reasons. An added difficulty is that Origin doesn’t play too nicely with Linux....

A few years back I made the full switch to Linux for all of my personal machines for a couple of reasons (which you can read about here). For the most part this was a painless transition which came with many more upsides than downsides for me and I was quite happy about it. However, one big deterrent for many people is the gaming situation on Linux. Since I am a non-professional gamer myself and this is one of my primary hobbies this was a potential issue for me and I want to write about the experience a bit....

There are many challenges when it comes to gaming on Linux but it’s even more difficult to get something up and running that’s so old that it’s a hassle to do it under Windows as well. In essence you have to deal with the setup you’d do in Windows (which is already nontrivial) and apply all of it through the layer of abstraction that is running Windows software on Linux. Fun....