Why do people still pre-order games before release?

In case of indie games to give the developer funding.

in Java

Again?

Very slightly less of a usability nightmare, especially for beginners who cannot be expected to know this stuff, especially when actually user friendly distributions take these troubles off the user’s hands.

You can add Flathub in Discover without using terminal

Still not user friendly. Bazzite (and others) has this out of the box.

First enable Flatpak, then add the Flathub repository, and then add a few PPAs here and there just is not user friendly at all, Terminal or not. This is the Linux Gaming community. The likelihood that people here want the emulators that get published on Flathub because of Steam Deck is high.

Backports aren’t necessary, but it’s nice to have the option if you later decide you want something newer

They are necessary because of Canonical’s insane demands for version number freezes. Unpaid volunteers often don’t have the resources to cherry pick and backport individual bug fixes. When the Kubuntu maintainers were blogging more frequently, “add our PPA to get bugfix xyz” was a recurring line.

*buntu are mainly beginner distros.

They aren’t. Canonical enshittifies Ubuntu and the official flavors more and more. The hoops one needs to jump through (like OP’s PPA command because Canonical forbids proper updates) are not user friendly.

Steam Survey shows how Ubuntu’s relevance for home users continues to shrink and alternatives like Bazzite continue to grow.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports

Fiddle with the Terminal to add a PPA (and also Flatpak) just screams usability.

Too bad it’s not available via RSS.

It’s not a podcast then. Podcast is a type of media delivery mechanism, not any recorded conversation.

using their proprietary launcher

https://launcher.hytale.com/builds/release/linux/amd64/hytale-launcher-latest.flatpak

Not tried it but it’s a Flatpak. I’d say it’s a positive.

Conveniently forgeting the part where valve creates a gambling system for kids, as usual.

Do you mean loot boxes in Counter-Strike? A) It’s not a game for kids. B) And no, I’m not getting involved with parenting of other people’s children, so I actually do not care.

But I get it, the only things that mathers is you.

I matter to me, yes.

There has actually been a case going around about Valve forcing price parity despite their official ToS not saying so, with emails from employees to devs as evidence.

They’re doing a shitty job at enforcement if your claim is true.

I can’t understand the amount of energy people spend defending Valve.

Valve uses my money to make the Linux FOSS stack better for everyone, including me. GOG doesn’t.

Buying on Steam instead of GOG serves my personal interests.

What’s wrong Heroic?

Not officially supported. Using the GUI with a controller is wonky.

You can install an Arch image as well. Distrobox should work fine with these OCI images: https://github.com/archlinux/archlinux-docker?tab=readme-ov-file#arch-linux-oci-images

The only time you might “tinker” with gaming is when you want to install, say, an emulator or Heroic from the Discovery store (flatpak) to play your non-Steam games, all of which is optional.

Playing games from outside Steam is less tinkering in Bazzite than SteamOS because Bazzite supports those out of the box. I don’t have a Bazzite install in front of me right now but IIRC it comes with Lutris preinstalled. On SteamOS that’s an additional installation step.

Hopefully the maintainers of RetroDECK compile an ARM version until then: https://github.com/RetroDECK/RetroDECK/issues/1195

FYI: https://github.com/Detanup01/gbe_fork

Still gets updates, unlike original Goldberg

Also SteamOS runs Docker containers out of the box just fine because it ships podman.

tbh i havent bothered to attempt gaming on anything other than the steam deck.

At worst you need to install Steam on other distributions and then compatibility is no different than on SteamOS (on equal hardware, of course) because Steam runs its games inside standardized containers since some time.

SteamOS ships both podman and distrobox.

distrobox create --image registry.opensuse.org/opensuse/leap:16.0 --name opensuse to install openSUSE, for example, then distrobox enter opensuse to use it. If you like rolling releases, install and then execute opensuse-migration-tool to upgrade to Tumbleweed or Slowroll.

I haven’t had to fuck around with any game.

Noodle probably only knows Linux from fiddle distros and now thinks that SteamOS is the only one that works out of the box which is just not true. There are plenty of mainstream options like Bazzite.