Reposting this from reddit so I can delete my original post (and soon my account hopefully).
GameImage basically just lets you fuss with getting the games working on Desktop first, then turn that into an AppImage file that you can just copy straight to the Deck.
I made a video guide for this a while back, but it’s fairly outdated at this point.
100% agree. Snaps are kind of neat for server stuff (easiest setup of Nextcloud I’ve ever done, even though I switched to Docker in the end), but man the desktop experience is god awful.
I had to setup an Ubuntu VM at work to run something I couldn’t do on the Windows host, I tried to open Firefox and it took ages to start. I literally began trying to troubleshoot why it wasn’t opening before it finally started. Completely unusable and I have no idea why Canonical thinks this is an actual competitor to Flatpak.
Having to prefix commands with “flatpak run org.whoever.whatever…” gets old quickly, and setting aliases to get around it isn’t user friendly. It’s certainly possible, it’s just not practical (which may have been a better word to use than “feasable” in my first comment).
I’m in the camp of thinking Flatpaks are definitely the future for GUI applications. While there are definitely cons…
CLI applications are not feasible as Flatpaks. This isn’t what Flatpak is designed for, standard package management will still be needed here.
Dependency duplication wastes storage space, but I’m personally willing to give up a couple GBs for the benefits I get.
Developers might package their application incorrectly. This is possible, but it hasn’t caused any notable issues for me in the 2 years that I’ve been primarily using Flatpaks.
As far as I’m aware, Flatpak doesn’t have a way to allow applications to set udev rules. This generally doesn’t matter, but for something like Steam Input, you will need to install the steam-devices package or setup udev rules manually so it can manage your controllers. Google’s Android Flash Tool also doesn’t work out of the box in the Chrome Flatpak last I checked.
…The pros more than outweigh these (in my opinion at least).
Non-distro-specific packaging means you can use Flatpaks on whatever distro you want. You can have more up-to-date applications on stable distros like Debian, or on smaller distros that don’t have the resources to package every application possible. Rather than Red Hat spending a significant amount of time packaging LibreOffice for RHEL/Fedora, they can just rely on the Flatpak and spend time on more important elements of the distro itself. There’s also Bottles, which enters dependency hell if packaged incorrectly, they had a blog post about this a while ago.
Application files are stored in one place in ~/.var/app. For some apps this doesn’t matter, but it keeps applications like Steam from cluttering up your home directory with random game saves and other garbage. This also makes backups easier since you already know where all applications keep their files.
It makes immutable distros actually usable, which I believe will be the future for some use cases.
Permissions management. Even if no one is setting privileges for their applications correctly right now, having the groundwork for this in place will be important if more proprietary applications are going to be ported to Linux in the future.
Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation) coined the whole “PC Master Race” joke ages ago, and even he regrets it, lol
I think the Duelsense controller is my favorite, being an incremental upgrade over the great DS4. Comfy layout, nice feeling bumpers and d-pad, and gyro controls.
The Xbox Series controller is equally comfortable and definitely gets points for using AA batteries instead of a built-in battery that degrades over time (my DS4 barely holds a charge anymore…). However, lack of gyro sucks, especially when everyone else has it.
If you want to count the Steam Deck as a controller, it’s a close second behind the DS5. All the features you could possibly want, plus trackpads and back buttons, and only loses points for being less comfortable to hold than the DS5 (but it’s also an entire console, so that’s fair).
I like the chart idea and while you have excellent taste in racing games, I did make my own with some adjustments, lol
For “Best driving in a non-racing game” I was tempted to put BeamNG, but whether or not that counts as a “racing” game is up for debate. I think ETS2 is a safe bet.
Racing games are by far my favorite genre, I don’t think I could pick an absolute favorite, so I’m just gonna ramble for a bit.
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 through Carbon are fondly remembered for a reason, they still stand up so well today. Outside of the golden era of NFS, Hot Pursuit (2010), The Run, Most Wanted (2012), Heat, and Unbound (absolute trash update today, nevermind on Unbound) are very good as well. Other games in the series are good too (I’m a strong defender of Rivals despite it being objectively subpar), but I’d consider these to be the highlights.
The Burnout series is excellent, especially Takedown, Revenge, and Paradise.
Forza Motorsport 4 and Forza Horizon 1 are the absolute peak of that franchise, absolutely beautiful games, I love the atmosphere and career pacing.
The PGR series is great as well, and only got better with every title. PGR4 (the last one) is amazing. This team also developed Blur before shutting down, basically Mario Kart with real cars, which is massively underrated.
The Flatout games (1 and 2, we don’t talk about 3 and 4 is eh) are great. Bugbear also developed Wreckfest, which is a spiritual successor that improves on the original in almost every way.
Driver: San Francisco is one of the greatest games ever made, and I’ll never forgive Ubisoft for abandoning the series.
The Motorstorm games are great, and Evolution Studios also worked on the excellent Driveclub before being bought and merged into Codemasters (and later EA…)
Enthusia is another super underrated one, really unique progression system that encourages you to drive interesting cars instead of the fastest.
The DiRT and GRID franchises have some great entries as well, especially DiRT 2/3 and GRID 1/2. Codemasters also developed FUEL, which I think held the title of biggest video game world for a long time (it might still if you don’t count stuff like Flight Simulator).
Split/Second is excellent despite its shitty PC port.
There’s a bunch of great indies as well, Distance, Redout, Inertial Drift, Horizon Chase Turbo.
There are lots more, Midnight Club, Ridge Racer, Gran Turismo, Test Drive, but this comment is way too long as-is… It is also fairly depressing that most of these are dead franchises, and/or aren’t available to purchase anymore due to licensing expiration.
I’ve been gaming on Linux since Proton first launched. It was good back then, and at this point I can play just about everything in my Steam library (nearly 1000 games). From indies to racing sims to triple a games. It’s great.
Anti-cheat is still hit or miss, but I don’t really play any multiplayer games, so that doesn’t affect me luckily.
I’ve been happy with Cloudflare’s registrar service, plus it keeps all my DNS stuff in one place.
Same, it’s even better the second time.