Jason Evangelho (00:01) Hey everybody, welcome back, sort of, to Linux for Everyone and welcome home. My name's Jason and this episode is sort of a spiritual sequel to something that I did in the middle of 2022 when I rounded up three awesome creators in the Linux space and asked them to join me for kind of a celebration of Valve's Steam Deck, had just launched Jason Evangelho (00:26) So with the revival of Linux for everyone, I had to get the gang back together again so that we could discuss the trio of Valve hardware that's coming out this year. And you know, in the last several years, gaming has been such a driver for Linux adoption and I felt it was really important to sort of and analyze the impact that Valve has had on this space, you know, from our unique perspectives and our experiences and It was a super fun conversation and we hope to do this on a semi-regular basis if you enjoy it. I'd love to know what you enjoyed about it. If you have ideas for topics that we should discuss in the future, let me know. Letters at LinuxForEveryone.net. Jason Evangelho (01:38) everybody to something we're gonna call Games for Everyone, featuring all of these fine gentlemen. Let's start with Mr. Gardiner Bryant. Gardiner (01:50) Yeah, so my name is Gardiner Bryant. I have a YouTube channel called Gardiner Bryant. ⁓ Very self obsessed, but whatever. I have a website called the Bryant Review. We talk about Linux, video games, free and open source software, the Fediverse, self hosted, all kinds of stuff. It's a lot of fun. And for the last, like, I don't know, four or so years, five maybe even, I've been talking about almost nothing on my channel but the Steam Deck. I love the Steam Deck. It's super cool. So I think that's why you invited me, Jason. You Nick (02:18) Ha ha ha. Jason Evangelho (02:19) It is, but not not just that. mean, you you are old school when it comes to Linux gaming. So ⁓ you've tracked it since day one, probably just like Liam has. And I also I just wanted to say that I I think you're an exceptional writer. I didn't realize that until you launched the Bryant review and I really started reading it on a regular basis. You're an exceptional writer. So just kudos. That's all. Gardiner (02:26) Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. That means a lot coming from you. Thank you. Jason Evangelho (02:47) All right, Mr. Liam Dawe gamingonlinux.com. ⁓ you're supposed to say that. Well, go. Liam Dawe (02:54) Well, you did it for me now, but yeah, I'm Liam. I run gamingonlinux.com. I've run it for probably 16, 17 years now. Just covering everything. Yeah, yeah, a very long time now. Jason Evangelho (02:55) You Gardiner (02:55) Thank you. Jason Evangelho (03:03) Has it really been that long? is a Liam Dawe (03:07) The industry has ridiculously changed in that time as well. It's hard to keep up now. I get like 40, 50 emails a day at this point. It's just madness. Jason Evangelho (03:17) Emails from, from who? Gardiner (03:18) Mm. Liam Dawe (03:19) Just everyone, publishers, indie developers, everything. It's madness. Jason Evangelho (03:21) Yeah. That's so great. That's so great. It's really I was at a point like that when I was doing insomnia radio back in like 2005 and I would have just like a hundred band submissions a day and it was it was difficult because you know you can't you physically mentally cannot cover everything that you want Let me ask you. Liam Dawe (03:42) Yeah, for the first time ever, I've had to set up, finally, I've had to set up email filters to try and put things in boxes for me to go through and it's just, there's not enough time, man. I mean, there's hundreds of games releasing all the time. It's too much. Jason Evangelho (03:59) Yeah. And it's, it probably makes your job more difficult that indie games are actually on the rise again. I mean, when you want the quality indie games are where it's at, not AAA gaming. And there's so many more of those because they don't cost $400 million to make. what, Liam, something I wanted to ask you is what is, I guess, like if you were to look at your traffic stats. Liam Dawe (04:12) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (04:23) What do you find is consistently the most popular type of gaming content for your site? Liam Dawe (04:29) generally anything to do with valve is you know, okay, just the line goes up like that, you know. Jason Evangelho (04:36) Yeah, yeah, gotcha. And finally, Mr. Nick at the Linux experiment. I've always just referred to you as Nick at the Linux experiment because you don't ever blast your last name out there and I tend to forget it, so. I'm sorry. Nick (04:42) Hey. Yeah, that's the nickname I use everywhere. Yeah, it's probably unpronounceable for anyone who's not French Liam Dawe (04:56) You have a last name? Nick (04:57) anyway. it is at the Linux experiment, but pronounced in French. Jason Evangelho (04:58) All right. Gardiner (04:58) Hahaha Jason Evangelho (05:03) ⁓ Gardiner (05:03) hahahaha Jason Evangelho (05:07) Tell us what you've been up to since since we were all last together in mid 2022. Nick (05:12) Yeah, well, the channel is still going, so it's still the Linux experiment. There's not as much experimenting, more news and reviewing these days, but yeah, it's it's the usual like daily news podcast and just weekly news roundup for people who didn't catch the daily shows and some reviews here and there for desktop environments, distros, new apps. I also lean a bit on privacy, the open web, web browsers. Jason Evangelho (05:21) Mm-hmm. Nick (05:35) Sometimes the Fediverse a little bit as well. All of that kind of stuff. And yeah, it's been what, eight years now for the channel and it's been my main job for three, which yeah, it's cool. Yeah, it's really nice. Jason Evangelho (05:44) Nice. Main job for three. Congratulations on that. That's great. Gardiner (05:49) That's awesome. Jason Evangelho (05:50) us how awesome things are in France and Germany right now with regards to open source and government and schools. And I think I just want to blast this out everywhere possible because it's incredible news. Nick (05:56) Yeah, this Yeah, there's been a lot of movement on that front. think the tensions between the EU and the US have just driven a lot of public institutions in France and Germany to try and look at moving to LibreOffice, moving to Nextcloud outside of the usual Microsoft Office stuff. So it's still a long way away from the whole country moving to those things, but Things are shaking up and I think it's cool. We'll see if in five or 10 years they stick to it. Although they do the usual revert because that's what happened in Germany plenty of times. But yeah, I'm kind of optimistic about it. Jason Evangelho (06:32) Yeah. was trying to tally the numbers in my head in that segment that you did and it was something like 500,000 people. Nick (06:41) Yeah, I think if you add up all the different institutions and ministries in France, it's got to be like 650, but their end goal is like 1.2 million, is a lot of users. On Nextcloud, that's not Linux, that's just Nextcloud. Jason Evangelho (06:48) That's it. Yeah, that's a sizable. That's right. But Gardiner (06:53) Mmm. Hmm. Jason Evangelho (06:57) it's but it's not it's not subscription money going into Microsoft's pocket anymore. And that hopefully will make them sit up and pay attention. But I doubt I doubt it will. ⁓ Anyway, that's great news. we are to talk about video games, specifically video games on Linux. Nick (07:01) Exactly. ⁓ I'm not sure either. Gardiner (07:08) Hmm. Jason Evangelho (07:13) I'm sure that Liam and Gardiner especially can attest to the fact that gaming on Linux has changed so dramatically in the last 15 years and even the last five years that it's probably barely recognizable. And I, what I love is the fact that we all did a, you know, we got together for a round table about Steam Deck right after it launched. And that's an interesting time capsule to go back to and then compare it to this. And so what I wanted to do is just go around the room and, ask how your gaming habits have changed since the Steam Deck launched. Is it still part of your daily gaming routine? Have you, have you switched to a different device? Liam Dawe (07:58) Well, for me it's, yeah, it's interesting because when it first came out, obviously I was doing basically everything I could on the Steam Deck, but you know, things change over time. And now I sort of have more specific games that I'll play on the Steam Deck compared to the PC, because obviously the Steam Deck isn't good at certain types of games. It's better to play them on an actual PC, but the comfort of it... has never gone away. Like right now I'm going through Cult of the Lamb on the Steam Deck and that on my sofa or in bed is just fantastic. And I played through the entirety of Dispatch, quite a recent release, on Steam Deck in bed. And that was just, it was amazing. It's so, good. But then for stuff like shooters, I'll be jumping onto my PC for that because you just can't beat mouse aim and... Jason Evangelho (08:42) Mm-hmm. Hmm. Liam Dawe (08:54) That's actually one of things that really annoys me about the industry is how consoles are built around the controllers and they are basically built in auto-in. But you try and do controller shooters on PC, whether that's Windows, Linux, Steam Deck, anything, you don't get that. And it's so much harder to aim and you're at such a disadvantage. So yeah, my gaming is very firmly split between PC and Steam Deck. Jason Evangelho (09:16) Hmm. Have you found any reason to upgrade or switch away from the Seam Deck to a different handheld? Liam Dawe (09:29) Personally, no, Well, obviously I'm a Linux guy. I appreciate everything that Valve's doing when it comes to supporting open source and Proton and stuff like that. But for me, the Steam Deck, for the games that I want to actually play on a handheld or if I'm docking it up to my TV, they all work fine. I don't really see a need for it. Like I'm not jumping into every brand new AAA release as they come out because most of them just don't interest me. Like I don't care about Call of Duty version 100, you know? Jason Evangelho (10:02) Yeah, and you're not alone. That's a sentiment that's spreading very, I feel like it's spreading at an equal pace as people getting disenchanted with Windows and looking at alternatives in the Linux space. These are kind of going at the same rate in my view anyway. Nick, what about you? Nick (10:22) Yeah, I had a sort of on and off gaming relationship, I'd say, for the past few years. I think I just got bored with the AAA games like most people, but... It started like three or four years ago and it stopped me from gaming for a while. And I actually resumed playing games, I think, six months ago. And I basically just play indie titles now. So most of them are played on the Steam Deck as well, because it's just like a great fit for that. You just pick it up from the couch, turn it on, you launch the game. It just works. You have no updates, no weird stuff, no nothing. And every time I want to play something a bit more demanding or I want to have more of a cinematic experience like a horror game, I just started which I had never done before. And so my girlfriend was sitting next to me. She wanted to see what it looked like and be immersed in the thing. So I turned on the gaming PC that is plugged into my TV and we played that on the TV. But generally I just pick up the Steam Deck, play for an hour, an hour and half, any type of game really. I also just finished Dis patch. Like I saw you writing it in the show notes. I was like, ⁓ what is that? Downloaded it, finished it in six hours. I just couldn't put it down at all. Liam Dawe (11:05) Good luck. Jason Evangelho (11:05) ⁓ Yeah, yeah. Liam Dawe (11:22) Yeah Jason Evangelho (11:24) it's so good! Nick (11:29) mostly Steam Deck and then the PC, but the PC is also running Linux. It's on Nobara, which is not that great in my experience, but it's been fine. yeah, Steam Deck and TV when I want a more cinematic experience, I don't really play games that absolutely require a mouse and keyboard, although that will change with Dawn of War 4 and Total War 40k, which will, I guess, consume my entire life, but that's about it. Jason Evangelho (11:49) yes, of course. Yes, ⁓ Liam Dawe (11:52) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (11:56) Gardener, hit us. Gardiner (11:58) Yeah, so my gaming habits haven't really changed that much at all since the launch of the Steam Even before the Steam Deck, I mostly played on my living room gaming PC with a controller. And that had, at the time, think it had Chimera. ⁓ So it's always been kind of like a controller-driven experience. Most of the games I like to play are indie games. ⁓ I don't really care for shooters that much and the only really PC-centric games that I like are Command and Conquer or ⁓ SimCity or something like that. So I still play those on my PC, ⁓ but for the most part, the Steam Deck replaced my living room gaming PC except for the VR space. So yeah, it hasn't changed a whole lot. Jason Evangelho (12:45) As far as my situation was at Forbes in the interim in the last few years I'm not there anymore but I briefly was covering the handheld gaming space. And I was always tempted away from the Steam Deck by the Legion Go or the original ROG Ally and not with Windows, I have to say, but with I loved, mean, Bazite, it feels almost on parity with SteamOS on the deck. It's gonna feel almost exactly like the same experience. But it was the hardware that I just, it was either. You know, the battery didn't last long enough or ⁓ it was just not ergonomic and comfortable enough for me. But I finally, just a few months ago, I did switch away from my beloved Steam Deck and got the ⁓ Legion Go S powered by Steam OS. This is the Z1 Extreme version. so I'm 50 years old now and it's Like the extra inch on this screen is a huge deal to me. It makes a massive difference. And that was a lot of the consideration. But I also think it's just the most comfortable handheld ⁓ device that's come out since the Steam Deck. yeah, it does. Yeah, it's ⁓ yeah. So it's. Liam Dawe (14:09) It's got a higher resolution screen, hasn't it? Yeah, this. That was one of the major problems Gardiner (14:12) Yeah. Liam Dawe (14:16) of the Steam Deck is the text clarity. Jason Evangelho (14:17) It's 16 10 19 19 20 by 1200 16 16 10 aspect ratio. And it's you know it's a fantastic experience. I hope we see more handheld devices with steam OS on it. I really do. ⁓ But yeah I still love I still have handhelds. I've also gravitated probably more towards indie games than AAA games. So I think I think we're all pretty much in the same boat so the joke, the joke is that Valve finally learned to count to three and announced three new hardware products, which we hope one of them will ship with another product that ends in three. I know that the, analysis and the, and the actual like news recap has been done to death. So I wanted to figure out just a more organic way to talk about. Gardiner (14:47) Mmm. Yeah. Jason Evangelho (15:05) Valve's overall hardware strategy, their impact on Linux gaming, and kind of what you guys are most excited about and apprehensive about when it comes to mainly the Steam Frame and the Steam Machine. think we don't have to spend any time on the controller if you don't want to. I think the controller's rad. I'm definitely gonna get one. I'm definitely gonna get all of them, whether it's, you know, Valve sending review units or out of my own pocket. So I guess, spoilers. Liam Dawe (15:32) I will be first in line for the steam controller too. Gardiner (15:35) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (15:36) Hey, let's start. Okay, let's start with that. Because Liam, you just reminded me that some people pre-ordered a Steam Deck like two minutes after it went live on the store and they got theirs a year, a year later. Nick (15:37) I'm very intrigued by it, yeah. Liam Dawe (15:53) Yeah, people were crashing the store. Jason Evangelho (15:56) And there were like tracking websites dedicated to like figuring out when am I, here's when I ordered, when am I gonna get my deck? Do you think that same experience will happen with the steam machine and the steam frame? Gardiner (16:00) Mm-hmm. Liam Dawe (16:09) don't think it will really. I think the one it might happen around is probably the steam frame. But I don't think something more like that will happen with the controller or the steam machine. mean, people have already got, you know, their computers, their Steam Deck, other hand-helds and so on, whereas the Steam Frame is, in a way, it's pretty radical compared to what's already out there, especially with things like Fex to allow developers who already have VR games on other platforms to bring it pretty much straight over to it, and that it'll play flat games as well on it. So it's... Jason Evangelho (16:21) yeah. Liam Dawe (16:45) It's rad, it's cool, I can't wait. I mean, I've got a Valve Index sat right next to me and the idea of not having wire is going to be bliss, Jason Evangelho (16:46) it is. Yeah, it is. Nick (16:57) Yeah, I used to have the PlayStation VR back when I had a PS4 and you got tangled in the cable all the time. And it wasn't even a hard setup. Like you didn't have to wire cameras to your ceiling or whatever. It was just using like a weird PlayStation camera and some PS moves and some light tracking. But the cable was like two or three HDMI stuff bundled in one just trailing around in your living room. You just put your feet in it. You tripped all around. It's just... Gardiner (17:14) Mm-hmm. Jason Evangelho (17:16) Mm-hmm. Liam Dawe (17:25) So I. Nick (17:25) I almost died twice at least playing that stuff. Jason Evangelho (17:28) no Nick (17:28) ⁓ Like the small table, like it was aiming for my head. Gardiner (17:28) Ha ha ha. Jason Evangelho (17:30) I- Liam Dawe (17:30) The simplest solution I could come up with was putting a mat on the floor. We came up with just putting a square mat on the floor so you can feel your feet on that so you know if you're turning or if you're going off the mat. Nick (17:38) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (17:41) That's a, that's really smart actually. I tripped repeatedly when I had, cause my last real VR experience was the HTC Vive And there was a launch window game for it called Holo Point. And it was just like a, basically like an archery game, like an archery combat game. And I, and you were constantly just like dancing all around, just, you know. Nick (18:05) you Gardiner (18:06) Mm. Jason Evangelho (18:06) doing flipping 180s and ducking and all that stuff and that cable just constantly get wrapped around my ankle or my arm and ⁓ so I'm also very excited about going wireless and Liam Dawe (18:17) Well, this does concern me a little bit though, because even with the Valve Index, this was before I came up with the matte idea of knowing where I am. I've literally punched my window with the controller in the hand, so it also kind of scares me a little bit on what I might do. Gardiner (18:29) my gosh. Nick (18:33) Too much freedom can be dangerous. Liam Dawe (18:35) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (18:36) Well, do you think they'll have some kind Gardiner (18:36) Mm. Jason Evangelho (18:37) of boundary system ⁓ like other devices have had? Where... Liam Dawe (18:40) Well, the the index in SteamVR does have a boundary system, but when you start really getting immersed in a game, you don't notice it. You're not looking for it. it's yeah. Jason Evangelho (18:48) Yeah, yeah. Gardiner (18:48) Hmm. Jason Evangelho (18:52) Well, OK, we're starting. We're clearly starting with the steam the steam frame that. Has so much more in my in my view, more important implications to Linux gaming and like it's it's a computer. You guys, it's not just a VR device, it's a computer. I can have a KDE desktop and like flip the cube like this. Maybe just whoosh whoosh. I don't know, but yeah, the fact that it can play. Gardiner (18:52) Yeah, I Liam Dawe (19:12) Yeah Gardiner (19:14) You Jason Evangelho (19:17) I everything, technically, is- Liam Dawe (19:22) So everything that Proton and SteamOS will run will run in some form on the Steam Frame. It all depends on the power of the Steam Frame. You might have to stream it from a computer like the Steam Machine. Jason Evangelho (19:37) Yeah, but it's. Gardiner (19:37) Yeah. My understanding is that like Half-Life Alyx is not going to run on the device, at least not at launch. Right. It's good. You stream that from like a dedicated PC. From your steam machine. Yeah. Yeah. Jason Evangelho (19:43) natively, right? okay, okay. Liam Dawe (19:45) Yeah, that's... Jason Evangelho (19:49) From your steam machine is what Valve hopes you'll do. Nick (19:52) You Jason Evangelho (19:53) Yeah. What what do you guys think about FEX and and the potential to be playing all of your Android games as well both flat and VR Android games on top of everything else. Liam Dawe (20:10) much like with Proton Valve are going to change the entire industry. Like Valve are the ones that founded FEX If you looked at the recent news and like the, what was it, seven year celebration of the FEX team and people are already using it to run main games on their Android phones. Like people are using it in industries that is not even technically what the actual design of it was for. Like Valve wanted this for themselves. But again, because it's open source like Proton, people are doing crazy things with it, playing Hollow Knight and stuff on their phones. It's incredible. And when it's out there properly with the steam machine, the steam frame and so on, we're gonna see such a crazy shift in the industry. Next year is going to be insane. Nick (21:01) I personally don't really have an interest in... playing Android games on another device, because I think generally the games that I want to play are already on Steam or others. But the ability to play games on Android is great. And I'm also thinking about a more wider compatibility thing, which is not necessarily gaming. But I think all they've built could also be used to just run Android apps on stuff like the Steam Deck, the Steam Frame, or whatever. So you could maybe get your streaming apps with a nice little VR display. Jason Evangelho (21:10) Yeah. Mmm. Nick (21:33) something in the realm of possibility. that's also something I'm excited for. Gardiner (21:38) I think ⁓ Lepton specifically is not necessarily just for like Android games, but I think it's also to make an easy transition for developers who've published VR titles on something like Oculus. I think that's really going to be a huge deal because a lot of there are a lot of Oculus games that are just exclusive to Oculus. They don't support PC VR and that is a major hurdle for Jason Evangelho (21:55) Hmm. Gardiner (22:06) ⁓ VR gaming in an open ecosystem. think Valve recognizes that and I think their primary motivation for Leptons is something like bringing over Oculus titles. Jason Evangelho (22:18) Is that something that Meta has the technical or legal ability to block? Gardiner (22:26) Well, I mean, if a game is like published on like Oculus, then it probably is using some like Oculus libraries or something. I think they might also have agreements with studios to like, you're only going to publish this on our platform. ⁓ But barring those things or like, you know, if a developer is just like, hey, if we just strip out the Oculus dependencies, we can put it on Steam and suddenly we have a whole other market that we didn't have access to before. Jason Evangelho (22:34) Yeah. Liam Dawe (22:54) Yeah, unless there's some sort of special publishing agreement, there's no way they could block it realistically. Jason Evangelho (22:55) And I don't. Gardiner (22:58) Right. Yeah. And the problem is too. Jason Evangelho (23:02) And what developer is gonna say no if they can do minimal amount of work to have three times a larger audience, right? Gardiner (23:11) Right. Meta owns a lot of the studios that are publishing exclusives on their headsets. So it's like, there's like a small Venn diagram, I think, of titles that are just exclusive to Oculus, but it still exists and having more games available on Steam that are VR is gonna be good for everybody. ⁓ Developers, gamers, everyone. Nick (23:35) And I think you're also with the Steam Frame, you're providing some kind of reference PC device from a known manufacturer. They have the store for the game, they have the device, it's tested. You have all the integrated bricks to port your game over. So it probably motivates studios a bit more to do the work instead of saying, hey, we could take our Oculus game and port it to whatever headset has been announced, but it's got to be bought by a thousand people. Will it really work? It has its own store. Is it worth it? But it's steam, it's Valve. Of course, if you have the opportunity, you're doing it. It's just mass market appeal for VR at least. Jason Evangelho (24:13) Yeah, mass market appeal and Liam Dawe (24:13) It opens up another avenue as well. So because it, again, like Proton, it's all open source, there's going to be nothing stopping other VR developers, like hardware vendors, of using that as well on their own devices. So it's just going to open up the industry when it comes to ARM and VR. Jason Evangelho (24:33) Like the Steam Deck did, right? in the best case scenario, maybe we see more, I don't wanna call them copycats, no one, outside of Nintendo Switch, there was no mainstream interest in portable PC handheld gaming devices until the Steam Deck launched. then everybody, Asus and Lenovo and everybody else was like scrambling to get their MSI. Gardiner (24:53) Mm. Jason Evangelho (25:00) You know, scrambling to get their device out to the masses. So I think it'd be so cool if we saw people doing exactly that with, you know, with SteamOS VR devices. With OLED lenses. Dang it. Or OLED, yeah, OLED displays and pancake lenses would be. Gardiner (25:16) We don't, I... Genuinely, I don't think OLED is the right technology in its current state for headsets because There's a much greater fall-off in the persistence of the image on an OLED Which means that there's more blur and like you're gonna have interference with the previous frame The only way to like really correct that on the OLED is black frame insertion Jason Evangelho (25:25) ⁓ okay, ⁓ Gardiner (25:42) And then you're like having the perceived brightness of the image. ⁓ And already OLEDs are pretty, behind pancake lenses are already pretty dark. ⁓ So all three of those things really kind of conspire to make TN or whatever the other, what Valve is using ⁓ the better option. It's not ideal. doesn't have the ratio or whatever, but like I think Valve made the right choice with. Jason Evangelho (25:58) Hmm. Gardiner (26:10) the panel that they chose. Jason Evangelho (26:11) Hmm. That's good insight. hadn't heard that argument before, but I agree. I So remember how how vital a website like proton DB dot com was ⁓ back when proton launched and several several years after I'm not sure how relevant it is today at the end of 2025 because I in the last year and a half I have not come across a game that didn't just install and play. whatever Linux distro I was using. it's not like I mean back in 2022 right when this was all brand new and shiny we were I at least was constantly going to proton DB. Will this game work? What's the what tweaks do I need to do? Oh wine tricks in this. OK, do you think we'll see like a FEX DB pop up? Do you think we'll see kind of that same cycle? Nick (26:44) Yeah. Liam Dawe (27:04) Hmm. Gardiner (27:05) Well to your first point, I think I still use proton DB ⁓ Once a week maybe ⁓ with the kind of stuff I talk about What was it the last game I tried? ⁓ Split second like it's our old it's a racing game that was on the 360 yeah, it's so good and Yeah Yeah, so I Nick (27:20) Yeah, it's so good. Jason Evangelho (27:20) Split seconds, awesome. Yeah, yeah. Right up there with Blur also on the 360. Blur was fantastic for racing. Okay, sorry, geeking out. Gardiner (27:29) I wanted to play that on my 360, I almost said 360, my Steam Deck, and I got it installed, and then I could not figure out how to, it worked just out of the box, but I could not figure out how to actually get the resolution to stick. It started at 640 by 480 or something, and then I had to go in and do a bunch of stuff that I found on ProtonDB in order to get it to actually keep the resolution I wanted. Jason Evangelho (27:48) Mmm. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gardiner (27:59) ⁓ I mean, most games will just work out of the box, but there are some lingering issues that I face that ProtonDB is invaluable for. And then for like... Liam Dawe (28:11) It all depends on how many games you play, like with the amount of games I go through testing and writing up and so on. Protons come on, you know, in the time since the Steam Deck came out, it's come along massively, but at the rate of games that are releasing and developers doing all kinds of weird shit, there's still a lot of games that have a lot of issues and some of them, you know, really minor issues. Jason Evangelho (28:16) Hmm. Liam Dawe (28:39) but there's still so many launch commands that games need to work properly. There's still a long way to go to get real out of the box compatibility on everything, but yeah. Jason Evangelho (28:44) Okay, okay. Okay. See, it's nice to have that reality check because I've been over here and like, know, everything's perfect land and not had any problems, but I don't do the same level of testing that I used to do and the same level that you do. Liam Dawe (28:56) Hahaha Nick (28:57) Same here, yeah. Yeah, generally, ⁓ when I buy games on the PC itself, which is like I'm just using the Steam Store with the full screen interface, I do not even look at compatibility ratings before I buy. And most of the times, there's no issue. Sometimes like, ⁓ this doesn't work fully at 4K or it hasn't picked up on my AMD GPU specifically. So it's trying to run on the integrated GPU. So the performance is horrendous. It happens very rarely. But from time to time, you do have to take a look at the Gardiner (29:26) Mm. Jason Evangelho (29:26) Hmm. Nick (29:32) database, but I don't think I need to check it before buying because I know I don't buy games on the day they release, so generally they just work. But sometimes, there's that little problem that you need to solve and it's helpful for that. Liam Dawe (29:45) I think when Valve roll out the... because right now you've got Steam Deck verified as a system across, you know, unsupported, playable and verified, and they're going to expand that for Steam Frame and Steam Machines. So this will all be shown on the Steam Store. I think you'll need Proton Database even less over time than we need it right now because you'll have Valve's own rating to look at. And as long as you're going for games that are verified, then you shouldn't have an issue. Well, famous last words. There are games that are verified that do have issues, but that's a whole other argument. But for the most part, it is correct. Jason Evangelho (30:16) You know what? Gardiner (30:18) Hahaha. Nick (30:19) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (30:24) That's actually, okay, that leads us into something really interesting to me. So there is actually who wrote this about support on the language evolving from developers like Steam Deck native support on Linux support on Steam. OK. Do you want to intro this because I'm just like fumbling my words. Liam Dawe (30:36) that's me. it's interesting because if you go back in the Linux gaming sphere far enough you would have before Proton people were arguing constantly for native Linux support for games or people were trying and mostly failing to get things to work in Wine apart from a few select titles that worked really well and then Proton came along more and more people were playing games in Proton Jason Evangelho (31:02) huh. Liam Dawe (31:09) 99 % of people gaming on Linux don't care whether it's on Proton or whether it's Linux native and that is just the simple reality. But it's interesting to see how the language around it has evolved from things like native Linux or it's a Windows game in Proton and then you've got like ⁓ Baldur's Gate 3 came along and said we are Steam Deck native and they're very specific this is Steam Deck native. Jason Evangelho (31:33) Hmm. Liam Dawe (31:37) But it is just a native Linux version, but they're only specifically supporting it on the Steam Deck. you had Khronos New Dawn did exactly the same thing. And then when speaking to developers about it, so many of them still don't even know what Linux is. So you have to talk very specifically about Steam Deck, Steam OS, and then some are even like, what the hell is Steam OS? Jason Evangelho (31:56) ⁓ Liam Dawe (32:04) It's like, how can you not know at least what SteamOS is at this point in time? Jason Evangelho (32:09) We are admittedly in a bubble. is, or let me say an echo chamber, not a bubble, this is not a bubble, not at all. We're in an echo chamber, and it's admittedly a large and growing echo chamber, but still an echo chamber. was actually talking to Mike Kelly a couple days ago, and he regularly has, he's working with people in his community to get them machines that have Linux on them. ⁓ Liam Dawe (32:13) Yeah, yeah, we are. Very. Jason Evangelho (32:34) He always has stories like, this, lady asked me to install windows Mint and like, but, but that, know, that kind of, think that ties into what Liam's saying is that it's for them. It's probably all about that brand recognition, right? If you say Linux support, not only are the developers going to be in trouble because that opens a huge can of worms just saying we support Linux. mean, that's, that's asking for. Gardiner (32:41) Ha ha ha ha. ⁓ Nick (32:41) Windows Mint, nice. Liam Dawe (32:52) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (33:04) buckets of support problems, know, admittedly. think it's a branding and marketing tactic more than recognition, right? Okay. Liam Dawe (33:10) Yeah, it is, definitely. Gardiner (33:13) Yeah. Liam Dawe (33:13) Because the funniest one is where I get an email saying, no, we don't support Linux at all, but it works great on Steam Deck. it's like, but that is Linux. You can go into a full, complete desktop of Linux on it. But I mean, it's an argument that's not worth going through. You just kind of go, okay, yeah, fine, whatever. And you have to move on from it. Gardiner (33:20) Well, you know... Nick (33:21) But that's Linux. Gardiner (33:27) in popular culture. Jason Evangelho (33:33) Right. Go ahead, Gardener. Gardiner (33:34) Yeah, I mean, in my experience, the popular culture's understanding of Linux is matrix code, right? It's like the terminal, like DOS prompt, primitive old, right? That's what most people think. That's the image that conjures in most folks' mind when they hear the term Linux. And I made a conscious decision quite a while ago to say SteamOS. Liam Dawe (33:43) Yep, that's it. Jason Evangelho (33:43) Yeah. Nick (33:44) Ciao. Gardiner (34:01) when I mean Linux and it irritated some people. But it's like, who am I making my content for? I'm not making it for people who are already Linux gamers, right? I'm making my videos to bring people on board and to get them through the door and to realize that the Linux gaming experience is just better in most ways. so I totally sympathize with this because it's like ⁓ Valve is doing Jason Evangelho (34:11) Yeah, right. Interesting. Liam Dawe (34:12) Yeah. Gardiner (34:30) so much. They're moving heaven and earth in a way that no other company has ever done for Linux gaming, or PC gaming even. It's kind of wild what they're doing here. Jason Evangelho (34:41) Well, I mean, Microsoft certainly isn't doing anything. And I know, I know people listening to this are gonna be like, big surprise, the Linux for everyone guy and all of his friends are against Microsoft. But look at how stagnant DirectX has been. They've done nothing for DirectX in five or six years. They only submitted recently to the pressure of SteamOS and Steam Deck. Gardiner (34:56) Yeah. Yeah. Jason Evangelho (35:07) By saying, yeah, yeah, Windows gaming mode. Yeah, we'll do that for the you know, we'll get that going and. It's. Liam Dawe (35:12) It's funny because Valve did the exact same to Microsoft before. If you remember when they were talking about when they were bringing ⁓ the Steam Left 4 Dead and so on over to Linux and they were doing the blog posts about how much faster they got OpenGL compared to DirectX. They lit a fire on the Microsoft to go back to DirectX and improve it again and they've done the same. Whenever Valve make a big Jason Evangelho (35:24) Hmm. Gardiner (35:26) Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, that was why we got DirectX 11, right? they get complacent. Right. Jason Evangelho (35:38) Very reactionary and not innovative, basically. Yeah. Nick (35:42) Yeah, and I think they're just moving out of the platform business anyway. They just want to sell services that you can run almost anywhere. Their games, their services, they don't care about the Xbox specifically. They're not trying to bring you another games for Windows Live or whatever. ⁓ fortunately, sorry, PTSD. But I think they're just giving up on all of that stuff. So maybe they still want to build Liam Dawe (35:54) Mm-hmm. No. Jason Evangelho (35:57) Mm-hmm. ⁓ god. PTSD, man. OK. Gardiner (36:02) Yeah Liam Dawe (36:02) No. Nick (36:12) technology behind it I don't think they're going to be. Jason Evangelho (36:17) Yeah. Nick (36:17) I think they just see any platform as a way to sell some stuff and make some money through that and the lockdown doesn't seem to serve them that well so… Jason Evangelho (36:26) Well, Windows is a platform now for selling services. That's all it is. Windows has a 1 % higher rate of profit than gaming does, than the Xbox brand. Only 1 % larger than Xbox. yeah. Why would they innovate Windows? Nick (36:30) Yeah, exactly. Gardiner (36:40) Mm. Nick (36:45) And they want to drastically improve the profitability of Xbox as well, because that's all the recent changes that they've been doing. It's because they want to drive the Xbox entire division profit margin up to, I think, 30 percent when they are at like 17, I think. So they're clearly seeing those things as just a vessel to sell some stuff. The platform doesn't matter to them anymore. Liam Dawe (36:58) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (37:10) this makes me think about this this growing dissatisfaction and vocal dissatisfaction about Windows gaming from. traditional mainstream outlets like The Verge ⁓ and then more enthusiast places like Linus Tech Tips and Gamers Nexus, they're all bashing Windows constantly, even going so far as saying like, want Windows to die and we're gonna, The Verge is thinking about devoting a lot more coverage to Linux in 2026, But my question is, What happens if Microsoft actually fights back and goes, well, here's Windows 11 G, a stripped down, this is just like Windows OS for gaming and that's it. Liam Dawe (37:58) Yeah, so the full screen Xbox experience has been gradually rolling out across different devices. It will be on desktop as well. And they've even done like a Windows technical blog post recently saying how they're dedicated to bringing down the list of processes that are running and stuff and make get what was it they said, make Windows the best platform for gaming and stuff like that. So they're already going down that road. The problem is they're saying all this. while shoving all this AI stuff into Windows and annoying people even more. Jason Evangelho (38:30) That, yeah, and I Gardiner (38:31) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (38:32) hear you and that's what I mean, but they're not going so far as to say, here's a different version of Windows with no teams, no OneDrive, no copilot. None of that's installed. It's just resources geared towards efficient, powerful gaming. Like would they go that far if gaming is so important to their business? Gardiner (38:44) you Liam Dawe (38:44) Nah. Gardiner (38:51) The problem is... The problem is Microsoft as an organization is just not structured in a way where they can deploy a lean focus team to make a singular product. They just can't. thing is Microsoft is so captured by the current moment of enshitification that like that will be their undoing in the desktop space, right? Right. Liam Dawe (39:17) I love that word. Jason Evangelho (39:19) in agentic OS, agentic. Not working Nick (39:19) Sure. Sure. ⁓ Jason Evangelho (39:22) out very well for them so far, by the way. Nick (39:23) No. Gardiner (39:24) No, and if you have like, in an industry like gaming, for example, where there is just one player who isn't running by the rules of inshitification, you are giving up your entire market share. Like it just takes one player like Valve, who is actually interested in making sustainable profit and not enshittifying their platform. for you to just lose everything ⁓ to the competitor. And that's exactly what Microsoft's doing. Nick (39:55) And I'm pretty sure that Microsoft as a corporation just has so many conflicting incentives. Like if you start building a Windows G. You're going to have the AI division knocking on the door saying, you know, AI for games is actually pretty cool and you should have co-pilot in there to get game guides and achievement guides. And then you'd get the OneDrive player saying, hey, maybe we can store game saves in OneDrive so you should pre-install it as well. I don't think you can wean yourself off of all those other business units in Microsoft. I don't think they're able to do that. Liam Dawe (40:10) Hahaha! Gardiner (40:11) Yeah. Yes. Jason Evangelho (40:19) Ugh. Gardiner (40:20) Yeah. Especially when... Cloud. Liam Dawe (40:26) which is why they're just doing it as a mode on top of it, aren't they? Nick (40:30) Yeah, Gardiner (40:30) Yeah, well, and especially when... Nick (40:31) which adds even more overhead on top of the system that is already extremely heavy. Gardiner (40:37) yeah, and also the fact that like, cloud makes up a huge portion of their income where desktop doesn't, you know? It's like, is Microsoft going to like, see the value in selling Windows 11 G to, you know, 40,000 special interest PC gamers? No, like they're not gonna make anywhere near that amount. So they have to bundle in these services to make the money that they would. Jason Evangelho (40:43) Mm-hmm. Right. No, no, you're absolutely right. Yeah. Nick (40:57) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (41:01) Yeah. Gardiner (41:03) have to invest in it to begin with. Nick (41:05) I think they would look at Xbox and saying, we're not even selling those specific PCs, which are, they are PCs just bundled as a console. We're not selling them. No one buys them. We stopped investing in them. Why are we building an OS specifically for other devices that we don't even make? I don't think they would go there. And I was, as I was saying, I think there's the QA as well. The QA on Windows 11 is atrocious. Like literally every single update that rolls out has Jason Evangelho (41:22) Hmm. Gardiner (41:23) Hmm. Nick (41:32) Tons of articles saying how it breaks something, makes the menu crash, destroys the shell, breaks the file manager, super basic stuff. I don't think they can maintain that version plus the gaming version plus anything else. They fired their QA team a while back and I think they replaced them with copilot. So I don't think that's just gonna work well. Gardiner (41:40) Yeah, printers stop working. Jason Evangelho (41:49) They must have because, yeah. Gardiner (41:50) You Liam Dawe (41:50) dear. Gardiner (41:54) I love how we can't resist to just shitting on Microsoft. Nick (41:58) Yeah. Liam Dawe (41:58) Well, it's easy to do, isn't it? I mean, they've done so many stupid things. Jason Evangelho (42:01) Well, look, like I keep, you know, it's Gardiner (42:02) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (42:04) not just Microsoft, but AI in general. I regularly go back to all of the tools that are out there and they all consistently suck. They're inaccurate. don't, you know, you have to correct them. Like that's not what I'm here for. ⁓ Anyway, it's. Nick (42:21) It's got to be a tangent, but my girlfriend, I think like this a week ago, she said, hey, could you find me online a picture of a nice Christmas tree in the middle of a snowy village? I was like, you know what? I'm going to try to use the latest Google AI to generate you one. It took me longer than just doing a Google search and grabbing any image. It just does not obey your commands. Like it generates me something in landscape. I tell it, put it in portrait. Jason Evangelho (42:37) Okay. Google image search, yeah. Nick (42:49) incapable of doing that. And it just spits the exact same image in landscape. You say that's not portrait. Please put it in portrait. Doesn't do it again and again and again. It doesn't do it. I have to generate a brand new image in portrait, which is the same image it generated previously, except it's read the people I told it to not add. It's insane. It sucks. It's a terrible system. It wastes time for everyone. I just hate those things so much. Jason Evangelho (42:52) Yeah. Gardiner (43:02) Mm. Jason Evangelho (43:08) Yeah, it's awful. Gardiner (43:19) dude. Nick (43:20) It's off. Jason Evangelho (43:21) And they want to give AI agents full control over our OS? No, no, because no, no, just no. Nick (43:27) Yeah, sure. Not for me, no. Liam Dawe (43:32) Well, the thing is you add in the AI agent on top of the recall that takes screenshots of everything you're doing and it's I don't understand how anybody thinks these things are a good idea. Nick (43:37) yeah, there's that too. Jason Evangelho (43:43) Well, it's only the executives in their bubble that think it's a good idea. I mean, we see the pushback. The pushback is real and it's growing. Nick (43:51) I'm pretty sure even the people developing Liam Dawe (43:52) It's- Nick (43:53) those things don't like what they're building. Gardiner (43:56) Didn't Microsoft revise projections for revenue from AI for next year or something? Because it's just not making the money they thought it would. Jason Evangelho (44:02) They did. Yeah, not being adopted is. Liam Dawe (44:07) Yeah, but you know how they're going to make that up now, don't you? They're pre-installing and forcing Copilot onto LG TVs and you can't remove it. Gardiner (44:15) Yeah. Nick (44:15) ⁓ no... Jason Evangelho (44:16) WHAT?! Nick (44:16) ⁓ God... Gardiner (44:16) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have the model of LG TV that would receive it, but I have never connected it to my Wi-Fi, so it's not gonna get that update. Liam Dawe (44:23) Hahaha Jason Evangelho (44:25) When will this nightmare end? All right, let's go into happier stuff. Nick (44:28) Yeah Jason Evangelho (44:31) But let's talk generally about the Steam Machine. Gardiner (44:34) So I'm excited for it because I have a... And this is no shade against Bazite at all. I have a Bazite-powered ⁓ gaming PC in my living room. there are just small inconveniences that I have absolute confidence that just won't be there with the Steam Machine, right? Small things like ⁓ having to compile shaders before you launch the game. Like that just doesn't exist on the Steam Deck. Jason Evangelho (45:00) ⁓ Gardiner (45:01) and it won't exist on the Steam Machine. ⁓ just weird, sometimes the Steam Compositor will get confused about what game is running and it'll like, just take me to a black screen and it will never show the game. And that doesn't happen on my Steam Deck. ⁓ There's just little things where, you know, and having full stack control from like, for Valve having full stack, drivers, everything, HDMI CEC, being able to put my device to sleep. Jason Evangelho (45:16) Hmm. Yeah. Gardiner (45:31) All of these things are going to be solved on the steam machine where they it's just fundamentally almost impossible ⁓ with with something like Bazai or Chimera Jason Evangelho (45:41) I will definitely validate your paper cuts, because I'm using Bazzite right now. And while I do love it, and I trust it as kind of a production machine, ⁓ it does have those little niggling issues. Even sleep, so I have a tower that's plugged in through DisplayPort, and sleeping and resuming is a nightmare on it. I can't figure out, it's just not talking to the TV correctly. I don't know why, and that's a big paper cut for me. Gardiner (46:02) Mm-hmm. Nick (46:09) I've got the exact same problem with Nobara on my PC. I can't turn it on by turning on the controller, which is like a little problem, but it's annoying. ⁓ It doesn't auto switch to the right ⁓ HDMI channel on my TV either. There's the update process, which is not handled through the SteamOS interface, meaning I have to go pick up a keyboard and mouse, which I don't have on my living room. So generally it's just sitting there unupdated for months, which is not great either. Jason Evangelho (46:13) Mm. Mmm. Gardiner (46:37) Mm-hmm. Nick (46:37) performance problems here and there, the shader compilation stuff. And generally, think the Steam Machine will also bring the SteamOS compatibility, meaning you just don't care about whether a game runs or not. You see it if it runs, you can install it and it will run. And it will probably run better on the Steam Machine than on a comparably specced PC, because it is a reference device that developers can optimize for, just like the Steam Deck, where they're not going to optimize for your specific combo of CPU, GPU or whatever else. Liam Dawe (47:07) It's funny hearing you guys talk about using like, Bazzite and stuff and you're having all these issues and stuff and there's me just sat there. I've been waiting years, right? I've been waiting years for a mini PC that has enough power to play all the stuff that I want that I can just sit at a TV and it's like Christmas came early and Valve basically said here is exactly what you've been asking for with the Steam Controller 2 that has the pads and the sticks and it will turn the device on Jason Evangelho (47:08) Yeah. Yep. Liam Dawe (47:37) for you and it'll go to sleep properly and it's like everything I've wanted in a little box. Jason Evangelho (47:42) And it's got an SD card slot. That's huge. That's huge. Steam Deck, boom. Steam Machine, click. know, seamless transfer of... Gardiner (47:45) Yeah. Nick (47:45) Yeah. Liam Dawe (47:46) I know, that's cool. Nick (47:52) Yeah, you get that little physical Liam Dawe (47:52) Yeah. Gardiner (47:53) Yeah. Nick (47:55) cartridge thing that is so cool with handhelds that I love. So that's cool as well. Jason Evangelho (47:58) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gardiner (48:00) I'm super excited about it. Honestly, like ⁓ I have a like a minis forum PC that in almost every way is just like one generation in terms of specs behind the steam machine and You put you put Bazzite on there you plug that in you can play 4k games. I've played ⁓ doom eternal and in 4k on this Minis forum like mini PC and it's like mind-blowing, right? And then most of the games that I really want to play are ⁓ Indies and they all work perfectly fine at 4K. Jason Evangelho (48:36) ⁓ it a integrated GPU? It's an AMD AP. Gardiner (48:39) No, it's got a dedicated, yeah, it's got like eight gigabytes dedicated, like 6600 or something mobile version. Yeah. Liam Dawe (48:47) See, I wanted to get one Jason Evangelho (48:48) okay. ⁓ Liam Dawe (48:49) of the Minisforum stuff, but again, it's like with the Steam Deck and why I'm not going for another handheld. I know Valve's quality, I know Valve's actual direct support, and buying a mini PC from somewhere like Minisforum can be so... I don't wanna, like, it can be risky, right? Because you really don't know what you're gonna get really, and you don't know what their support's gonna be like if it breaks in a year's time, whereas you know what's gonna happen with Valve. Jason Evangelho (49:04) Yeah. I've heard- Mm-hmm. Gardiner (49:17) the other thing about that is like when those are brand new, they don't have great support for Linux out of the box, right? Like the latest Ryzen CPUs just don't have, there's just little weird features that are missing and things are broken. And then by the time the prices come down or there's Linux support for them, then they've made them in such small quantities that there's just not stock available anymore. And so it's a difficult position, especially if you want something like that, because you have to buy it on the faith that at some point there will be the drivers and everything in the kernel. Liam Dawe (49:45) Yeah. It's the same with like the handhelds from GDP, A &E and so on. They're cranking them out so fast, multiple models a year. You don't, again, support. It might not work in a year's time. There might not be any left. They might have just completely moved on and then you're stuck, aren't you? Gardiner (49:59) Mm-hmm. Jason Evangelho (50:11) Yeah, Liam, it's actually that point that has ⁓ convinced me not to buy from any of those brands is because every time I turn around, they're releasing an upgraded model it's like every six months they're turning around. new new handhelds and new you know mini pcs and ⁓ maybe that's confusing to a lot of people going like wouldn't we be celebrating if If we had a steam deck 2 by now like almost four years later. Wouldn't we be celebrating that fact? Would we I don't know. I would I definitely would be but ⁓ Nick (50:43) Yeah, probably. Yeah, but four Liam Dawe (50:44) Yeah, I would. Nick (50:46) years is not a year. ⁓ And I think, again, it would be from Valve, a proven company that controls the hardware, the software, the software integration with the hardware, the store. So even if it was once a year, you would probably still trust them to support it and to make it work properly and to not release it until the drivers are actually well cooked and work. ⁓ Jason Evangelho (50:48) Right. Gardiner (50:49) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (51:10) Yeah, well, Liam, let me ask you, when ⁓ did the Valve Index release and how long did that support last and has it even ended? Liam Dawe (51:19) The Valve Index is old now, man. It's so old. the problem is that Valve's support of Linux VR has never been especially good. Like they haven't really put much effort into it, to be honest. But again, you're talking about the tiny market of Linux desktop gamers that have a capable PC of properly running VR. Jason Evangelho (51:21) Yeah. Gardiner (51:21) Yeah. 2018. Yeah. Jason Evangelho (51:47) Yeah Liam Dawe (51:48) and then you're talking about specifically VR. It's the niche in a niche in a niche. Even for Valve, it's not worth putting the effort in. But my hope with the Steam Frame is that maybe some of those improvements will trickle down, but they might not because the Steam Frame, it's all built in. And it's very different from running something plugged directly into your computer where you've got Steam VR running it then on another device. Jason Evangelho (51:50) Very tiny slice. Yeah. That's fair. That's fair. Liam Dawe (52:19) So, yeah. Gardiner (52:19) Yeah, I think there will be like some improvements that come to Linux VR, ⁓ especially things like Proton's native bridge that lets, you know, ⁓ Proton games interact with like the native Steam client and things like that. But yeah, no, I see what you're saying. I have a index in my living room and I have to boot into Windows in order to play ⁓ VR because Jason Evangelho (52:46) ⁓ Liam Dawe (52:46) Yeah, I've had to do that a few times, yeah. Gardiner (52:47) It, I still to this day, yeah, still to this day, I'm super, super sensitive to like micro stutter in VR and like frame rate drops and all this stuff. And I can not at all play VR on Linux. just, it's, it doesn't have the timing down or something. I don't know. Nick (53:04) Yeah, it's a technology where you really need to be perfect, exactly perfect, or you're going to make people sick. Jason Evangelho (53:08) Yeah. Literally make them sick. Yeah, Gardiner (53:12) Yeah. Yeah. Jason Evangelho (53:12) yeah, yeah. That's fair. Well, I mean, I'm looking forward to hopefully seeing. The end of that complaint when the Steam frame launches, ⁓ you know, speaking of launches. Does it? It feels to me. Overly ambitious for them to be launching all of this hardware in early 2026. And we don't even have price or preorder information yet. Gardiner (53:21) Yeah. Liam Dawe (53:39) Well, the problem with that is Valve know the industry right now, especially with RAM prices and so on. If they gave a price when it comes to launching, that price will be completely different. I think they're trying to stop the issues that other vendors have had when they've had to raise the price multiple times. Like you've had Framework, the laptop vendor recently, they've had to their prices. Gardiner (53:40) Mm. Jason Evangelho (54:05) Ugh. Yeah. It's all going up. Liam Dawe (54:06) Xbox, PlayStations, and so on. Like everybody's Nick (54:09) Yeah, Liam Dawe (54:09) raising prices on everything. Nick (54:09) the Switch 2 as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it had a price hike right after it was announced, I think they announced it at a certain price. And I think a month after that, they said, ⁓ due to the tariffs, it's like 50 bucks more. Yeah. Jason Evangelho (54:11) The Switch 2 even got a price hike already, really? Wow. Gardiner (54:13) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (54:19) it was tariffs then, but yeah, yeah, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do another one. Just I don't know. They like their they like their profit margins on their hardware. So, you know, then does it make sense for Valve to come out maybe after after New Year's, you know, first, second week? I'm going to say second week of January and say. Here's the price of the steam machine and the pre-orders are live. All at Liam Dawe (54:48) think we'll get the pricing towards the end of February, I reckon. Jason Evangelho (54:48) On a random Wednesday. Nick (54:51) That would be very valve-like. Jason Evangelho (54:55) February, okay, Nick (54:55) February, yeah. Jason Evangelho (54:56) okay. And then. Gardiner (54:56) Yeah. Liam Dawe (54:57) I think February with possibly a summer launch maybe. But I don't think they'll release it all at the same time. The steam machine and the controller will launch at the same time. I think the steam frame will be the last to launch because it's probably the most complicated device out of all. Jason Evangelho (55:01) Hmm, okay. I agree. Gardiner (55:10) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (55:14) And we might as well just throw our our opinions into the into the hat here. What will the steam machine cost? Liam Dawe (55:25) I'm gonna say. Yeah, I reckon $750. Nick (55:27) with the controller. Yeah, I would have been around like Jason Evangelho (55:27) Hmm. With the controller? Nick (55:30) 800 without a controller, I would have said. Gardiner (55:33) Yeah, I would like it to be 650 with the controller, but ⁓ I think it's probably gonna be more around seven I don't think that will they be selling it without the controller They will okay Yeah Okay Nick (55:36) Yeah Jason Evangelho (55:44) Yes. I. Yeah. Nick (55:45) It is a PC, I would think so, Jason Evangelho (55:49) Yeah. And because you know because if somebody buys just the steam controller and then three months a year down the road they want just the steam machine then that's that's got to be an option. I'm going to say six ninety nine with the controller and I know that's hopeful but ⁓ I. But you have to remember that while. Gardiner (55:58) Right, okay. Nick (56:05) optimistic. Liam Dawe (56:06) I think that's wishful thinking. Jason Evangelho (56:14) Cost of RAM is egregious right now. Valve kind of takes a junkyard wars approach to building their hardware now. I don't know about in the past, but now they do. And they're gonna get, ⁓ I think they're gonna get some very deep discounts on the silicon, on the chip set from AMD. And I think they're gonna find ways to cut costs, but not cut corners on other aspects of the hardware. ⁓ So I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful that it stays under $700. And, ⁓ you know, I know that they said it's not gonna be priced like a console. They said it's gonna be priced more like a mid-range gaming PC, but that, that's a huge price range, right? Yeah. Nick (56:55) yeah that's like 650 to 12 1300 Liam Dawe (56:56) Yeah. Gardiner (56:56) Yeah. Nick (57:00) like it's it's yeah Jason Evangelho (57:02) I guarantee it'll be under a thousand. It has to be under a thousand. Gardiner (57:05) Yeah. Nick (57:05) Yeah, it has to be. Liam Dawe (57:06) if they price it anywhere near a thousand then we're gonna... it's gonna be dead on arrival, Jason Evangelho (57:13) Yeah, yeah. Gardiner (57:13) Yeah. Nick (57:15) Well, it will Jason Evangelho (57:15) And I don't... Nick (57:16) still appeal to a bunch of us Linux niche gamers, but it's probably never going to reach mass market. Like, you're going to take a look at what it spits out. You're going to take a look at a PS5 or if you're a mad bastard at an Xbox Series X and you're going to think, why am I paying 300, 400 more? It doesn't make sense. Jason Evangelho (57:18) Sure. Liam Dawe (57:32) You Jason Evangelho (57:36) And will it come bundled with Half-Life 3? Liam Dawe (57:35) Yeah, I mean, even if you're... Nick (57:40) In that case... Gardiner (57:41) Hahaha Jason Evangelho (57:42) I'll pay a thousand sure ⁓ Gardiner (57:47) When Half-Life Alyx was announced, they were like, if you buy the index, you get Half-Life Alyx for free. And I was like, are you kidding me? A thousand bucks? Absolutely. I did, and yeah, and I literally, I bought my index just to play Alyx Like that was the only, I had no other games that I didn't know anything about VR. It was just Alyx. And then that's when I actually got into PC VR and gaming on the index. But yeah. Jason Evangelho (57:56) Here's a fast- Liam Dawe (57:57) Hahaha Jason Evangelho (58:00) Yeah. I s- My shameful secret is I've never played it. Yeah, I know. Nick (58:19) Me Gardiner (58:20) You're missing out. Liam Dawe (58:19) man! Half-Life Alyx is absolutely one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. It's so good! Gardiner (58:26) Yes. Yes. Jason Evangelho (58:27) Ugh. Nick (58:28) Yeah, I never had the hardware to play it, so I never played it. First thing on the Steam Frame that I definitely buy will be Alpha Cat AXE. Absolutely. Jason Evangelho (58:29) Well... Gardiner (58:32) Let me tell you, like, if you... Jason Evangelho (58:32) Yeah, Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Gardiner (58:37) Yeah, I'll tell you right now, if VR gaming was like Alyx, everyone would be doing it. But because I mean, like if you get people into Alyx, is like you are literally transported to this ⁓ different space and it is very cool. I mean, I don't know if you've ever been to Disney World. But like when I was 12 years old, I went to Disney, right? And I, you know, walking through like the haunted, riding through the haunted mansion or like space mountain, and there's like that magical experience of just going through. And that is the experience I had as a 20, a 30 something year old man playing Half-Life Alyx. It was magic. Jason Evangelho (59:16) immersion yeah. Hehe. Liam Dawe (59:24) Yeah, you're not wrong there. The biggest problem is there's so few titles that even come close to Alyx in VR. Nick (59:34) mean, on the PSVR, the only ones that really blew me away were Beat Saber, because that was just a fantastic rhythmic experience that blows your mind and Superhot. I remember in Superhot at some... Yeah, exactly. I was hiding behind those barrels in the game and I was so immersed that I tried to push myself up and there was nothing in front of me. So I fell and I was like, that's awesome. ⁓ Jason Evangelho (59:42) yeah, I love Beat Saber. Gardiner (59:42) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Jason Evangelho (59:47) Super hot. ⁓ Liam Dawe (59:49) Yeah, love it. Gardiner (59:50) No. Yeah. Liam Dawe (59:58) Hahaha! Jason Evangelho (1:00:02) What hardware was that on that you I'm excited about the possibility of just there being a wider adoption of VR hardware, which will in turn ⁓ hopefully inspire developers to take a stab at it. Because right now, I don't know what the install base of the MetaQuest is. mean, Apple. Whatever Apple's is, is just not even on the table as far as it's not making an impact. But you know, if you're a game developer, you're, you know, it's almost like saying I'm a game developer and I'm gonna make a Linux exclusive game and not release it on Windows, right? Before the, yeah, just not release it on Windows even. And it's just gonna be for Linux users. Like, why would you do that? And right now I feel like why would you pour all these resources into making this dynamite VR? Nick (1:00:43) Before the Steam Deck. Yeah, before the Steam Deck. Yeah. Gardiner (1:00:50) Mm. Jason Evangelho (1:00:58) you know, immersive VR experience if there's just not, the players aren't quite there to justify it yet. Liam Dawe (1:01:05) Yeah, I mean in my own life of people that I know I can count one other person that has a VR kit like in you know real location world friends and so on I've never heard anybody really talk about it and it's just it is such a niche still because the more you think about it like Jason Evangelho (1:01:16) Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Gardiner (1:01:25) Yeah. Liam Dawe (1:01:30) You want VR to be more like Star Trek holodeck kind of thing, don't you? Really. That's what we're all waiting for, right? When you try and talk to any sort of normal person about VR gaming and it's like, ⁓ strap this big thing to your head and hope you don't walk into a wall kind of thing. It's not selling it to many people. think it's still going to be a huge challenge until they can get them down to the size of my glasses. It's never... Jason Evangelho (1:01:33) Yes. You're waiting for AR, I guess, right? Gardiner (1:01:34) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:01:47) Mm-hmm. Gardiner (1:01:48) Yeah. Liam Dawe (1:01:59) realistically going to be this proper mainstream thing. Jason Evangelho (1:02:05) Not to pile on with pessimism. And I'm normally a pretty biased Valve fanboy, but I have to say that I don't, I'm concerned about the battery life on the frame. That's my only concern about it having a wider adoption is the battery life. if you're playing something really demanding, it's only gonna give you 90 minutes to two hours and like, Gardiner (1:02:05) Mm. Jason Evangelho (1:02:31) I don't know if you're watching a, if I want to watch, you know, the extended edition of Lord of the Rings, can I even finish it? on my big virtual theater, that, those are the kinds of things that, that concern me about it. But I don't know if that's warranted. Liam Dawe (1:02:43) I think watching Gardiner (1:02:44) I mean... Liam Dawe (1:02:45) films have been no problem because you're barely using any power to do that really. The gaming side of it is a concern for the Steam Frame is not just the battery life, it's the performance. If their own last generation VR game can't even run on it natively, you know, on the headset rather than streaming, it's going to be an issue I think. Gardiner (1:02:49) Yeah. Liam Dawe (1:03:11) And then again, if it proves popular, developers are going to have to optimize for it. So Gardiner (1:03:15) My understanding is that it's kind of on par. It's pretty close to the same battery life as the Quest, the Quest 3. ⁓ Like, I think the Quest has like two and half hours or three maybe, so it's not that much worse. Jason Evangelho (1:03:28) ⁓ Okay, Liam Dawe (1:03:30) And then again, Nick (1:03:30) and Jason Evangelho (1:03:31) okay. Liam Dawe (1:03:31) you think about it, playing in VR, you don't generally do it for hours and hours stretches at a time, do you? Because it is... Nick (1:03:36) Yeah, because you get the weight on your Gardiner (1:03:37) Right. Nick (1:03:39) head. Jason Evangelho (1:03:40) Well, sure, but- Liam Dawe (1:03:41) Like playing Beat Saber as a full body workout. Nick (1:03:44) Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:03:44) Oh yeah, that's true. No, that's absolutely true. I Gardiner (1:03:44) Yeah, yeah. I literally, Jason Evangelho (1:03:47) can't play that for more than 30 minutes. Gardiner (1:03:49) I literally, I'm a type one diabetic and I literally use Beat Saber as a way to regulate my blood sugar. Yeah. Nick (1:03:55) Thank you. Jason Evangelho (1:03:56) ⁓ wow. Liam Dawe (1:03:57) Dude, I Jason Evangelho (1:03:57) Okay. Liam Dawe (1:03:57) get so hot playing it. I'm not sure if I've said this in public like this before, but I have to get down to my underwear because I just, I get so hot. I can't help it. Gardiner (1:04:00) Yeah. Same. Yeah. Liam Dawe (1:04:12) and somebody walks in and I'm there like this with the hat in my underwear like hello Gardiner (1:04:17) I have to play in like my underwear and a shirt because the wire will like get tangled in my back hair. It's no fun if I don't wear a shirt. Jason Evangelho (1:04:18) You Liam Dawe (1:04:19) Hahaha. Nick (1:04:23) ⁓ yeah. Liam Dawe (1:04:24) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:04:28) All right, let's jump into, we're gonna talk about some of the games we've been playing at the but let's make this next, second to last segment, bold predictions for 2026 in Linux gaming. And I know, I don't know if that was on the show notes or not, so I might be surprising you guys. One bold prediction, it can be ludicrous or realistic. It doesn't matter. Liam Dawe (1:04:48) Alright, I'll take it to start then, shall I? Jason Evangelho (1:04:55) maybe it'll just generate some interesting ⁓ Anybody wanna start? Liam Dawe (1:04:58) Well, we hit 3 % officially this year. So I think my realistic expectation is we'll hit over 4 % throughout next year. And that's before, I reckon we'll hit that before the Steam Machine releases that Linux as a share of users on Steam will hit 4%, maybe midway through next year. Around summertime, I reckon. Gardiner (1:05:20) Mm. Jason Evangelho (1:05:21) Before summer 2026 then. Okay. Liam Dawe (1:05:26) because it Jason Evangelho (1:05:26) Huh. Liam Dawe (1:05:27) is trending clearly towards that point. And it's not all Steam Deck as well. If you look at the trends, the amount of machines actually using Steam OS is going down, whereas other distros are sort of stabilizing in the middle. So I think realistically 4%. And if you look at the trajectory over the next few years, it will just keep going up. It's a slow and steady wins the race, basically. Gardiner (1:05:30) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:05:38) Mm-hmm. Liam, with all the discussions you have ⁓ with game developers, what percentage of market share do you think Linux gaming needs to have for them to start actually paying Liam Dawe (1:06:06) think realistically once you hit 10 % that is the spot where developers and publishers will really be starting to turn their heads because you're... that would probably be over 20 million people at that point and that's not a small market when it comes to video games. Jason Evangelho (1:06:21) Yeah, that's significant. No. Gardiner (1:06:27) Mm. Jason Evangelho (1:06:27) Is that ⁓ we see the end of invasive anti-cheat? Nick (1:06:33) prediction would be full anti-cheat support by the end of 2026. I think the Steam Machine is what we need to have that because ⁓ you can't really say that the Steam Deck is really suited to the competitive shooters and competitive games that really want to have that damn anti-cheat in. So you can always say, yeah, Steam Deck is sort of big, but that's not the platform for our game. So we don't care. Once you have the Steam Machine doing some kind of numbers, some kind of user base, Jason Evangelho (1:06:34) Ugh. Gardiner (1:06:40) Hmm. Nick (1:07:02) that's the device that you play those games on. That's the device you use a mouse and keyboard on. That's the one that has the oomph to play that. And I think at that point, you have to say, okay, we need to find a solution for the anti-cheat stuff. Now, whether that means we have to implement those horrible things in our computers or they just get rid of them and go to another model, I don't know. But ⁓ I would say anti-cheat problems mostly fixed by the end of the year. Jason Evangelho (1:07:28) Hmm, nice. I'm on board for that prediction. Gardiner (1:07:29) Mm. Nick (1:07:33) Liam Gardiner (1:07:33) I like that. Nick (1:07:33) is really unconvinced. Liam Dawe (1:07:37) just from what I know of the industry and talking to a few publishers, would say no, it's going to happen. Not by the end of 2026, but if the steam machine actual success by the end of 2027, now, now we're talking. Nick (1:07:43) No. Gardiner (1:07:44) Yeah ⁓ Jason Evangelho (1:07:53) We're gonna revisit this next year. Nick (1:07:54) Yeah, because my understanding was that we are, well, we are, some people are currently working on a multi-kernel support for Linux. And I don't really see what would prevent Valve from working on a dedicated gaming kernel that has the kernel level anti-cheat and use those multi-kernel solutions to load the right kernel for the right game, play that game on the right kernel and switch to the non-invasive kernel for the rest of the games. Jason Evangelho (1:08:18) Huh, Gardiner (1:08:19) Mm. Jason Evangelho (1:08:20) sounds ambitious, but awesome. Right? We still don't have proper HDR support across the board, so Then again, if you know, we see what happens when Valve throws their weight behind something. got anything? Nick (1:08:23) It may not be a one year solution. Liam Dawe (1:08:25) Yeah, that's more what I meant on a technical Gardiner (1:08:25) Yeah. Liam Dawe (1:08:29) level. Gardiner (1:08:39) I don't have like a specific Linux gaming prediction, but I think that we're watching, like I feel like I've been seeing the hints and indications that people are starting to take their security seriously and like their online identity, they want to protect that, they want to maintain their privacy a lot more than they ever have before. And I see that. being leading into ⁓ Liam's prediction where it's like, people aren't just switching over to Linux for gaming, they're switching over to Linux because it's the more secure option. It's the better option for your digital autonomy. ⁓ so I see like, if the Steam Market share gets to 4 % on Linux, what's the one that's like browser market share or whatever is gonna be bigger than that. Like it's gonna be growing and it's gonna start growing really quickly. And so I think we're gonna hit like a critical mass towards the mid to late 2026. And it's really just gonna explode from there. Also, maybe we'll see a bunch of like. Jason Evangelho (1:09:34) Mm-hmm. Gardiner (1:09:48) desktop apps, like proprietary desktop apps, like Affinity's apps and stuff like that. Jason Evangelho (1:09:53) Mmm. Interesting, OK. Well, the downside of going last is that two of my predictions have already been mentioned. So I'm not going to opt out. I'm not going to pass, but I will say Liam, think it's going to be gaming share and it's going to be 7 % browser share by the end of 2026. Liam Dawe (1:10:04) Hahaha. Gardiner (1:10:06) You Jason Evangelho (1:10:19) This isn't really gaming. But I think that we will see a very financially successful independent gaming distribution that's not SteamOS by the end of 2026. I kind of just came up with that off the top of my head because I didn't want to repeat what you guys said. But I would love to see, you know, ⁓ a distro that emerges or already exists that offers, you know, something like Bazzite, even though that is that is propped up by by Universal Blue, but they're technically independent. Gardiner (1:10:31) Mm. Jason Evangelho (1:10:50) Right. I don't know what that what that looks like specifically, but just an independent ⁓ gaming distro that offers an alternative to steam OS that is financially successful, takes a page from Thunderbird or takes a page from KDE and has a really successful fundraising campaign and can just offer, you know, I don't know, more device support or I don't know what that looks like, but. Gardiner (1:11:12) Hmm. Jason Evangelho (1:11:12) I think we'll see some of these guys come out of the shadows as Linux continues to ⁓ gain popularity. Nick (1:11:17) Wasn't something I think called Playtron or something which was a specific distro? Is that the one you're thinking about? ⁓ Jason Evangelho (1:11:21) god. ⁓ man. I- no. No it's not. It's absolutely not. Gardiner (1:11:21) Yeah, yeah. Liam Dawe (1:11:21) Hahaha! Gardiner (1:11:24) Ha ha ha ha. Liam Dawe (1:11:30) ⁓ Don't get me started on Playtron. That'll be another hour long chat about them. Jason Evangelho (1:11:34) I asked who was it I asked. I think it was either it was either Liam or it was Joe Resington who I you know because I spent like kind of two years in hibernation. I wasn't paying attention to the daily news cycle and so I'm catching up on a lot of a lot of this stuff and I heard about Playtron in passing and I asked somebody I don't know if it was Liam or Joe what it was and all they all they said was like crypto and I was like all right I'm out. No interest. Nick (1:11:59) Hahaha! Gardiner (1:11:59) Yeah Liam Dawe (1:11:59) Yeah. Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:12:05) Why don't we wrap this up by talking about what games we have been playing this month. Gardiner (1:12:04) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:12:11) Liam, you still? Liam Dawe (1:12:12) Oh, here we go, okay. Well, I've been really into ark Raiders heavily. Well, the thing is, I've put over 130 hours into it and it's only been out, what, a month now? Jason Evangelho (1:12:22) Okay, still addicted. Yeah, I think about a month, Liam Dawe (1:12:35) the hype around it... Jason Evangelho (1:12:35) a part-time job, dude. Liam Dawe (1:12:37) I can pass some of it off as well, related, it's fine. The novelty and hype around it, for me personally, has worn off quite a lot, but I still enjoy just jumping into it and going for a run through and seeing what chaos happens. 130 hours is a lot of time for any game, I think, anyway. And so I got my money's worth out of it, I just... Jason Evangelho (1:12:50) Mm-hmm. Liam Dawe (1:13:00) I really love the world that it's in and just the fact that even the most basic enemies are deadly in it and all the animations in the enemies is really f***ing cool as well and because it's a PvP game PvPvE so it's got NPC enemies but right around the corner might be another player with their sights on you Jason Evangelho (1:13:02) Yeah. Liam Dawe (1:13:25) or you can be friendly towards each other. I've had so many funny interactions with random people on proximity chat. It's amazing. Like one guy just ran past me and he was playing like some little flute or something and he was running past me playing the flute, just stopped next to me, played it at me and then ran off. it's just, the amount of chaos you can have in it is amazing. And yeah, I love it. Jason Evangelho (1:13:25) Hmm. Nick (1:13:43) Ha ha ha. Jason Evangelho (1:13:45) you Nick (1:13:46) You Jason Evangelho (1:13:47) Have you found that the majority of your human experiences, your human interactions there are friendly or combative? What weight is it tipped? Liam Dawe (1:13:59) It depends on the mood and my own mood because I've shot a few people in the back as well and you know they've been very unhappy with me over proximity chat. It's funny with all the different accents you hear from people as well when because I'm clearly British and people instantly hook into that when I'm over there and then they start talking in English but then you hear all their wonderful accents. Jason Evangelho (1:14:02) Okay. Gardiner (1:14:05) Mm-hmm Jason Evangelho (1:14:26) Hmm. Liam Dawe (1:14:26) And when they start swearing at you in English in these accents as well is quite funny, to be honest. Yeah. And when you just hear someone's... It's like when you hear someone screaming in the distance and they come running at you and you just see this great big thing called a rocketeer that's floating towards you and you're like, ⁓ shit. Yeah, it's brilliant. Jason Evangelho (1:14:30) Yeah Gardiner (1:14:31) haha Jason Evangelho (1:14:32) If you've recorded any of that, I would love to see it. ⁓ those are terrifying. Those are terrifying. Gardiner (1:14:51) Hmm Liam Dawe (1:14:54) You can get killed by the smallest NPC enemy in it as well, like you're running down the stairs in this dark room and then all you hear is, bup bup bup, and then this roller ball comes at you and explodes. And they're like one of the most basic things in it and you're dead and you're like, okay. There's lots of little things about it that I appreciate as well. Jason Evangelho (1:15:08) Yep, yep. High stakes. mean, it's a big, it's the risk reward that I think makes it so compelling, you know, for me. I don't play it as often, but yeah, it's a great game. Liam Dawe (1:15:17) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's... It's all the little touches that they put into it, like even if somebody downs you when you're crawling along the ground, you can still exit the map with everything you've got if you're close enough. It's little things like that and even that... They can revive you as well, yeah. Just a random player could come along and be like, you know what, here you go, you're alive. Yeah. It's good, but there is one thing I will touch on. Gardiner (1:15:23) Hmm. Jason Evangelho (1:15:35) Yeah, or you can beg them to revive you, right? They can use one of their, yeah. Here's some mercy. Sure, sure. I love that it's a dynamic. That's, yeah. Gardiner (1:15:45) haha Liam Dawe (1:15:52) which as we all know the industry with AI, generative AI and stuff, the thing that makes me uneasy about it is that they do use AI voices in it but it's on the more ethical side of it because they are they have paid and contracted people to use their voices they're fully aware that it's being done and they're paid for it but it doesn't really add anything to the game Jason Evangelho (1:15:56) Mm-hmm. But they're not being paid as much as if the developers had a new script, right? They have a new enemy type or a new NPC in the hub world and a new script and they hired the voice actor, hey, can you come back and record some more lines, right? Yeah. Liam Dawe (1:16:28) Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm not- Yeah, and it's like I'm torn between two worlds because the game itself is brilliant. It's got a brilliant design to it, but it does use a form of generative text to speech. Yeah, it's difficult. Jason Evangelho (1:16:41) I get it. Yeah, yeah. Gardiner (1:16:53) Yeah, and there's no telling if the training data that they used to actually build the models were paid actors too. Liam Dawe (1:17:02) Yeah, it's a difficult one. Jason Evangelho (1:17:03) Hmm. want to say that that kind of practice will not be ramping up, but I feel like it definitely will be. ⁓ Liam Dawe (1:17:14) Yeah, it will be. It's everywhere. Gardiner (1:17:14) Yeah. Liam Dawe (1:17:16) I mean, I got an email the other day of, and they were proud of this as well. The entire game was 100 % AI generated. It went straight in the bin. I was like, well, I don't care then. Nick (1:17:26) Slop the game. Gardiner (1:17:26) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:17:27) Wait, is this the one? okay, okay. Nick, what you been playing? Liam Dawe (1:17:32) Hahaha Nick (1:17:34) I've been playing a bunch of stuff. I finished this patch this month which is just absolutely fantastic. You have to like those sort of telltale type games although it does have more gameplay than the older ones. Liam Dawe (1:17:41) Yeah, amazing. Nick (1:17:49) because you have that whole dispatch mechanic where you choose the hero you want to send on which call based on the instructions that you've been given and those heroes progress over time. It also seems to feed into how they react to you a little bit as well or all the choices that you make. So it's a fantastic one. More like an interactive movie, but still wholly immersive, super gripping. Great. Jason Evangelho (1:17:53) Yeah. But like, yeah, super excellent writing. mean, excellent writing and character interactions. Like, I actually feel like these video game characters have chemistry with each other, which I rarely feel. Yeah. Nick (1:18:14) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and the voice actors are excellent. Liam Dawe (1:18:20) Yeah. Nick (1:18:23) It's just great. Yeah. I've also played The Invincible, which is an indie title as well. I think it's relatively old, a few years old at least. ⁓ kind of set in what they call an atom punk universe. So it's basically like space exploration, Cold War, but way more advanced with like robots and nuclear spaceships and whatever. So the design is very rounded, very 60s aesthetic. And it's based on a graphic novel, I think from a Polish author. It's just fine. Again, it's a walking simulator. You don't do much. There's no combat and nothing, but you investigate on the planet. You make choices that do impact. Jason Evangelho (1:18:50) neat. Huh. Nick (1:19:03) the ending that you see. And it's beautiful, it's nice, I really enjoyed it. It was on sale on Steam. I finished it. It's like six or seven hours. The invincible. Liam Dawe (1:19:10) What was it called? ⁓ right. Okay. Jason Evangelho (1:19:13) Huh, I'm gonna look into that. Nick (1:19:15) It's pretty cool. ⁓ Jason Evangelho (1:19:16) The aesthetic sounds pretty neat. Nick (1:19:17) Yeah, yeah, it's really nice looking. It's not like the most advanced visual game, but there's an ambience to it. There's a mystery around the planet you're exploring and why is no one remembering anything. It's pretty cool. And then I finished Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, the first one, not the bad one that they released, the old one that was on PS2, which is way harder than I remember, but pretty fun as well. Jason Evangelho (1:19:34) Wow Liam Dawe (1:19:37) That's a classic. Nick (1:19:43) And of course the Claire Obscure, which I've been playing an hour here, an hour there. I do want to take my time with it. Jason Evangelho (1:19:46) Yes. You're a French countryman. You're pretty much obligated to play that game, right? mean... Nice. Nice. Nick (1:19:53) Yeah, and I played with the French voices as well. Gardiner (1:19:55) Hahaha. Hahaha. Nick (1:19:58) Yeah, it's very cool. I must admit I'm not a fan of this genre. I'm not a big fan of turn-based combat. I don't really enjoy the combat. I know people will get mad at me, but I just want to go on with the story, the universe. It's just beautiful. It's well narrated. It's just super immersive as well. Really nice. So I put it on easy. So the combats are not a hindrance because I don't like those combats. But the whole story, everything's just fantastic. So I'm taking it one bite at a time, but it's cool. Jason Evangelho (1:20:29) Nice. Any others? Gardiner (1:20:29) Mm. Nick (1:20:30) And well, I started Dredge as well, Soma as well, and the medium as well. But again, I'm just dabbling in a few games here and there. I have a hard time like concentrating on a game for like four or five, six hours, unless it's very narrative like Dispatch, for example, or The Invincible, because you can just go through it like a movie. Jason Evangelho (1:20:35) Okay, yeah, you're... Wow! Yeah. Nick (1:20:53) But a game that involves a few more mechanisms and actual hiding stealth, gameplay loops, etc. I find myself just being able to play them in one or two hour increments tops. Jason Evangelho (1:21:05) Nice. And I had to just, I just want to throw in that I actually love the release strategy of dispatch. I like that. I like when like streaming services release a show a week at a time. And I, I, I kind of feel that way about episodic games. Now I think that was a neat, a neat way to release it, you know, build up a little bit of anticipation after you finished the each chapter. So Nick (1:21:18) Yeah, me too. Jason Evangelho (1:21:30) Gardiner, it's all you. Gardiner (1:21:31) boy, I've been very busy this week ⁓ or the last ⁓ month even and I've really only been going back to my old standbys Dead Cells is just a brilliant game and that's I've been playing that on my Steam Deck a lot ⁓ Domekeeper Have you heard of Domekeeper? ⁓ Liam, I saw you light up like it's ⁓ Liam Dawe (1:21:51) ⁓ yeah, love that. Jason Evangelho (1:21:52) Huh. ⁓ okay. Yeah. Gardiner (1:21:57) Okay, Domekeeper Liam Dawe (1:21:57) right game. Jason Evangelho (1:21:58) Huh. Tell us about it. Gardiner (1:21:59) is like if you crossed Dig Dug, Missile Command, and a Roguelike. ⁓ It's so, it's so, is that a good way to describe it, Liam? Jason Evangelho (1:22:05) What? Nick (1:22:06) You Jason Evangelho (1:22:10) I'm intrigued. Liam Dawe (1:22:11) ⁓ yeah, I guess. Gardiner (1:22:13) Kind of. So, okay, basically you're this little tiny dude and you have a dome and then there are waves of enemies. It's like a tower defense too. So there's waves of enemies that come at you and you have to fight them off and then you have to buy upgrades for your dome, for your weapons and your defenses. And then you have to dig down underground, under your dome and find the resources you need to actually buy everything you need to upgrade. Jason Evangelho (1:22:22) Yeah. Sold. Gardiner (1:22:42) It is the most addictive game loop. Yeah. Liam Dawe (1:22:44) He's writing it down, let's say, he doesn't forget now. Nick (1:22:46) Yeah, Jason Evangelho (1:22:46) Yeah, I wrote it down. Like I'm gonna go buy it just based on your description. Yeah. Nick (1:22:47) I typed it in my browser tab as well. ⁓ Gardiner (1:22:50) It... Yeah, it's literally the most addictive game loop I have ever played. It's so fun. ⁓ And that's been consuming most of my time on my Steam Deck. And then, obviously, Beat Saber. I do that, like, almost daily. And ⁓ then I've been playing ⁓ Smash Remix on my N64 with my girlfriend. And it's super, super cool. Jason Evangelho (1:23:05) Okay. Are you looking into the analog 3D at all? Are you interested in that or are you just gonna stick with your OG hardware? Yeah. Gardiner (1:23:19) No, not really. mean, I have a Summercart 64 and so I don't... you know, if I... I don't know. If I was to go into like that avenue, I'd probably just get like a generic FPGA. Actually, I already have a generic FPGA and I never use it. I have the Mr. I almost never use it because I have the consoles I want to play and I play on the original hardware. Jason Evangelho (1:23:38) ⁓ ⁓ wow. Well, yeah, you know what? The original hardware is always the better, like, it's not gonna be better fidelity wise, maybe, but just experience wise, I feel like it's always the better option. Yeah, yeah. Gardiner (1:23:50) No. Yeah, and I have like a CRT right like literally right here ⁓ and I play all of my games on that. yeah, I even had this CRT has an HDMI port in it. It's it was like the last one that Sony ever made. It has an HDMI like zero point nine. Yeah, it's and it does the HDMI is so old that it doesn't have the ⁓ audio input like it doesn't do audio. So there's like a separate audio jack on the back for the HDMI port. Jason Evangelho (1:23:57) I'm so jealous. That's rad. That's rad. it's a Sony. Trinitron? Yeah. Gah. Wow! Liam Dawe (1:24:20) What? Gardiner (1:24:22) And so, but I had, it's so beautiful. It's a widescreen CRT and I had like ⁓ my living room gaming PC hooked up in here for quite a while. And I was playing all my favorite games in glorious 720p on this thing. Jason Evangelho (1:24:22) I bet it's gorgeous though. Man. What? Nick (1:24:25) You Jason Evangelho (1:24:33) Hmm. Glorious, 720p. I love it. ⁓ Is that super expensive these days? It probably is, huh? I've been... You suck! Gardiner (1:24:47) Dude, I got this for free about eight or maybe nine years ago on craigslist because this guy was like, I'm just getting rid of it. It's too heavy and I don't want it in my house anymore. And I'm like, bro, I will take that from you. And he's like, yeah, yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:24:57) Dude dude made a huge mistake huge mistake. Oh well Nick (1:24:58) ⁓ yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:25:02) That's good. Good that you got the the benefit of that I have been playing mainly mainly three games I won't go into Claire obscure expedition 33 because I pretty much have to echo everything that Nick said about it I about about maybe 25 hours into it and having a blast. I love the combat, but it's I find that there's really weird difficulty spikes, kind of unexpectedly difficult when you get into a new area. And it kind of forces me in at least to go back and grind it out a little bit to level up my characters. But other than that, you know, everything Nick said just from the. The voice acting to the really imaginative worlds and the, and the lore behind it. And I'm like, there's these mysteries that they don't actually just directly address that kind of keep you on the hook and. It's really a fascinating premise. ⁓ The other two I've been playing have been a little more suited towards my short attention span. the first one is the new Luminous, Luminous Arise. ⁓ That was a game back in the PSP days, I think. And they have a brand new version and it's fantastic. Some of the music is a little grating, but... Like visually it's just, ⁓ it's more luminous. Like if you liked luminous, then you will love this. And the game that I actually have to like strongly recommend to everyone, everyone in the world is called Sektori And Sektori is a twin stick shooter. Liam Dawe (1:26:41) The... Yeah! That game rocks! I love that game! Jason Evangelho (1:26:44) It's a twin stick shooter from ⁓ a veteran developer who used to work at Housemarque who did games like Super Stardust Delta and Returnal. ⁓ It is developed only by him. He is the only developer and then his brother did the music on it. And this is probably the best twin stick shooter ever made. It. Gardiner (1:26:51) Hmm. Liam Dawe (1:27:06) Yep, Gardiner (1:27:07) Hmm Liam Dawe (1:27:07) one of the best, absolutely. Jason Evangelho (1:27:09) It is very much, you enjoyed Geometry Wars, this is 10 times better. So that's my pitch. Like if you liked Geometry Wars, if you liked the graphic style and the challenge of that, and it has a lot of the same like, I think Geometry Wars had this mode called passive or pacifism or something, where you don't use any of your weapons, you just like crash through gates and when the gates explode, that's how you. Gardiner (1:27:16) ⁓ You're speaking of my soul Nick (1:27:22) Good. Jason Evangelho (1:27:37) you know, decimate the enemies. It's got that kind of mode in it. It's really challenging and really simplistic, just it's, think it's one of the best games of 2025 confidently, confidently. I can say that. And it's, and it's affordable. Gardiner (1:27:49) Hmm Liam Dawe (1:27:50) What I like the most though is the way the arena changes as you're playing through it. That was so cool. Jason Evangelho (1:27:56) that's yeah. So yeah, it's kind of a dynamic arena. So as you play through, ⁓ there will be like these walls that form either the entire arena changes or these walls will form randomly. And you get this little red outline to show you that it's coming in and you have to get out of there, you know, and and then there's like boost mechanics where you can dash through enemies and there's just it's and they don't just hold your hand. They're like, discover all these mechanics and have fun. It's fantastic. S-E-K-T-O-R-I, Sectori. And it plays beautifully. You can turn your Steam Deck down to like seven to 10 watt TDP and still hit 120 FPS on it. sorry, not 120, 90, 90 FPS. I can hit 120 on my Legion Go S with Steam OS. Yeah. Which is really like, I said at beginning of the show, Gardiner (1:28:33) Hmm. ⁓ Hmm. Mm-hmm. ⁓ Jason Evangelho (1:28:54) that it was about the screen size, but it's also about just that extra little extra performance bump that I get over the Steam Deck. For me, it was kind of like a Steam Deck 1.5. That's kind how it felt to upgrade to that. But yeah, that's what I've been playing. Gardiner (1:29:11) Nice. Jason Evangelho (1:29:12) that's been a blast you guys. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you think we should address? Liam's debating whether or not Nick (1:29:19) Mm-hmm. Gardiner (1:29:19) Hahaha. Jason Evangelho (1:29:20) to bring it up. I can I can tell I can tell go ahead man. It's okay Have your rant Liam Dawe (1:29:25) So, the more things change and improve with Linux desktop, the more they stay the same. Gardiner (1:29:34) Yeah. Liam Dawe (1:29:36) So I switched over from Kubuntu because I did a bit of a boo-boo and broke a partition so I thought, you know what, screw it. I'll go with a completely different distro and distro hop which I haven't done for ages. So I went with Fedora KDE because KDE is, Plasma is, you know, I love it. And I love those things to match as well because you've got the Steam Deck which has KDE, Plasma as the desktop mode. I want the same across my devices. And so I installed Fedora KDE and I was four days into using it, I think it was. And they pushed out a graphics driver update for Mesa and that broke Steam games. no games would work, nothing. no, Steam would launch, but the games wouldn't load. And I went looking into it and this was a known issue. Jason Evangelho (1:30:22) None would steam, steam would launch, but you couldn't launch it. You couldn't run any games. That's a big deal. Gardiner (1:30:30) Mm. Liam Dawe (1:30:34) before they pushed out the update, but it was pushed out anyway. And that really, really annoyed me. And one of you was saying earlier, but I think it was you Gardiner, about how in a lot of people's mind, Linux is still like the matrix code, terminal and all that. And we all joke about that. But then I became the joke of that because that same day that it happened, I was due to play online games with my friends. Nick (1:30:40) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:31:03) Aww. Liam Dawe (1:31:03) And when I eventually sorted it all out and got in, they joked about, yeah, but you had to use a terminal. And it's like, yeah, I actually did. I had to downgrade the graphics driver in terminal. It's something we're not supposed to do. It's 2025. Why do I have to do this? but something hopefully good has come out of it because they're looking at improving their processes for it. I'm... Jason Evangelho (1:31:10) Did you? ⁓ no, no. Nick (1:31:11) I did. Gardiner (1:31:11) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:31:22) Hmm, I'm sorry. That's... Liam Dawe (1:31:32) I'm happy with what's happened as a result of it in the end, but I still think something like this never should have happened because if you're a maintainer involved in Linux distribution and you can push out an update for a critical piece of the system where people have said it breaks all of this, that just shouldn't be allowed to happen. Jason Evangelho (1:31:33) Okay. Yeah. Gardiner (1:31:41) Yeah. Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:31:54) Did Nick (1:31:54) Yeah, Jason Evangelho (1:31:54) the maintainer Nick (1:31:54) plus. Jason Evangelho (1:31:55) have a response to that or? Liam Dawe (1:31:57) Yeah, they basically said, ⁓ I don't care about Steam because it's not open source. You can't debug it properly. And then because of the replies to what they said, they quit as a maintainer. So yeah, it got a bit, it got slightly heated on the Fedora discourse forum. I don't think they really should have quit. mean, no one was being particularly horrible. We were just trying to find out how this could have happened. Gardiner (1:32:09) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:32:09) what? my gosh! no. Liam Dawe (1:32:26) Like Fedora has this, ⁓ a karma system where people can leave notes whether an upgrade that's going through works properly or not. For some reason that was disabled for this. It also had negative karma. People replying saying, again, it breaks stuff, but it was still pushed through. It shouldn't happen. There should be tests involved to stop this kind of thing, which is what they're going through and looking into now. So in future it might not be an issue, but it was still. Four days it's using it and I'm telling people, hey, this is cool. Fedora KDA is really nice, except when they push out a drive update what breaks everything. Nick (1:32:58) So. Gardiner (1:33:01) Hmm Jason Evangelho (1:33:06) Yikes. Gardiner (1:33:07) Yeah. ⁓ Liam Dawe (1:33:07) Yeah, that was a bit of a yikes. Nick (1:33:08) Yeah. I'll be honest, that's why my production laptop, which is the one recording all of this and all my videos, I just don't distro hop on it. I just run the distro that came with it, which is Tuxedo OS. I don't touch a thing. I don't install anything that doesn't come from Flatpak. I don't touch repos. I don't add PPAs because I know, I know something is going to explode at some point if I do something and I don't want to have to debug stuff. I don't want to. Liam Dawe (1:33:22) Haha, yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:33:34) I have learned. Yeah, I have learned and I'm not saying that. Gardiner (1:33:38) Yeah. Nick (1:33:38) I'll play around on other computers, but not on my main one. Jason Evangelho (1:33:42) I'm not saying that you did this Liam, not remotely, but I know that kind of to piggyback off what Nick said, I know that I love to tinker and I will always tinker myself into an unusable distro. And so I'm kind of in the same situation now where like my production machine, I don't touch it. I'm never gonna touch it. I'm not gonna experiment or try to customize or do anything special. It's just, it's working great and I'm happy with it. Liam Dawe (1:33:57) Yeah, I've done that a few times. Gardiner (1:33:57) Yep. Nick (1:33:58) same. Yeah. Gardiner (1:34:11) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:34:11) Here's another machine for distro hopping. Yeah. Yeah. Gardiner (1:34:13) In my experience, Linux works best as an appliance. Like, you if you want something stable, you buy a device that had Linux shipped on it, and then you don't mess with it. And then you leave it to, like, you know, like a minis forum or a little, ⁓ you know, whatever PC, like your old laptop, whatever. That's what you experiment with. That's what you have fun with. But if you have to work with it, you've got to. Jason Evangelho (1:34:18) Huh. Mm-hmm. Yeah. ⁓ Gardiner (1:34:40) have an appliance, you Nick (1:34:41) you stick with what works. But hey, when you have a problem in the partition, then you have to reinstall, you don't really have a chance. You have to do it. Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:34:43) Yeah. Gardiner (1:34:46) Yeah. Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:34:47) Right. Liam Dawe (1:34:47) Yeah, that is literally the only reason why I distro hopped is because G-Parted crashed and annihilated a petition that Kabuntu was on. There was no recovering it. So that was the only reason I changed. Otherwise, I just don't change. install it. I don't even customize it. I've got the most basic KDE Plasma setup you can have, which is basically I've changed it to the dark theme. That's it. And then it's staying there. Jason Evangelho (1:34:53) No. Dude. Gardiner (1:34:54) Ugh. Yeah. Mmm. Jason Evangelho (1:35:13) You know what? I'm glad, I'm glad Liam that you chose to air that out because I feel like I can sometimes get stuck in this mode where I'm like Linux is all unicorns and rainbows, but you know, it's nice to have a reality check. We need a reality check once in a while. It's not perfect. And now Gardiner, because you said that about it being appliance, I want to change my bold 2026 prediction. I'm gonna say that there's no. Liam Dawe (1:35:24) No it's not Nick (1:35:26) Yeah, it's not. Gardiner (1:35:37) Okay. Liam Dawe (1:35:38) ⁓ No, there's no type backs now. You've said Gardiner (1:35:41) Hahaha Liam Dawe (1:35:41) it. ⁓ Jason Evangelho (1:35:41) Alright, I'm gonna add one. I'm gonna add one for people to think about. ⁓ I think that we will see another dedicated Steam OS steam machine from either Lenovo or ASUS by the end of the year. Gardiner (1:35:56) Mmm. Liam Dawe (1:35:58) I mean that's not even two out there they've got the Legion Go 2? The ⁓ one with the detachable sides that's the Legion... Yes the Legion Go 2 Jason Evangelho (1:36:02) They got the, this one, the Legion Go, the Legion Go S with SteamOS. That's the first Legion go. Yeah. the two just escaped my radar because it was so ridiculously priced that I didn't even ⁓ like, yeah, so expensive. Gardiner (1:36:18) Hmm. Liam Dawe (1:36:20) But they might perhaps do the same with a steamOS version of that, maybe? Gardiner (1:36:25) Yeah, if they do release a ⁓ competing console, it will be three times the price. Liam Dawe (1:36:32) Yeah, yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:36:33) And maybe three times as powerful. Like, I don't know, do you think we'll see like a, I don't know, Minisforum do something like, you know, here's a little small form factor console like Box with SteamOS, something like that maybe. Gardiner (1:36:36) haha Liam Dawe (1:36:47) They're all getting ridiculous though. There's one of those handhelds coming out. Is it GDP and it doesn't even have a battery in it? What's the point? Jason Evangelho (1:36:49) you It's just so Nick (1:36:55) What? Jason Evangelho (1:36:56) powerful. Nick (1:36:56) What? Jason Evangelho (1:36:56) They're like, nope, you need a 60 watt 60 watt from the wall to play this Gardiner (1:36:57) you Nick (1:36:59) ⁓ Yeah. Liam Dawe (1:37:01) Yeah, the battery is a full on battery pack. You have to plug in to it. That's separate to it. Yeah. Gardiner (1:37:06) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:37:07) We're going backwards! We shouldn't be going backwards! We Nick (1:37:08) Yeah. Jason Evangelho (1:37:10) should have smaller batteries, Gardiner (1:37:11) You Jason Evangelho (1:37:11) more battery life. That's what we should be... ⁓ Gardiner (1:37:17) Thanks Nvidia. Liam Dawe (1:37:17) I still can't believe it's a thing, but it is. Jason Evangelho (1:37:18) Yeah, thanks Nvidia. Is it Nvidia? it? Yep. Nick (1:37:21) They looked at the Apple VR headset and they said, yeah, you know what? A battery clipped onto your belt. That looks cool. Let's do that. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ Jason Evangelho (1:37:28) That looks cool. People people used to wear Walkman's. They'll put a battery on their. They'll put a battery on their belt. Sure. Well Gardiner (1:37:28) Hmm. Liam Dawe (1:37:35) dude. Jason Evangelho (1:37:37) guys, it's been a lot of fun. ⁓ We'll do this again next month. At some point we'll figure that out. In the meantime, Gardiner, where can we find you? Gardiner (1:37:39) Yeah. You can find me gardinerbryant.com or at Gardiner underscore Bryant on YouTube. Jason Evangelho (1:37:53) Nick? Nick (1:37:54) Just the Linux experiment on YouTube and you'll find everything else from there. Jason Evangelho (1:37:58) Everything there. Cool. Mr. Liam. Liam Dawe (1:38:01) Just gamingonlinux.com Jason Evangelho (1:38:04) I noticed that no one mentioned social media links. That's interesting. It's interesting. That's all. It's not a judgment or anything. It's just interesting. And I'm not going to mention them either. You can find me at Linux for everyone dot net. It's back. There's not a lot there, but it's back. And of course, Linux for everyone on YouTube. Thank you everybody and until we chat again, take care, take care of each other and you guys stick around for a minute. Gardiner (1:38:29) Thank you.