Valve Posts Updated Steam Deck FAQs To Address More Community Questions

[cl333r]

Dude, discussions with you is a complete waste of time. I wish there's be ignore button here. Go read what layers are for. And then re-read it again.

I knew you'd dodge this question as well, facts are stubborn things.

[uid313]

Has KDE, X.Org Server or Wayland seen any contributions from Valve?

[Tuxee]

Wonder if valve will only support SteamOS moving forward, saw the other day this guy saying they only officially support ubuntu 20.04 LTS.. which no actual gamers use probably

Care to elaborate? Because both I and my son are frequently gaming. On a 20.04. The kernel is pretty much irrelevant (you get 5.11) with NVidia you should get the most recent driver via an "official" repository. Mesa comes at 21.0.3 (which isn't exactly a showstopper) and if you really need more recent drivers - kisak's Mesa repo with 21.3 is not exactly rocket science to integrate.

[skeevy420]

Dude, discussions with you is a complete waste of time. I wish there's be ignore button here. Go read what layers are for. And then re-read it again.

The worst part is it doesn't even have to be Vulkan layers. It could "simply" be added to Mesa or X so something like xrandr could use FSR over other scaling methods which would have the benefit of working with anything from desktop environments to graphics APIs like OpenGL and Vulkan.

Vulkan is not a magical fucking bullet.

[skeevy420]

Care to elaborate? Because both I and my son are frequently gaming. On a 20.04. The kernel is pretty much irrelevant (you get 5.11) with NVidia you should get the most recent driver via an "official" repository. Mesa comes at 21.0.3 (which isn't exactly a showstopper) and if you really need more recent drivers - kisak's Mesa repo with 21.3 is not exactly rocket science to integrate.

That's the key phrase. "with NVidia" means you get your driver from the vendor. "with Anyone Else" you get your driver from the kernel and supporting userspace software. Long story short, that means using Ubuntu "with Anyone Else" you end up with subpar performance and drivers compared to someone using a distribution that pulls in updates from the kernel and supporting userspace software faster.

[CochainComplex]

I wonder how good SteamOS 3 will perform against other distros on a rather "generic" AMD System Zen2 or Zen3 with AMD Navi1 or Navi2 gpu or even some current APU System.

[CochainComplex]

Wonder if valve will only support SteamOS moving forward, saw the other day this guy saying they only officially support ubuntu 20.04 LTS.. which no actual gamers use probably, and I wouldn't want to install SteamOS as my main distro as its too use case specific

AFAIK current SteamOS is Debian based. Steam Client is well supported on a lot of distros. Most likely deb pkg ist the "Native" distribution format. SteamOS 3.0 will be arch based. So rpm becomes more likely their "native" pkg? On the otherhand the toolchain for building Proton - Steam Runtime Soldier whatever is based on a very old Ubuntu Version.

[pal666]

How much functionality was implemented in Vulkan in the last several years thru layers vs extensions?

extensions require application support, layers don't

[pal666]

Has KDE, X.Org Server or Wayland seen any contributions from Valve?

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...-Keith-Packard

[SteamPunker]

- Currently the Steam Deck is on a Linux 5.13 based kernel but working to move to a Linux 5.15 LTS kernel build.

At first I was a bit concerned, since this seemed to imply that SteamOS 3.0 (and subsequent versions) would be relying solely on LTS kernel releases going forward. Would they at least be backporting the FUTEX2 patches from Linux 5.16, for instance?

Thankfully, the FAQ itself provided some more clarity and reassurance about this:

What kernel version will be used on SteamOS 3.0?

We'll always try to update to the latest kernel version. Right now we're using 5.13, and we're working on an update to 5.15, and we'll continue to roll out those changes to whatever's latest, moving forward.

So they're working on 5.15, but will regularly be updating to newer kernel releases. That's good, since new gaming-related features and optimizations are coming down the pipeline fast lately.