I’m pretty sure it’s mandatory that any Chinese owned company has to have backdoors and provide access to the government. I’ve read interviews where people talked about running companies in China, and they would talk about how government employees would come and install hardware in all their server rooms, and they couldn’t touch any of it or do anything about it.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most kernel anti-cheat are developed/used by companies that are at least partially Chinese owned.

The anti-cheat programs provide uninstall options, but you’re basically just assuming they actually uninstalled and didn’t leave anything behind. You don’t have any control over whether it actually fully removes itself or not, it’s very difficult to verify that nothing was left behind, and some have been caught leaving software behind or reinstalling themselves silently later.

Apex Legends also has kernel anti-cheat, so my point still stands. Also Apex legends famously had people’s machines get hacked through it’s anti-cheat during a tournament.

With your theory, you could run a DirectX to Vulkan translation layer on Windows and also get increased performance. Which may be true, but once again points the finger at bad drivers.

Yes, from what I’ve been told that actually does improve performance in many games.

Kernel anticheat is seriously bad, and shouldn’t be allowed on any computer. Kernel anticheat is basically installing full access backdoors to your computer that you have no control over. Attackers and malicious devs have used kernel anticheat to install ransomware, spyware, crypto miners, and more. They also frequently cause increased system instability and crashes.

Kernel anticheat typically runs from the moment your PC is turned on, and it’s job is literally to spy on you to make sure you’re not cheating. Among other things, many take constant screenshots of your PC to see what you’re running. In this day and age where every company is spying on your and selling your data, installing kernel anticheat is literally sharing 100% of what you do on your PC with a company (usually chinese company) and trusting them to not take advantage of your data.

Furthermore once you’ve installed kernel level anticheat, there’s no way for users to reliably remove it. Most anticheats will reinstall themselves if removed, and it’s basically assumed that once you’ve installed one, your system is permanently compromised. They can create backdoors on the PC to allow reinstalling themselves in the future, or even install other software without your knowledge. There are concerns about them batching your bios, so that even a full harddrive wipe won’t be able to remove their backdoors.

Finally, the whole point of kernel anticheat (to players) is to prevent cheaters, but that doesn’t even work. Games like valorant are filled with cheaters despite using kernel anticheat. It’s just led to a bunch of kernel level cheat software that’s still able to hide from anticheat. So players are giving up their PC security/etc for basically no real gain.

The compatibility layer is overhead, but the key difference for many games is that DXVK swaps directX for Vulkan, and Vulkan often gets better performance.

The performance gains of using steamOS are twofold, there’s less OS load (this is particularly noticeable in low performance games, windows will consume much more battery on a game like Dead Cells than SteamOS will), and there’s also a vulkan performance increase for some games. My understanding is if you see a big performance increase in a demanding game, that’s usually thanks to vulkan.

Have you tried trinity fusion in desktop mode to see if it has more resolution options there? Also worth cycling through fullscreen/borderless/etc and seeing if any of those give more resolution options.

Dues Ex Human Revolution is pretty old, I don’t think it has controller support. Have you tried a control scheme that uses inputs like wasd and mouse?

That’s super cool, and the fact that it splits in two means it will still be a uniquely cool option once we get an actual steam controller 2.

I don’t have experience with that game specifically, but generally most games are easier to run through steam than through a 3rd party store. You often have to manually identify missing .dll files and install them through winetricks/protontricks to get games to work. The EA launcher in general doesn’t play nice with Steam Deck, so I don’t know if you’ll be able to get it working.

It’s worth noting that the steam version of Battlefront 2 didn’t work well either for a long time, due to the EA app. My understanding is it works now, but the game still has some general issues with crashes and stuff. Some recommendations people made are to run the game in windowed or borderless (not fullscreen), to let the game sit on the main menu for 30 seconds before trying to play anything, and to maybe try forcing proton 9 instead of proton 10 or experimental.

You have to be careful about that too, the code isn’t written to be easily understood by casual reading.

For example, the code will describe your hot, neutral, and ground wires as “ungrounded, grounded, and grounding” wires. Applying rules meant for a “grounding” wire to a “grounded” wire can have serious issues.

The whole code is written like that, where it’s really easy to get confused if you don’t understand the exact terminology it uses.

As an electrician, it’s difficult to give good electrical advice over the internet.

First of all, you don’t know how capable someone actually is at doing work. There’s both a knowledge and a technique requirement for quality work. Bad electrical work can easily cause house fires and death, if I tell someone online how to fix an issue, and they electrocute themselves or burn down their house, I’m partially responsible for that.

Second, it’s hard to give good advice on how something should be done without seeing it in person. Small details that are hard to get from a description or image can change how stuff is required to be done, and the code is complicated and has lots of exceptions and different requirements. Also different areas have different code requirements, and different AHJ requirements, so fully accurate advice has to come from an electrician in your actual area.

Final thing I’ll mention is that getting qualified as an electrician is hard. Getting a full electrical license where I live requires 8 years of experience (4 years being directly supervised, then 4 years of light supervision). You also have to pass a pretty difficult exam, electricians usually spend 6+ months studying hard and taking training classes for the exam, and then it still has an abysmal first attempt pass rate and normally takes many attempts to eventually pass. Ultimately after all of that (8 years, months of focused study and classes, multiple test attempts), 25-30% of people are never able to pass and get their full license.

With all that considered, I’m happy to give advice to other electricians online. If they’re already certified I can have some confidence that they have the knowledge and skills to do a good job with any advice given. However trying to give actually good, responsible advice to someone who is uncertified and a complete unknown on terms of skill/knowledge/location with only a partial knowledge of their problems and setup, it’s hard. It’s much easier to recommend they just get a licensed electrician from their area to take a look at it.

…remembering how they had been served at the Whore-Kill, they went some ten or twelve miles higher, where they landed again and traded with the Indians, trusting the Indians to come onto their stores ashore, and likewise aboard their sloop drinking and debauching with the Indians until they were at last barbarously murdered, and so that place was christened with their blood and to this day is called the Murderer-Kill, that is, Murderers Creek.[11]

— George R. Stewart, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States

(this story of it’s naming is now considered a folk tale)

True, but he’s mainly wanting a keyboard setup for it. This is only slightly thicker than the keyboard by itself, and reduces the pieces he has to bring with him to keyboard + glasses.

There’s also the added memory of a guy sitting in a coffee shot wearing sunglasses, typing away on a keyboard without a computer in sight. Should be an excellent start to roleplaying a blind schizophrenic at starbucks.

Thanks for sharing this, I find the Amish practices and work arounds for technology really fascinating for some reason. I’d love to tour some of the more technology permissive Amish communities and learn about their rules and restrictions on its use, but unfortunately there’s not any living in my area (not to mention needing to get approval to be shown around).

With FBC Firebreak, I see a lot of steam reviews blaming the lack of game content. It sounds like the game was good during the closed alpha tests when weapons/unlocks were all available, but in an attempt to provide a slow drip feed of content, the final game is very barebones with most stuff locked behind free battlepass progression.

If that is the case, it’s unfortunate that another potentially good game is being ruined by the live service model.

There are different Amish groups with different tolerances for technology. Some Amish are allowed to use electricity/etc as long as they generate it themselves instead of buying it from a power company for example. They have amish-specific low function computers they use for spreadsheets and the like.

Direct internet access is normally not allowed now, but I could imagine that’s not universal or may not have been banned in the early days. Many modern Amish are allowed to use various work arounds for internet access, like fax services that they can fax a search to, and it will fax back screenshots of web results and websites.

I tried jump ship, and it only got about 20fps in the starting area. Tweaking graphical settings didn’t really seem to help, so I put it off to try on my PC later.

Does it get better performance later? Or did you find a better setting for it?

Generally the same culture, but skewed towards more tech savvy types and online-centric culture groups. It’s a lot smaller than reddit, which helps a lot with the quality of interactions, but I think if it grew enough it would end up very close to reddit culture.

My favorite demo I played was Clover Pit, it’s by the devs of Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, and could lazily be described as balatro meets a slot machine. In reality it’s more different from balatro, it has it’s own retro horror vibe and some other interesting things going on. I enjoyed it, and found myself itching to play it more.

Nothing else clicked with me unfortunately. Jump Ship looked cool but didn’t run well on the deck, Brave Junction is a blackjack StS type game by rideonjapan but didn’t quite click with me. I tried a few other games but nothing hooked me.

FBC Firebreak is now officially steam deck verified as well

I’m excited for it as a remedy game, but I’m worried that it may be another example of a talented studio getting pushed into an unfamiliar multiplayer game, chasing trends. I also don’t think the name is doing them favors, I don’t think it’s clear that it’s tied to Control/Alan Wake universe enough to help sales, but it also doesn’t feel suitable as a standalone game name either. Anyways we’ll see how it goes, hopefully it will be great and be really successful.

I’d recommend looking at the articles I linked, I probably should have refreshed my memory on them better before commenting.

In addition to knowing that valve is working on compatibility layers for running x86 on arm devices, there was also a steamVR update 9 months ago contains files for an ARM device code named deckard. There’s probably more relevant leaks too, I think some renders of deckard controllers got leaked at some point as well.