Confused on Steam Play and Proton? Be sure to check out our guide.
Latest Comments by Kithop
Wine team now hosting Mono, looking to adopt the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct
14 September 2024 at 4:09 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: tohurI like this CoC over many others as if you read it and understand it, it is in fact apolitical which all CoC's should be IMO.

Oh totally - the Contributor Covenant is a good solid standard. I meant more: life isn't apolitical - the circumstances that lead some people to be able to contribute to FLOSS and not others is inherently derived from political actions. Which countries invest in related education (and which may not even have the resources at their disposal to offer it), what sort of systemic issues certain groups of people have to navigate and contend with versus others, that sort of thing.

So yes - you should *strive* to be as neutral as possible, but that involves recognizing that everyone comes from different backgrounds - by being equitable, it allows the work to be 'apolitical' in that we don't have to fight to be respected, but on the other hand, it *is* 'political' in that it's expressly countering some of those issues and biases baked into society in the first place.

Wine team now hosting Mono, looking to adopt the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct
12 September 2024 at 2:34 pm UTC Likes: 16

Quoting: Liam DaweThe only people usually not in favour of them are the exact type of assholes they aim to keep away.
Hear fucking hear.

Adopting a decent CoC does not suddenly make the sky fall on developers' heads. The lack of one does not suddenly make a particular software product apolitical (hint: there is no such thing when it comes to being part of a group of people where not only do you have access to technology, but the free time and skills training on top). So if we want to encourage healthy collaboration on a project, we need to do so with a common basic understanding of respect and human decency.

Clearing murky waters and saying 'yes, being a shitty person will get you ostracized' in writing means much less wiggle room for them to try and get out of the repercussions of their own actions.

(Also, I'm sick of anti-CoC people essentially just using it as a dogwhistle for racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia - absolutely hilarious to me considering how many fellow trans people work in open source and tech in general. I can virtually guarantee that at least a good chunk of the tech in your phone and Linux distro of choice has been worked on by a trans person for your benefit.)

Linux system performance optimizer GameMode v1.8.2 out now fixing hybrid CPU core pinning
19 August 2024 at 11:11 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: MangojuicedrinkerHi
Core Pinning performance gain is minimal for X3D CPUs. use Core Parking instead:
open as root: /usr/share/gamemode/gamemode.ini
under "CPU", change core_parking=yes and also follow the instructions to add yourself to gamemode group (else core parking won't work). This can MASSIVELY increase performance exactly like how AMD has done it in Windows.

Look here for more info (and also a benchmark).

Very nice benchmarks! But yeah, not for me; I've got enough stuff going on in the background typically (why I bought the 7950 over e.g. a 7800X3D instead) that I want to keep using those other cores. That said, I'd be curious to really understand why that makes such a big difference, like - when the other CCD is parked, does that free up power budget / TDP room for clocks on the remaining CCD?

There's definitely a choice to make here in configuring, of course - good info to have! (Also, might be fun to play with this being a thing on a per-game basis)

(In my particular case, the RX 7600 is definitely the bottleneck regardless, but that may change in a cycle or two..)

Edit: That said, I made sure to get all my configs right and tested briefly with glxgears and mangohud to confirm that it works, so I'm *going* to benchmark this myself later... ;p

Linux system performance optimizer GameMode v1.8.2 out now fixing hybrid CPU core pinning
19 August 2024 at 7:01 pm UTC Likes: 2

I just recently upgraded to a Ryzen 7950X3D based system and have been playing around with the latest git version of gamemode for the core pinning and it's been working great! Glad to see it released.

Essentially, in my case it helps pin the game's threads to the CCD that has the extra X3D L3 cache (even if the max frequency is a little lower), leaving the other 'regular' CCD alone for background and other tasks.

Similar with the various heterogenous core concepts like Intel's 'P' and 'E' cores, presumably, and ARM's big.LITTLE.

Most games are GPU limited, but you can still get some modest performance boosts (<= 10fps or so) with this change, at least on my particular setup. I'd imagine keeping game threads off of the Intel efficiency cores would make a much bigger difference.

Control your cooling on Linux with CoolerControl - v1.4 brings AMD GPU RDNA 3 fan support
29 July 2024 at 1:21 pm UTC

Minor correction: GitLab, not GitHub

Been playing around with this on my new build, and while I love CoreCtrl for setting stuff up, this is also a great monitoring tool. I haven't gone through yet to see if there's 100% feature overlap and coverage between the two, though.

7 Days to Die gets an experimental Beta for the 1.0 release
26 June 2024 at 4:03 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: stormtuxThe native version of the experimental beta crashes after a few seconds after loading a new game and immediately after loading a save while the proton version is stable. Since nobody here wrote about the stability i conclude all normally uses the proton version?

Nah, all native here... Never even tried to use Proton for this as it should be unnecessary. What I *did* do, though:

  • Set Beta branch to latest_experimental
  • Wait for it to finish updating
  • Go into the install folder and delete my old Mods folder entirely just in case
  • Run Steam's 'Verify integrity of files' to have it re-download whatever the correct 'vanilla' mod stuff is they put in there


Other than that, I go into the launcher and set it to Vulkan, acknowledging it's experimental, and then set my default launch to always be *without* EAC (again, I only play with trusted friends - YMMV if you want to join public servers). I don't know if it's new new or not, but for my particular all-AMD system I've had great performance uplift moving AA from Temporal to FSR in the options, too.

7 Days to Die gets an experimental Beta for the 1.0 release
25 June 2024 at 1:11 pm UTC Likes: 3

This usually sits in my top 3 most played games on Steam, but that's down to having a small group of friends where I host a server for everyone every major patch, or whenever we want to try some big modpack for it.

Of course, at almost 700 hours in and many many years at this point, we're all honestly kind of excited at the rebalancing in 1.0 that's meant to slow things down a bit and make crafting and base building more important.

Plus, I think 'we re-ported to the current consoles ourselves (RIP Telltale) *and* will be enabling cross play' is a pretty good time to finally call it 1.0 after a decade of early access. Having a continuing roadmap for another year or so to hopefully add in the last features they've been teasing for a while is nice in the '1.0 isn't the end where they all pack up and abandon it' way, but yeah... There are some things on there they've been teasing for a loooong time.

Solo, this game is a bit of a tough sell for me. It's not unplayable or anything like that, but it really does shine in multiplayer. Nothing like a bunch of gyrocopters descending on some Tier 5 or 6 PoI to make you feel powerful after all the hard work getting there. ;) Plus it lets you do some real intense stuff on Blood Moon nights as it scales up for more people in the group.

Already got my server fresh and updated to the Experimental branch, and our group is planning to start properly tonight.

High on Life, Atari 50 Anniversary Celebration, MechWarrior 5 and more in this bundle
7 June 2024 at 6:29 pm UTC Likes: 1

Mech5 is a great 4-person co-op game, runs great on my desktop under Proton (it's Unreal Engine), too. Can even mod it just fine, easy peasy, and the mods add a ton to it.

Haven't tried the apparently janky VR mod for it, but I *have* tried my HOTAS (X56) and it seems fine. Throttle control is a little weird with the 50% = stopped, 0% = full reverse thing but I'm sure I could remap that externally if I wanted (and might still have a go at).

Discord Overlay for Linux adds PulseAudio / PipeWire integration
8 April 2024 at 6:39 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: nenoroI'm waiting for OBS to be compatible with pipewire then i can get rid of pulseaudio

It... Already is? Or at least, you may need the Pipewire Pulseaudio compatible module and maybe the appropriate xdg-portal package(s) but OBS works great with Pipewire now.