In this case it’s referring to the fact that the OS is built upon the same containerization technology used on cloud platforms such as Kubernetes. As a marketing tool it’s a bit buzzwordy, but it’s not about running the core OS components outside of the physical machine here.
Even if the performance is only mediocre, the gameplay will hold up. The game uses a fresh new combat system that merges action combat with turn-based gameplay, the likes of which I haven’t really seen in any other game including past Trails entries, and it’s absolutely a great time.
For the original PS4 release, Falcom released a fairly comprehensive demo that allowed you to play through the entire first chapter of the game, and carry over your save to the full release. They’ve also done something similar with Ys X which released on Switch day 1, so hopefully the Switch version gets a similar demo for both the Japanese and Western releases so you can try-before-you-buy.
I’m interested to see how the game performs on Switch. I played the Japanese PS4 version which was rough at launch but improved with post-release patches. I expect there are going to be some necessary cutbacks (no 60FPS, lowered render resolution, reduced visual effects, the standard fare) but that shouldn’t impact the quality of the game experience at all, it’s a wonderful entry and a great starting point for newcomers in a long-running series that rarely ever has those great starting points.
If I’m not literally touching the content I’m trying to scroll, I’ll stick to the default orientation (scrolling down moves content down). Wayland touchscreen input handling seems to handle this just fine and not couple touchscreen scroll direction to trackpad/mousewheel scroll direction.
Unfortunately, I think many of the Asypr/Feral ports from the early 2010s, like Civ V, Borderlands 2, etc. fall victim to this. Those ports were amazing for Linux gaming at the time, but due to the fact that they were held back by their macOS counterparts and Apple’s limitations on that platform, as well as the fact that they were third-party ports with far less post-release engagement from the original dev than the Windows versions, have left those versions to languish. It’s a huge shame because those companies did, and to a certain extent still do support Linux-native gaming quite well, but their earlier ports have not aged well and there’s not much that can be done given the opportunity costs for the many involved parties on those older games.
Civ V is a game I still play regularly to this day, and I basically have to run the Windows version under Proton to avoid crashes on modern hardware, maintain compatibility with popular mods, and play multiplayer with Windows users without terrible game desyncs.
It might be somewhat controversial of a take, but to me an awesome-performing Proton version of a game is far better than a Linux version that may be native, but has severe deficiencies and/or lags behind its Windows version.
To me, my favorite native Linux games would be ones that do things on Linux that are not possible on other platforms. Generally, this would be an “unfair” advantage, as games should strive for feature parity on all platforms within reason, but so often we end up being on the wrong side of that equation that seeing some of the perks of the platform is nice.
To my knowledge, the only major game I can think of that does this to a certain extent is Factorio, which enables non-blocking game saves on Linux and macOS and not Windows. It’s not a Linux-exclusive feature, but it’s nice that the developers went through the effort to implement the feature on Linux even though it’s not possible on Windows.
I wasn’t a fan of the built-in weather widget so I immediately replaced it, so I have no experience with it being nonfunctional, sorry.
It’s not like Nova Launcher, but I’ve been really enjoying Kvaesitso. It does support icon transformations (better than Nova does IMO) but provides a very different interface that’s focused on search.
The reality is that the number of games, even AAA ones, that are releasing at that high a “minimum” performance requirement is incredibly small compared to other games that do release with more modest system requirements. Games that are “just good enough” graphically to go along with their gameplay tend to be the norm, I think, with the few games that really go for pushing visual fidelity being respectable in their own right but not frequent enough to fret about. What will matter the most is what games you want to play and what their requirements are, and that’s basically impossible to project out 1, 3, 5 years out or however long you expect the hardware to last.
For what it’s worth, I have a Steam Deck and spend a lot of time playing on it, but pretty much every “AAA, big budget => big graphics” game I want to play I’d exclusively do so on my gaming desktop (or remote play on Deck if I want to play it there at all), while sticking to 2D and lighter 3D games on the portable device directly. This is mostly due to what kinds of games I enjoy playing on what form factor, as for example my decision on what to play docked vs portable on the Switch is much the same way, and for about a year after buying the Deck, my desktop hardware was so out of date it was getting generally worse performance than the Deck yet I’d still use the desktop for “spectacle” games, but the necessary graphical quality to go along with that tends to correlate well.
Additionally, it’s devices like these, that have proven successful in the market, that incentivize Valve to continue Proton’s development. It’s hard to see given the already insane trajectory Proton’s development was on before the Steam Deck, but now that getting games running on Linux (in at least some form) is desirable by many game developers in order to gain Steam Deck support, Proton compatibility guarantees, and the corresponding development to make that happen, have shifted to before the releases of many major AAA games, and that compatibility work has cascading effects for many other games as well.
The reason this is known is because this supposed device is using the same AMD APU used in the Steam Deck. It’s unlikely that a standalone controller would have a dedicated APU like that without becoming a full-on portable gaming device of its own.
I haven’t adopted this kind of setup, mainly because Proton just does such a good job I have almost zero need for Windows, but my plan for eventually doing something like this was to also maintain a passthrough Linux VM for any GPU-intensive work on that side.
When I realized that the practical end-state of my system would mean I’d just be running things from within the Linux VM 98% of the time (games that can run on Linux) I kind of dropped the idea.
For me it’s always been after I tried to resize a partition.
I recommend using whatever is the “least hands-on” option for your boot drive, a.k.a your distro default (ext4 for Debian). In my admittedly incompetent experience, the most likely cause for filesystem corruption is trying to mess with things, like resizing partitions. If you use your distro installer to set up your boot drive and then don’t mess with it, I think you’ll be fine with whatever the default is. You should still take backups through whatever medium(s) and format(s) make sense for your use case, as random mishaps are still a thing no matter what filesystem you use.
Are you planning on dualbooting Windows for games? I use https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs to mount a shared BTRFS drive that contains my Proton-based Steam library in case I need to run one of those games on Windows for whatever reason. I’ve personally experienced BTRFS corruption a few times due to the aforementioned incompetence, but I try to avoid keeping anything important on my games drive to limit the fallout when that does occur. Additionally if you’re looking to keep non-game content on the storage drive (likely if you’re doing 3D modeling work) this may not be as safe.
The ideal end state is “why not both?”, I think. Have an immutable “base” system, and utilize mutable overlays on top for any necessary tinkering or involved activities.
Casual users need not interface with the overlays at all (or do so through very controlled mechanisms, like how Flatpak/Snap, Steam game containers, etc work today), while developers, tinkerers, and those that are curious can create throwaway environments that they can mess with to their heart’s content.
WSL on Windows has its warts, but it shows how such an ecosystem is possible (if you treat Windows itself as a Black Box That Must Not Be Modified). I think the immutable distro ecosystem is on the right track, with technologies like Toolbox/Distrobox to bridge the gap, it will just take time for the tooling, practices, and ecosystem around them to mature and not be as much of a hassle as they are today.
Today, I am running both immutable and non-immutable setups on various machines. My work computer (development) and gaming rig are on a traditional setup, as my specific development needs are not 100% compatible with a toolbox environment, and gaming-adjacent applications like Discord are slow to adapt to the needs of Flatpak containerization. I have a laptop that’s 100% just used for media consumption and shitposting, which is a good use case for immutable distros today and is running Fedora Kinoite.
This is, IMO, the biggest yet least obvious advantage of immutable systems. A traditional Linux environment is “just as safe” as the immutable setups, if only the user/administrator is perfect, never makes a mistake, and always makes the right decisions for now and the future.
Given reality tends to differ from the above, having a system that, at a bare minimum, provides you the “oh shit go back” button to system-level changes, and at best provides a clear, reproducible, trail of actions, is a huge advantage for long-term stability for all users, experienced or not. I’ve been through the school of hard knocks far too many times maintaining everything from server setups to gaming desktops the traditional way, and have committed to “early adopting” immutable distros for pretty much everything except the gaming setup (given the whole suite of proprietary and out-of-date/out-of-touch applications that are basically necessary in that space and not-fully-compatible with the sandboxes and abstraction layers necessary).
I’m a big fan of the series and would consider it to be my favorite JRPG series, not just for the story but because I enjoy the gameplay it offers as well.
It’s a fairly “cheap” series to try out and see if you’re into it. The entire series is a singular, continuous story, so the recommended place to start is Trails in the Sky First Chapter, which can be picked up fairly cheaply on Steam, especially during Steam sales. It’s not as long as future games in the series, and is fairly representative of the pacing and storytelling format that later games will follow (though it is considered one of the slowest-paced games in the series). Basically if you’re not a fan of Sky FC, you’re not likely to be a fan of the future games in the series either (especially given that the substantial improvements to gameplay over the series’ 20 year history likely won’t have much appeal to you).
There are also demos available for some of the newer games in the series (e.g. Trails of Cold Steel III), and while I would not recommend actually playing through those games out-of-order, they may serve as a quick/cheap way to see if the format of the games is right for you.
I will say that while the combat of the games is rarely very difficult, and the game provides difficulty modifiers to make it even easier if you’d like, that the combat system is still fairly fleshed out and quite good casually IMO, but if you’re really not into doing it even at easy difficulties, one option (PC exclusive) may be to download completed game saves and play through the games on New Game+ and completely trivialize the combat.