I think I‘ve stumbled across this at some point, but I think it has been updated since.

Thanks for finding it, I‘ll keep it in mind when I get around to trying VR on Linux again in the future.

I’m doing all of my PC gaming on Linux for years now. Except for VR. It’s unfortunately not running well at all for me. I’m running an Nvidia GPU with a Valve Index and whenever I was able to even get a picture on the HMD in the first place, the latency from movement to screen was about a second or so. Which is an incredibly efficient way to feel incredibly sick.

I’m not sure about your setup, maybe it’s better supported in some way, but, from my experience, I’d unfortunately recommend keeping a Windows partition for VR and saving yourself the (quite literal) headache.

I‘m personally very happy with kagi when it comes to features and, most importantly, the quality of search results. But, as they don‘t have ads, it’s pretty expensive to use.

I think we‘re in a very different situation right now. Proton has become so good that it‘s just not necessary for most developers to do anything to get their game running on Linux. When Macs peaked in the hardware survey, the compatibility tools were far less powerful and developers had to actually invest time and resources, if they wanted their game running on Mac.

I also think that the Steam Deck is absolutely being recognized by many developers. Even big publishers proudly announce their games being playable on it. And having games optimized for Deck often improves them on Linux in general.

So I really wouldn’t worry about developers not specifically targeting Linux. Even without that, gaming on Linux is in the best spot it has ever been and is steadily improving.

Although I’d love to see that happen more frequently, this is simply not realistically doable for most commercial games.

Almost all of them use licensed third-party libraries which are integrated deeply into the game’s code base, but which can’t legally be distributed as part of an open source project. So in order to be able to open source a modern commercial game, you’d have to put in quite a lot of work finding all of your code integrating with commercial libraries and either replacing or removing it. And if that’s not enough, you’d probably have to have your (expensive) legal team check the entire code base for any infringements just to be on the safe side.

All that work for no monetary gain just isn’t a very good business case. So, unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect a lot of modern games to be open sourced any time soon.

While that‘s true right now, a big patch called „Economy 2.0“ is expected to drop this week (more on that here and here).

I really hope this will be a successful first step of making the game actually better than its predecessor. Unfortunately the economy simulation is only one of many issues which make me want to play something else after a few minutes of gameplay. I think it‘ll be at least another year until they‘re able to fix all these minor annoyances, which sum up to one very big annoyance. Like not being able to place stuff sometimes without any obvious reason. Or those ugly, steep pathways on lots, when the connecting street isn‘t completely flat. Or missing animations for firemen, which currently only have to drive up to a burning building in order to stop a fire.

Cities Skylines was a better Sim City (2013) and was justifiably loved for that. For now, Cities Skylines 2 is unfortunately just a worse Cities Skylines.

This is very speculative, but along the things they’ve learned for VR they‘re mentioning APUs and wireless streaming. This might hint towards a standalone device which can also be connected to a PC.

It‘s possible to use VR headsets with the Steam Deck. It‘s just far too weak for a pleasant experience.

It‘s worth noting though, that, according to this interview (37:30), Valve is probably working on a new VR HMD which will make use of the things they‘ve learned from developing the Deck. So I‘d guess there‘s a standalone headset coming from them at some point in the future.

I think it’s important to remember that LiMux, the Linux project in Munich, didn’t really fail because the software didn’t work. The city had commissioned a study that blamed bad implementation, bad internal cooperation, and bad administration. It explicitly did not recommend that the project be shut down. Unfortunately, this recommendation was ignored by the mayor, who was previously responsible for convincing Microsoft to move its German headquarters to Munich and who calls himself a “Microsoft fan”.

So it’s probably worth noting that the success of such large projects doesn’t only depend on the viability of the software. It’s also very much dependent on the lobbyists the project is up against, especially in the public sector.

I‘d be really surprised if Apple tried that.

They have to know that it violates the DMA. And the penalty for violating it can be up to 10% of their yearly worldwide revenue (not earnings!) for the first violation and up to 20% for repeated violations. I don‘t think they‘d risk that, especially as the EU really isn’t known for its leniency when someone intentionally breaks their rules.