A really great and easy to understand article about BTRFS snapshots.

Warning: You might brick your controller! (Do this at your own discretion.)

Sister Reddit post

Preamble

About a month ago, Sony decided to forgo their still-functional Firmware Updater Tool (you get a "can't connect to the server" message and it doesn't let you download the firmware) and replace it with the PlayStation Accessories app.

This new app does not run on wine at all from what I can see, so I decided to try and get the previous tool (I'll call it FWUpdater) working again.

PlayStation Accessories, on launch, connects to playstation's server (https://fwupdater.dl.playstation.net/fwupdater/info.json) and checks if it's version is up-to-date, then checks if there is a new firmware for the controllers. As it seems, FWUpdater uses the same URL to check its version as well. As these are completely different programs, and the server reports the latest version for PlayStation Accessories only, FWUpdater gets confused and just displays "can't connect to the server" (correct me if I'm wrong).

After some experimentation, I figured out I could just spoof the version reported from the server (with mitmproxy) and get FWUpdater to fetch the necessary firmware.

Prerequisites

• Python
• Wine
• Browser
• Terminal-feet

Process

Step 1: mitmproxy

a. Install mitmproxy from your package manager (or grab the latest binaries from
mitmproxy.org and open a terminal in the mitmproxy folder.)

b. Run mitmweb, this should launch a web UI in your browser:

c. Select File in the upper left corner and then Install certificates. This will open up another page:

d. Setup your browser (in the browser setting) to connect to mitmproxy:

e. Reload the previous page and you should see the certificates for various platforms:

f. Download the Linux certificate and install them to your system trust store, following the instructions on the above page for your specific distro (for Arch Linux, you move the certificate into /etc/ca-certificates/trust-source/anchors/).

g. Revert the proxy settings in your browser.

Step 2: FWUpdater

a. Download the FWUpdater and extract it.

b. Create a new empty file, paste this in and save it as a python script (.py).

from mitmproxy import ctx
from mitmproxy import http
import json

def response(flow: http.HTTPFlow) -> None:
    if flow.request.pretty_url.endswith("/fwupdater/info.json"):
        data = json.loads(flow.response.get_text())
        data["ApplicationLatestVersion"] = "1.5.0.2"
        flow.response.text = json.dumps(data)

b. Start mitmproxy in a terminal with the script:

mitmproxy -s "path/to/the/above/script.py"

c. Start FWUpdater with the following command:

HTTP_PROXY="http://localhost:8080/" wine "path/to/FWUpdater.exe"

d. Profit.

Hope this helps (And I hope I didn't miss anything lmao)

For context:

I've been using Linux since 2000. Started with Mandrake Linux (Helios?), then I moved to Ubuntu in 2004 and alternated between Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu MATE for a time until I settled with Kubuntu for the last few years.

Ubuntu has been rock solid for me for the past 20 years and I'm used to the APT package management and Ubuntu/Debian environment overall with all the various services and configs, setups and release cycles, etc. The stability allows me to enjoy my spare time playing games and doing other important tasks instead of troubleshooting my system and figuring out how to make something work. Ubuntu has been awesome in that regard.

I've also been dual-booting this whole time with Windows. Gaming on Linux simply wasn't up to snuff up until very recently with Steam working on Wine and Proton for the Steam Deck and Bottles, which makes running Windows games on Linux almost comparable to Windows.

Windows 10 was a great OS, except for a few flaws and privacy issues with the introduction of mandatory Microsoft accounts and One Drive integration. But you could work around those things. It was supposed to be the last Windows we would have to install with perpetual rolling releases, but apparently they changed their minds about that. Windows 11 was released and reading about it gives me nightmares. Using it for work also has been an incredibly buggy and frustrating experience. The invasion of privacy, data collection, screen monitoring and AI integration plus the additional advertisement are all reasons for which I will never install this OS on my personal computer. And some of these features have started to leak into Windows 10.

So I've made up my mind. I'm wiping Windows from my PC and will be running Linux only. I believe it's become good enough to use as a daily driver for a home gaming desktop and for productivity. But... Which distribution should I choose?

The dilemma:

There's been a whole slew of new Linux distributions that have come out lately. Some have been early in the Linux gaming aspect such as POP! OS. Others have tried to become a solid replacement for the default immutable Steam OS such as Bazzite. And there are now some pretty awesome sounding gaming-focused distros such as Nobara. And that's on top of the various existing Ubuntu flavors, Fedora's spins, OpenSuse and the many Arch variants that almost seem to pop up monthly.

I've been shopping around for a distribution to become my daily driver from now until who knows when. I'm expecting to stick to that distro as long as possible. Here's some of the things that I am looking for:

• Not immutable : I find this to be adapted for devices like tablets, IoT devices and handhelds instead of an actual PC. I'll need to be able to change my system configs as I please and an Immutable distro seems like a pain in the butt to deal with that.
• Rock solid : This is the most important aspect and is why a lot of the Arch or other bleeding edge distros won't do. (With some exceptions)
• Hardware support : The second most important aspect. I think that's pretty much covered by most popular distros, but some have better support than others. Especially for ease of getting the right drivers. (Especially for NVidia GPUs, or gaming controllers and devices.)
• Performance : Most popular distros offer ok performance, but some have been enhanced to provide improved performance according to the hardware. This is a very big nice to have, especially for gaming.
• Desktop choice : I'm really not a big fan of Gnome 3. It seems nobody really is. Many Gnome based distros come with quality of life extensions out of the box to fix that. Not a big fan of GTK apps' UI ergonomics either. That's why I prefer KDE over Gnome or Cinnamon. Budgie seems like a great alternative as well. Also having a PowerToys-style FancyZones tiling system is a big big plus (KDE has that OOTB)
• Applications : The thing I love about Ubuntu is the amount of available applications in their repos. I'm hoping to have the same availability in my next distribution.
• Online community/support : Having a great online support community is very important. The more users, the larger the knowledge base and the easier you can find answers to questions to troubleshoot problems.
• Online services integration : Optional but a very nice to have would be to have integration with Google apps like GMail, Calendar, Keep and Google Drive to name a few.
• Customization : As funny as this sounds, I want to use the desktop in its most vanilla form as possible with as few customisations as possible. Over time I found that having extra customisations like extensions, applets, etc tends to break things because of lack of support over time. It's also more difficult to troubleshoot when very few people are using them.

The distributions that ended up meeting my requirements are the following in order of preferences :

• Kubuntu : So far its been working great for gaming but I think there could be some performance improvements. It's my first choice because I'm just so comfortable with it already. Zero effort, but with some compromises in performance.
• Nobara with KDE Plasma : This looks solid and ticks all the requirements. I think there's some amount of learning to do for using YUM/RPM packages and to understand some of the customisations, but I think this effort will be minimal. I am concerned about long term support however since this is a fairly new distro supported by individuals.
• Ubuntu Budgie : I really like this DE, very simple but elegant. But, like Kubuntu, I don't know how it's going to fare performance wise. And I don't know what kind of tools there are to configure gaming controllers, etc.
• Ubuntu (I'm willing to deal with Gnome 3 for simplicity's sake)
• Fedora KDE Plasma spin : Everybody is raving about Fedora so maybe I'll give it a shot as an Ubuntu replacement.
• ~~Manjaro~~ Endeavour OS with KDE desktop :Possibly the only Arch distro I'm willing to install because they focus on stability, however learning about the packaging system and configs/environment feels like a drag. But with the great community and documentation I'm willing to make an effort for this one.

What are your thoughts on this? What are your recommendations based on my requirements?

EDIT:

Thank you very much for everyone's input. I've spent a good part of the day installing distros in a VM to check out some of your suggestions and reading more about my choices.

I can't believe I am saying this, but I am reevaluating my choice of using Kubuntu. After some reading I have found out that Ubuntu and it's flavors will not be supporting flatpaks starting in 23.04. And there are several known problems with snap, such as serious performance issues. A task that would take 1-5s as a regular .deb installed app, would take up to 10 times that time to complete. Canonical is also working to modify apt to use snaps instead of installed .deb packages. They are aggressively pushing snaps to a point where they'll want to replace the majority of the software with snaps eventually.

Yeah there's security features built-in and all, which flatpaks don't necessarily have. And the security is tighter around Canonical's snap repos compared to flathub for example. But I don't know if I'm ready to move to that new way of doing things. And Canonical is going against what the community wants.

I don't know. I think I'm more confused now that I was when I started...

Original post: https://idtech.space/notice/AmJ60Dc5Vn0yigcxPM

Discussion about the same topic: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/22526765

Proton:

• Update wine to latest bleeding edge
• Update dxvk to latest git
• Update vkd3d-proton to latest git
• Update dxvk-nvapi to latest git
• Import upstream proton changes
• Update mono to 9.3.0
• Rebase wine-staging

Protonfixes:

• Added god of war ragnarok SteamDeck=1 workaround (thanks UserNamesAreNotMyThing)
• Added Star Citizen libcuda nvidia fix (thanks ProjectSynchro)
• Added fix for Plain Site (thanks iodream)
• Added fix for Worms: Blast (thanks iodream)
• Remove deprecated Sleeping Dogs: DE fix
• winetricks now built from source
• Elden Ring fix updated (thanks UserNamesAreNotMyThing)

so I recently dualbooted arch and windows. I have noticed the longer I play game the more the fps drops.

Deadlock for example, I will be getting 110-120 fps then as the match goes on (usually at the 20-40 min mark) it gradually drops to 50fps (I don't know if it will keep going, that is just the lowest I have been able to see it drop)

the outlast trials also gets pretty bad micro stutters.

I have tried reinstalling drivers removing two sticks of ram that seem to be faulty, and reinstalling arch completely with archinstall just to see if I flubbed something up around manual install, I tried the nvidia-open drivers (the ones released by nvidia) and the proprietary drivers. Nothing seems to be working.

When I launch into windows games stay at pretty consistant framerates.

specs:

rtx 3070 ryzen 7 3700x 16gb ram 1tb ssd 2tb ssd 1440p 144hz monitor

Any help is very much appreciated!!

(off topic question but I figured I would ask here as to not create another post. I cannot for the life of me get wayland kde to work properly. It efuses to let me change the resolution and refresh rate. the solution I seem to be finding is that wayland doesnt play nice with nvidia. So I have just been using x11. is this assesment incorrect?)

Hey! I'm going to finish up university soon and as part of that I'm required to do an internship related to C++ development. I'd love to do something in the Linux gaming space and help promote it that way, but I'm not aware of many studios in Europe that are big enough to take interns. So I turn to Lemmy: what are some studios that may be open to Linux development, either through supporting it natively or creating/improving developer tooling on Linux?

Almost every distro I've used so far ends up having problems installing Steam due to mismatching i386 packages. I've heard that they're being removed upstream. Anyone happen to know a timeline?

Title says it all. I've used the most up to date GE for it, and it kind of works, but I get some odd visual bugs. Additionally, any other Proton release ive used disables audio in cutscenes. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Im using Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu but with KDE desktop environment.

There's a lot of blog posts and news articles being written right now centred around Microsoft's plans for updates to Windows 11, and potential kernel changes, with some thinking this means big things for Linux gaming.

Sorry to say, but I'm here to bring a more realistic take and to help keep all your feet on the ground.

quite relevant to yesterday's discussion.

After listening to this comment in my earlier post, I finally installed Linux in my new machine. I have almost set up everything for my use case save for support for playing Minecraft.

While many Linux switchers are keen to having maximum support and optimization for games, I don't look forward to the same. I plan to having Minecraft as my one and only game in this machine and want to have as minimal dependencies set up for playing it as possible.

I intend to use the fabric version of MC with mod support on my machine with Iris Xe GPU. I am also comfortable with using a different launcher aside from the default one if it is safe and better to do so.

Could someone give me guidance on how I go around installing Minecraft according to my needs?

Got greeted with this message today. I've been playing Apex on linux for more than a year. Not sure if this could be related? Is this just me?

I've contested the ban and I'm currently waiting for a response from ea support.

UPDATE : Got an email response from EA today. It's basically a generic message saying that my account was associated with "cheating practices" and so they will not remove the ban.

This is absolutely fucking ridiculous! I've been playing this game since 2020 and have 3K+ hours on record, now this shit happens and there's no recourse ? Fuck this company.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20175694

I mean games you played / you are going to play.

My list looks like this for example:

• Summer: DAVE THE DIVER
• Autumn: Against the Storm
• Winter: Frostpunk 2
• Spring: Terra Nil

What are yours?

Solution

This is a bug in KDE Plasma [1.1][2]. It appears that it might be fixed in KDE Plasma v6.2 [1.2][3].

Original Post

I have noticed this behavior with Element and Signal while playing Deadlock. The game will have a pretty severe stutter, ie the frame-rate will substantially dip, for half a second or so at the exact moment that a message is received. It seems to happen with every message. Do note that these are only messages that would result in a system notification. All other messages that are silent, ie they have no pop-up notification, do not result in any stutter.

• OS: Arch Linux, Kernel: v6.6.49-1-lts
• DE: KDE Plasma v6.1.4
• WM: Wayland
• CPU: Intel Core i5-4690k
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6600

Updates

• I have tried disabling this setting in Deadlock:
• I have tried windowed-borderless
• I have noticed that the moment that the stutter occurs, my CPU spikes maybe 20% and my GPU drops to 0%.

I am using Fedora Kinoite and quickly installed nvidia drivers, but when I launch an application with DRI_PRIME=1 it tries to use compute graphics. I had accidentally installed the cuda drivers along with the normal ones, but then removed them. I have tried with just the normal drivers, both normal and cuda, as well as only cuda.

If anyone could help that would be greatly appreciated.

URL is a link to a post about a Xbox one translation layer for windows. There is also work being done on a PS4 one where they recently played bloodborne using it. Would this work on Linux I would think so since wine is a translation layer for windows so if you just translate Xbox -> win -> Linux it would work... right? I'm not very informed on the matter and would like to know. Thanks

So...I'm trying to get Proton 9.13, as I've just read it might be able to run The Casting of Frank Stone without crashes. And...I CAN SEE IT. When I choose Steam on ProtonUp-QT. Or when I choose Bottles. But when I choose Lutris, then add version...the latest GE-Proton it shows me is 8-26. Nothing newer than that. What gives? Why?

Hotfix:

• Update vkd3d-proton to latest git to include World of Warcraft MSAA fix

proton:

• wine updated to latest bleeding edge

• dxvk updated to latest git

-proton upstream fixes added

Additional:

• protonfixes updated to latest git

Been running Fedora 40 for a few months, and having a hard time keeping Wayland as the desktop environment. Just did a fresh install, and the Nvidia driver updates to 555.58.02. I really want to stick with the Recommended branch, not the New Feature branch. Every update, Wayland breaks. How do I rollback to 550, and switch to the Recommended Branch for updates?

I'm trying to play dark souls 2 with the graphics overhaul mod in hdr. I'm passing 1440p to gamescope with the -W, -H, -w, -h options and limiting framerate to 60 with -r and -o.

The game just refuses to display at anything other than 720p. I can change the in-game resolution setting to 1440p but the resolution just doesn't change. I tried setting a lower resolution (480p iirc) as well, but it still looked the same. Also tried enabling fullscreen but that setting doesn't save nor does it do anything.

I'm inferring that it's 720p because the in-game cursor moves half the distance of the actual cursor with gamescope set to 1440p, but they're in sync if I set it to 720p. To the eye it just looks blurry. The mod menu opens at the size it opens without gamescope but is also similarly blurred. Couldn't interact with it to confirm the resolution due to the aforementioned mouse issue

Outside of gamescope fullscreen works fine and the resolution setting works too iirc (but they reset after reopening the game). Kde plasma. Tried disabling secondary screen, setting scaling to 100 and limiting desktop fps to 60, didn't help

Could this be some kind of steam deck detection? Any ideas?