MudMan

I don’t think that’s true of either. They’re not saving all this video in RAM. Steam’s system even asks you during setup to choose a temp folder for the video to sit in until you choose to save it as a clip. I don’t know when it flushes that cache, but I’m assuming it doesn’t and simply overwrites it when it runs out of the allocated space to allow you to go back and save something after you close a game.

It’s not just the games that support it, it will also tag other metadata it knows automatically on all games, like achievement unlocks. And you can manually add tags, too. It’s all telemetry that Valve and the devs are already extracting from you, of course, plus whatever you volunteer in manual markers, but it’s still a bit creepy to see it laid out on a timeline like that.

Well, it’s two different things, one is the background record, which is less “freaking out” and more “not for me on PC”.

The other is blending the background recording with metadata on a timeline, which starts getting Recall-y in terms of logging a video recording of what you were doing where there is also a data record of what you were doing. I do think that part starts stepping over to kinda creepy.

It’s more useful here than as a OS feature, though, because yeah, I can see it saving one the trouble of recording different matches separately or having to scrub back and forth to find certain things.

Yeah, I get that, but that’s also true of Steam Link and Steam’s general streaming solution (which I presume is what this is using) and it’s trivial to get a different window to show up or even to get to the desktop from the in-game streaming, particularly if you have a non-Steam app in your library.

So yeah, it’s gonna be on demand recordings from me… assuming the quality holds up (Nvidia’s kinda sucks). Otherwise that’s what OBS is for.

Well, that was MS’s argument and I don’t think it flies there either.

On a console it’s fine, it’s only ever gonna catch a game. On the Steam Deck as well, same deal.

For a desktop PC that you also use for work and media and other stuff… yeah, I want to be extra sure that if I alt-tab from a game to quickly answer some work email that’s not going to accidentally be recorded anywhere, even locally. Like Recall, I can see people who would not mind that as long as the data stays in their computer, I myself like knowing that I don’t accidentally leave exposed files with potentially sensitive information laying around without my knowledge.

I mean, it’s fine, it just means turning the feature off. I don’t use the equivalent feature from Nvidia for the same reasons. I still think it’s funny that MS got (rightfully) put on blast for basically doing this and then Apple and Valve both announced similar features immediately afterwards. It’s made for some awkward mental gymnastics on the Internet recently.

Hah. So if you turn the background recording on it keeps a browsable timeline with metadata about which modes you were playing, presumably based on your rich presence data?

How freaked out do you think everyone at Valve was this past month watching Microsoft’s Recall feature get ripped to shreds?

All joking aside, I do not trust background recording on PC. I’ve seen how easy it is to bypass Steam Link’s restritions on streaming your desktop, I guarantee that some of these clips would end up with something I don’t want in them. I do think metadata annotation on long manual recordings is potentially interesting, but it IS creepy.

Yeah, on that I’m gonna say it’s unnecessary. I don’t know what “integration with the desktop” gets you that you can’t get from having a web app open or a separate window open. If you need some multimodal goodness you can just take a screenshot and paste it in.

I’d be more concerned about model performance and having a well integrated multimodal assistant that can do image generation, image analysis and text all at once. We have individual models but nothing like that that is open and free, that I know of.

Look, the naming ship has sailed and sunk somewhere in the middle of the ocean. I think it’s time to accept that “AI” just means “generative model” and what we would have called “AI” is now more narrowly “AGI”.

People call videogame enemies “AI”, too, and it’s not the end of the world, it’s just imprecise.

That is a stretch. If you try to download and host a local model, which is fairly easy to do these days, the text input and output may be semi-random, but you definitely have control over how to plug it into any other software.

I, for one, think that fuzzy, imprecise outputs have lots of valid uses. I don’t use LLMs to search for factual data, but they’re great to remind you of names of things you know but have forgotten, or provide verifiable context to things you have heard but don’t fully understand. That type of stuff.

I think the AI shills have done a great disservice by presenting this stuff as a search killer or a human replacement for tasks, which it is not, but there’s a difference between not being the next Google and being useless. So no, Apple and MS, I don’t want it monitoring everything I do at all times and becoming my primary interface… but I don’t mind a little search window where I can go “hey, what was that movie from the 50s about the two old ladies that were serial killers? Was that Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart?”.

Seems to go to the OPs point of having open software alternatives, though. I am in a fairly unusual place regarding the practical usage of some of these things, but I do agree that if the entire concept is fundamentally rejected among proponents of open software that delays the possibility of developing viable alternatives to work around those issues.

All of that’s fair. It’s gonna be very dependent on your price flexibility and your preferences between Meta and Sony’s ecosystems and platforms.

I’m with you that VR is absolutely optional, too. I don’t think it’s a mass market proposition and hey, I personally don’t use the VR devices I own frequently, so…

I’ll say the one thing I think you’re wrong about is how available the dirt cheap ground level “phone in a box” alternative is. I don’t think that’s compatible with anything anymore. The Samsung Gear VR is discontinued and unsupported in software, the Labo thing was always a gimmick and I’m not aware of a phone conversion kit that will give you any compatibility with any of the ongoing VR platforms. Entry level to be able to do anything VR (as in, at least compatibility with PC VR games) remains the Quest 2 at this point. Next would be the Quest 3 and the PSVR2 and I suppose some of the cheaper PC HMDs. After that you get into the PC high end.

I hear you, but for a budget rig something’s got to give. If it’s any consolation regarding Meta, they used to bleed money every time they sold one of those, so you wouldn’t have done them any favors. I don’t know if the balance is less crazy for them these days.

You make a good point in that holdouts that haven’t purchased a PSVR2 due to lack of games may feel more justified to take the plunge now, but the extra money of the adaptor starts to sting in that case, particularly if splurging on something that may not get much use isn’t acceptable for your situation.

Yeah, for sure. If you just drop Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever on a machine where everything works for you out of the box the experience is not hard to wrap your head around. Even if one thing needs you to write something in a terminal following a tutorial, that’s also frequent in Windows troubleshooting.

The problem is that all those conversations about concurrent standards for desktop environments, display protocols, software distribution methods and whatnot are hard to grasp across the board. If and when you hit an issue that requires wrapping your head around those that’s where the familiarity with Winddows’ messy-but-straightforward approach becomes relevant.

In my experience it’s not going through the motions while everything works or using the system itself, it’s the first time you try to go off the guardrails or you encounter a technical issue. At that point is when the hidden complexity becomes noticeable again. Not because the commands are text, but because the underlying concepts are complex and have deep interdependencies that don’t map well to other systems and are full of caveats and little differences depending on what combination of desktop and distro you’re trying to use.

That’s the speed bump. It really, really isn’t the terminal.

Well, the good news is that of course you can use Linux with only as much command line interaction as you get in Windows.

The bad news is that the command line REALLY isn’t what’s keeping people away from Linux.

Hell, in that whole list, the most discouraging thing for a new user isn’t the actually fairly simple and straightforward terminal commands, it’s this:

Here’s where it gets a little trickier: Scrolling on Firefox is rough, cause the preinstalled old version doesn’t have Wayland support enabled. So you either have to enable Wayland support or install the Flatpak version of Firefox.

This is a completely inscrutable sentence. It is a ridiculous notion, it brings up so many questions and answers none. It relates to concepts that have no direct equivalent in other platforms and even a new user that successfully follows this post and gets everything working would come out the other end without understanding why they had to do what they did or what the alternative was.

I’ve been saying it for literal decades.

It’s not the terminal, it’s not the UX not looking like Windows.

Yeah, but that’s you jumping into the terminal and formatting commands off the top of your head.

That’s very rarely required. Most normies will go online looking for help, find the command to solve their issue and copy-paste it over, both on Windows and Linux. Most tutorials for normies will even include step by step instructions to open whichever command line and what to type.

But again, if you’re at that point something else went wrong and you’re already out of your depth. In most basic OS installs that should never happen, including most widely used Linux distros. That really isn’t the barrier to any sort of mass adoption.

I hear this a lot, and… I’m not so sure.

I mean, for one with modern installers if you’re at the stage where you’re on the terminal as a basic user you are having to troubleshoot more problems than you should have and the issue isn’t the terminal but the stuff that isn’t working that lead you to need to use it.

But also… Windows has one of those, too. Two, actually. Every other troubleshooting page for Windows online has you open a command line and type some stuff up, when not messing with PowerShell. It’s not that weird.

I find that Linux users and communities have a tendency to overestimate how much of the issue is “the terminal” or “the interface not looking like Windows”. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal if the distro you’re installing works first time out of the box. The problem is when it doesn’t, because terminal or not, that’s a dealbreaker for most people.

Hm. So are we all the way there to Win 11 not being installable in fully offline machines, or…? Because niche as that application is, it does sound like the start of a use case for a natively compatible Windows alternative from a third party (say, a FreeWin to go with FreeDOS). I know there are or have been some attempts, but… yeah, long term that seems like it would prompt more focus on something like that.

I suppose it’s more likely that compatibility layers in other OSs would get there first and more practically, but still. Maybe it’s time to move Windows applications from an ecosystem to a standard.

Yeah, it’s a nice feature that the PS5 seems to use primarily for performance. I do wonder why it’s turned off here and whether there is a standardized way to report eye tracking in VR to relevant middleware they could be tapping into instead. I genuinely don’t know enough about the technicalities of all the overlapping VR platforms to tell.

Hm. The breakout box doesn’t surprise me, I would assume the headset itself is relying on some hardware within the PS5 itself, since they were clearly developed in parallel and the original PSVR also needed a breakout box itself. I bet they could have solved it in software, but maybe there’s some type of hardware security also at play. Plus I can see how they’d rather avoid all the RMA from people just plugging the headset to random USB-C ports and being frustrated when it doesn’t just work. It’s an old school way to handle it, but at least this way they know it’ll work.

The missing features are… more interesting. At a glance it makes sense, in that no PC VR game has support for headset rumble or triggers with variable resistance, to my knowledge. Is there a PC HMD with HDR support? Or any games that use it?

So on those and the eye tracking you’d expect no games would take advantage of it out of the box… but does this mean they are disabled at the driver level and no upcoming games can support it either? Or would it be possible for them to enable that down the line for maybe their own ports or, say, Capcom ports later on.

I’m surprised we’re this far, honestly. This is a desperation move at best. The PSVR 2 is a funky-ass HMD compared to what has become the standard for this space. Still wired, unusual choices for displays, super unique features… a minimum baseline to meet SteamVR standards makes some sense, it’s just surprising that they aren’t leaving some of their feature set out there as an option for devs later on, since that seems like it would encourage more third party PSVR content on PS5.

Still, better than having a paperweight. Even with just the basic features, the PSVR headset should look nice enough and get you most of the way to a full PC VR experience. If you have a gaming PC and only have VR through your PS5 this should significantly expand your options. Although I suppose if that’s you I have serious questions about why you went that way instead of getting a Quest 2 when Meta was just giving them away, like everybody else did.

Sure, but you’re an outlier. All of us in this conversation are massive outliers. I mean, we’re on Fedi alternatives to Reddit, for one. We’re talking in a Linux Gaming subreddit of a niche derivative of Reddit.

It’s not like we don’t have numbers. We’re the 0.8% of the market that has a Steam Deck, and from that you’re part of the 0.4% of it that also migrated another computer for one reason or another. And that’s out of Steam, which has about as many users, give or take, as the Nintendo Switch, not orders of magnitude more. We’re a fraction of a fraction of a fraction.