What you’re looking for is called “Wabbajack”. It’s a pretty impressive system, because it actually pulls all the mods from their official nexus mods source, rather than requiring you get permission from every mod you want to include to be compiled into some new package that then has to be maintained and updated whenever anything updates.

It’s like setting up a full-blown, fully tweaked modlist in a single click. Really impressive solution to navigating a lot of the thorniness that would come from redistributing other people’s work in a “traditional” modpack.

Interesting, I’ve never heard of that one! Might be worth some research as well

Only recently moved over to Linux, is SuperTuxKart actually… good? Like, me and my wife have put tons of hours into modded Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, the physics are really fun, the accessibility options are good enough that she can reasonably keep up with me, and the graphics are super appealing. Is Tux Kart worth my time to look into? Does it have a chance of appealing to my very casual wife?

I was actually able to get the software working by adding it to steam as a “non steam game”. Proton (GE in my case) was able to run it just fine, which is great, as that was one of the last reasons I had to boot into Windows.

Eager to see this, and really glad they’re going with Bazzite, as that’s become my personal gaming rig for much the same reasons they’re doing this now. Will absolutely consider their hardware reviews and benchmarks with this data over others.

Haha, you’re not wrong. Ours tend to ebb and flow with whatever urgent priority upper management has set as well, and it tends to take slack alongside our tech debts. Our management is listening and getting better though, I’m hopeful that in a few years we truly will catch up on our tech debts and have all our managed products in good shape at once.

That said, even in that environment, we’ve had some pretty incredible 20% success stories. Some of my own experiments from when I’ve had the time have become proper released features, although I mostly use it to skip the bureaucracy and address my pet peeve tech debts, which isn’t the point but is nice to be able to do. And one of our major internal products, with a large dedicated team and roadmap, began as one developer’s 20% project a few years back.

The best companies will do something like “20% time”, leaving one day a week or something to work on whatever, which is fantastic for stuff like this. Some of your employees almost certainly have the best ideas, if you just trust them with the space to prove them out.

Great way to get cool stuff like this without unpaid labour.

Haha, perfectly valid, thanks for the clarification!

Edit: Just realizing who you are here, and wanted to express my gratitude! Bazzite has been the thing that finally allowed me to feel comfortable ditching Windows on a gaming living room PC, with all my finicky requirements for HDR and a clean controller-driven experience, and it’s been a fantastic decision.

Dang, I know Bazzite’s whole advantage over SteamOS is integration speed, but man are they quick. Incredible team.

Stoked to hear I’ll get to try this out so soon!

Nice stuff! Does anyone know how long these upgrades usually take to make it to bazzite-gnome?

Very cool! I’ve only just recently gotten to experience the joys of AV1 for my own game recordings (Linux is way ahead of Windows here), and dang is it nice. 10 minute flashback recordings of 4K HDR@60 for only 2.5GB, and the results look fantastic. Can just drag and drop it over to YouTube as well, it’s fully supported over there.

Glad to see things moving, I’ll be eager to check this out in a few years once it has wider support!

Ugh, it’s incredible. Hollow Knight has been one of my favourite games for years, and thus far my expectations for Silksong have actually been exceeded, not just met. Utterly loving it.

Seemed flawless besides the external controller issues. It’s already steam deck verified, after all, so hopefully this is a quick fix for them.

But yeah, until that patch comes, I’ll be forcing proton :/

Yes! I had that issue as well. I managed to sidestep that one by screwing with gamescope, scopebuddy, steam input, switching the controller to 2.4GHz, and restarting the game several times.

Once I unlocked Sprint everything fell apart again, and that’s when I did some googling and realized I was running the native Linux version.

Yeah, proton is a bit of an odd dual edged sword like that. Obviously the dream would be the Linux market share getting large enough that it’s a no-brainer to focus on that version and make it as excellent as possible, and proton is essential for that, but at least for now, proton is so good that it makes it hard to justify a native version.

If you can’t maintain a high standard of excellence for your Linux port, savvy players will just use your Windows version through proton anyway, because it’s already a high quality port. Easy to understand why many studios forego a native Linux version altogether.

This was also the solution to me for a weirder problem, running on Bazzite with an 8BitDo Ultimate 2, I was sprinting randomly, especially when cresting ledges, and the dash button was inconsistent.

Extremely frustrating, the game feels significantly better with sprinting working as intended via Proton (I used GE-latest, but I assume it works with most proton versions). Would be nice to see the native version fixed, but proton is perfectly fine for now, and “external controller on Linux” is likely a lower priority bugfix.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this would work.

The answer to where you should plug in is directly into your GPU, as streaming the data from your external GPU to your iGPU will cause data throughput issues as it has to constantly stream data back and forth through the PCIE bus. Even in simple games at low resolutions where that wouldn’t be an issue, you’d still be introducing more input lag. That’s why connecting your display to your motherboard is usually considered a rookie mistake.

But obviously, if you’re outputting from your external GPU, that silicon is still being used while rendering on the iGPU, which I believe would erase any potential power savings.

I think the better solution if you really want to maximize power savings, would be to use a conservative power setting on your main GPU, and do things like limiting your framerate/selecting lower resolutions to reduce your power draw in applications where you don’t need the extra grunt. Modern GPUs should be pretty good at minimizing idle power draw.

The problem isn’t the tech itself. Getting a pretty darn clean 4k output from 1080p or 1440p, at a small static frametime cost is amazing.

The problem is that the tech has been abused as permission to slack on optimization, or used in contexts where there just isn’t enough data for a clean picture, like in upscaling to 1080p or less. Used properly, on a well optimized title, this stuff is an incredible proposition for the end user, and I’m excited to see it keep improving.

Hard to blame them. Proton is dang impressive, and if it works, it works.