Fubarberry

Great to see new releases running well on the Deck, and I've been hearing a lot of praise the last couple days for Pragmata specifically.

Note: the default graphics settings default to fsr 1, you'll have much better results switching to fsr 3.

This plugin makes some changes to the deck's WiFi settings that are supposed to significantly help with streaming quality. It's not on the decky store yet, so you have to manually install it.

Here's what it does:

• Disables WiFi power management and PCIe power states that cause packet batching, latency spikes, and throughput degradation during sustained streaming.

• Locks to your current access point so the Deck stops scanning for other networks every 2 minutes. Disable before switching networks or if you use a mesh/multi-AP setup and need to roam.

• Installs a script that reapplies your settings every time WiFi reconnects - works even if Decky isn't running

• Increases kernel buffer sizes and TX queue length to handle bursty streaming traffic without dropping packets

It also has some other features that can be toggled if needed, like forcing ipv4, forcing 5/6ghz, or using a different DNS.

Leaker here is Brad Lynch, who generally seems reliable as a leaker for Valve software and products. He was also the source for the leaked renders of the steam controller.

More details here: https://www.techspot.com/news/111951-steam-could-soon-show-estimated-fps-based-crowd.html?hl=en-US

Wine is the base for Proton, which lets windows games run on the Deck.

The interesting bit here is the change to how DLLs are loaded. Currently with Wine and Proton, you do at times need to do a bit of a workaround for games that need specific DLLs for their mods. With this change now in place and shipped in Wine, it means that if the DLL company name attached is not Microsoft (so a custom one supplied with the mod or game), Wine will automatically use it over the Wine version.

Hopefully, the end result will be a number of mods for Windows games on Linux / SteamOS will be easier to run, often out of the box with no extra changes or launch options. And, eventually, Valve will pull the changes into Proton so everyone using it with Steam will see the benefits of it.

Improved streaming quality and connection stability for an app like this can actually be pretty meaningful, so I figured it was worth sharing.

Basically you can now manage the download screen of your deck from a PC client. I haven't gotten to try it yet, but my understanding is that the deck needs to be on for this to work, but it will work if the deck is already in the "screen off downloading updates" state.

Important to note that the results are a bit weird though for the last couple months.

In December, after Win10 EoL, linux achieved a record 3.58% of Steam users. However there was a massive drop in February, down to 2.23% of users on Linux. This was accompanied by a massive spike in Chinese steam accounts (english users dropped from 36% of user accounts in the survey to 22%, while Chinese user accounts jumped from 24% of users to 54% of users). I'm guessing it was a bunch of chinese bot accounts. (edit: as pointed out in the comments, this was probably due to chinese new year. Lots of chinese people hitting gaming cafes).

Now for March, Linux jumped back from 2.23% of users to 5.33% of steam users surveyed. Leading the charge are two unidentified distros 0 64-bit (+17.6%) and 64-bit (+8%).

The unknown distros being responsible for the massive gain is very suspicious, so we'll have to see if that part ends up being correct or not. On the other hand, the surge of chinese accounts that seemingly pushed down linux's percentages last month are now gone, with chinese accounts dropping from 54% of users to 23%.

So ultimately we'll need to wait and see if valve clarifies what "0 64-bit linux" and "64-bit linux" are, or wait until next month to see how things change.

This is a look into how an AI bubble burst might play out. The biggest issue is money, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are burning money with no good way to turn it profitable. Google can "win" the AI race just by continuing to spend money, and wait for the others to crash and burn.

OpenAIs recent attempts to turn a profit (shopping and sora) are both failing, and they've resulted to trying ads (which they had previously described as a last resort).

Anthropic is capturing the developer market, but some reports say their metered models cost 5x more than what people pay for them. It doesn't matter that they're having market success, if more users just means burning way more money.

If multiple major players crash or have to get bought out, we may see several major datacenters shutdown or underperform, which could have a strong ripple effect on the economy.

Noteworthy, this article doesn't include anything about the US government's involvement in AI. The US considers AI a race to reach AGI before china, and may attempt to prop up a failing AI market to achieve this.