is a pain in the ass

is dependent on 3rd parties

Well, one of the two, at any rate.

I haven’t spent much time with them — I’m not a devops person — but if you’re doing this at scale, I’d guess that you might want to look into software configuration management tools.

Some major open-source players that run on Linux:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible_(software)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Chef

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_(software)

I’ve only used Puppet, and not really in this role, so I can’t provide a lot of advice specific to their use. But it may be a useful starting point for you, if you’re asking “how do people do things like this?”

kagis

Yeah, I see examples of people deploying game servers with them. To look for Ansible and Valheim, for example:

https://github.com/Aetrius/valheim-ansible

The basic idea is that if you’re running a bunch of servers, you can make changes to a configuration file and the software configuration management package will set up a system to conform to that configuration or propagate all the changes to those servers that don’t yet have those changes applied to them.

EDIT: For Puppet, sounds like they moved to a proprietary model, and OpenVoxProject is the open-source fork.

Eventually, I expect that advanced AI will. The same is true for many human professions. But I’m dubious that pure LLMs will be the route this takes. Too many limitations.

It’s possible that such an advanced AI might make use of or incorporate LLMs.

when I started using vim mode in zsh.

I’m an emacs user myself, but if you’re not aware, readline — which handles a considerable portion of the “prompt for text” stuff in many terminal programs, like input for bash and such — can be put into vi mode.

https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/rluserman.html#Readline-vi-Mode

In order to switch interactively between emacs and vi editing modes, use the command M-C-j (bound to emacs-editing-mode when in vi mode and to vi-editing-mode in emacs mode). The Readline default is emacs mode.

When you enter a line in vi mode, you are already placed in ‘insertion’ mode, as if you had typed an ‘i’. Pressing ESC switches you into ‘command’ mode, where you can edit the text of the line with the standard vi movement keys, move to previous history lines with ‘k’ and subsequent lines with ‘j’, and so forth.

Or, in ~/.inputrc:

set editing-mode vi

To set the default.

I use emacs’s magit for git stuff (the bulk of things) and emacs’s ediff for most other things.

Good if you know emacs, but hard to recommend using it for someone who doesn’t.

EDIT: Oh, one exotic utility that’s useful for some rare cases, not really for interactive merging of code — wdiff for word-level diffing. Most code can reasonably be diffed on a line-by-line basis, but that’s not true for some text formats, which can have very long lines. Human, natural language in text format, is one good example.

What would you suggest for checking the network?

Well, on the Linux side, something like bwm-ng will tell you the total throughput through an interface, and if you can transfer a file across the two, you can probably get a feel for how much bandwidth is practically available to do.

If you’ve been able to move that much over the network before, though, that’s a fair argument that that’s not the cause.

I haven’t done it, but the first thing that I’d be inclined to suspect is the wireless network, not Wayland; you don’t know what else is also transmitting on those frequencies.

I’d check to see whether your machine is maxing out the CPU (top) or GPU (nvidia-smi) and whether changing the streaming resolution affects the framerate.

I would guess that you’ll normally find that (a) there will be higher latency (especially worst-case latency) on Bluetooth interfaces than USB interfaces:

According to this:

https://gamepadla.com/xbox-core-controller.html

You have average/max USB latency of 8.3 ms/12.23 ms.

You have average/max dongle latency of 8.88 ms/14.64 ms.

You have average/max Bluetooth latency of 12.98 ms/20.89 ms.

For the wireless protocols, I expect that the amount of interference where you are will also be a factor.

It looks at least at one point, there was an issue with those controllers not specifying the polling rate that they actually wanted. I don’t know if you have one of this particular generation, but you might try the specified workaround:

https://github.com/atar-axis/xpadneo/commit/15801c6c0421957190193fec3f371a353111c12e

It looks like the above patch is still present in current xpadneo, so I assume that the issue remains:

https://atar-axis.github.io/xpadneo/#troubleshooting

High Latency or Lost Button Events with Bluetooth LE

Affected models: Xbox controllers using Bluetooth LE (Xbox Series X|S or later)

While using new Xbox Series X|S controller, you may experience laggy or choppy input, also button presses may be lost or delayed. This problem only affects Bluetooth LE controllers, the older models are not affected by these settings even if you think you may see such a problem.

A proper solution is still missing but we isolated it to the Bluetooth LE connection parameters for latency and intervals. The bluez developers say that the connected device should suggest the best settings, the bluez daemon only ships sensible default settings. It looks like the new Xbox controllers do not properly suggest their preferred connection parameters, some BLE mice show the same problem. You can work around it by changing the bluez defaults instead. This change is not recommended by the bluez developers but as long as you only use a very specific set of BLE devices, this change should be fine.

The controller uses 100 Hz internally for its protocol, so we decided to use intervals of 8.75…11.25ms. Each tick is 1.25ms, so we end up with MinConnectionInterval=7 and MaxConnectionInterval=9. If you already use a similar work-around for other devices, you may need to adjust your settings to the proper bounds, i.e. do not increase the min value, do not lower the max value.

Edit the following file and restart the Bluetooth service or reboot:

# /etc/bluetooth/main.conf
[LE]
MinConnectionInterval=7
MaxConnectionInterval=9
ConnectionLatency=0

No problem. Yeah, it’s an invaluable off-site resource that new users don’t get informed about. Indexes all of the Threadiverse instances, whereas any given instance can only search the communities that are local or at least one local user has subscribed to.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=networking&order=active_month

You might just ask your question and see if someone can answer it, even if they don’t specifically use that combination. I don’t think that there’s any deep integration between the two.

Far more than 90% of the Steam games I own run on Linux.

could not load kernel32.dll, status c0000135

On my Debian Trixie system, kernel32.dll is in the libwine package:

$ apt-file search  kernel32.dll
libwine: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/wine/x86_64-windows/kernel32.dll
$ apt-file search -a i386 kernel32.dll
libwine: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/wine/i386-windows/kernel32.dll
$

I have no idea what Linux distribution you’re using, but if it’s Debian-family, maybe:

$ sudo apt install libwine:amd64 libwine:i386

That’ll get both the 32-bit and 64-bit WINE libraries.

It sounds like Battle.net is a 32-bit Windows binary, whereas World of Warcraft itself is a 64-bit binary. I assume that the Battle.net binary might also be a 32-bit binary, and it looks like you’re running a 64-bit WINE binary (see the x86_64 thing in the above path that Lutris is running). Maybe you only have the 64-bit WINE libraries installed, and it can’t run the 32-bit Battle.net installer? I’m guessing, mind.

I don’t use Lutris, so can’t provide any advice there.

I’m so used to the game being handled by Blizzard’s Battle.net launcher, so I can’t really wrap my head around how that would work.

They’re probably talking about launching said launcher from Lutris or Steam.

kagis

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/guides/view/how-to-install-battle-net-on-linux-steamos-and-steam-deck-for-world-of-warcraft-and-starcraft/

Well, vkgears shows that Vulkan is working at a low level, and glxgears that OpenGL is.

In fact, if they package and let you install both at once, you might even be able to try both 32-bit and 32-bit packages. For me, that’s the mesa-utils-bin package on Debian, with the vkgears.i386-linux-gnu, vkgears.amd64-linux-gnu, and so forth binaries.

But if that’s all working, I guess probably try running some Direct3D app in WINE, to cut Proton and Steam stuff out. I don’t know what would be a good choice. Maybe some 3D benchmark app or something. If that works fine, then narrow down on the Proton/Steam stuff.

Unfortunately when trying to run a game (I could only try ProjectDiva Megamix+ and another game which I know is unreliable) I couldn’t get dxvk to work, it would always give me a “directx 11 not found” error. The other game I mentioned runs on dx9 and had similar issues, failing to create a graphics context from what I can tell from the logs. The first game runs if I force WineD3D. On my primary PC running OpenSUSE with an RX 9070xt and on my Steam Deck the game works perfectly.

I’m skimming this, but if you’re wanting to test, use glxgears (OpenGL) and vkgears (Vulkan). They’re pretty simple and self-contained.

DXVK lives at a higher level, so I’d go try dicking around with that once I’m sure that the above are working fine and using your hardware.

WineD3D (can) use OpenGL. DXVK uses Vulkan. If forcing WineD3D works, it might be that you’re having trouble with Vulkan stuff. I don’t do much with Nvidia hardware, but one thing I’ve seen before was not having Vulkan and/or OpenGL userspace stuff installed — especially for the particular architecture.

On the Debian trixie system on which I’m typing this:

$ dpkg -l|grep vulk
ii  libvulkan1:amd64                          1.4.309.0-1                          amd64        Vulkan loader library
ii  libvulkan1:i386                           1.4.309.0-1                          i386         Vulkan loader library
ii  mesa-vulkan-drivers:amd64                 25.0.7-2                             amd64        Mesa Vulkan graphics drivers
ii  mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386                  25.0.7-2                             i386         Mesa Vulkan graphics drivers
$

OpenSUSE may package them under different names, but I think that that might give an idea. Note how I’ve got two different architectures for each installed. 32-bit binaries (i386), including WINE/Proton games will need the 32-bit stuff.

Honestly, I think that one thing that people don’t appreciate about Linux is how much work has been done on a common license front (BSD/LGPL/GPL/MIT) to help unify work, and how much work has been done by packaging and testing people, the distro guys. Like, if people had to spin their own Linux setup out of open-source repos — some on GitHub, some one SourceForge, etc — it’d be a lot harder. That’s kinda what the Skyrim modding world is like.

The Skyrim modding crowd has several sources of fragmentation, I think:

• Bethesda doesn’t actually make money off mods at all, unless it’s from the Creation Club and paid, of which there is not much. Skyrim is closed source, so they’re the only people who can work on that. My guess is that some stuff, like Skyrim Script Extender, really should have been folded into the base game…but there’s just not money in it for Bethesda, and they aren’t a volunteer project. If you look at a favorite open source game of mine, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, there are surprisingly few mods…because over the years, things that would have been “mods” for a lot of commercial games were just added to the base game.

• Bethesda has been comparatively-restrictive on what content they’ll host, so “just put a mod on Bethesda’s site” isn’t going to be a universal solution.

• NexusMods, probably the largest mod distribution site, is a company, and has no incentive to help facilitate other sources of mod distribution. So their mod managers only support automatic download of mods from NexusMods.

• Some mods are going to cause moral outrage or are even outright illegal in some places.

• Because many mods don’t allow redistribution, they can’t be moved to another site. That also limits the clients that can automatically handle them.

• Because mods generally are not under licenses that permit forking, people can’t just go out and fix some of these compatibility problems and release a fork that works.

• Sometimes people take down mods. Maybe they don’t want people to know that they were producing an erotic mod. Maybe they just get angry or frustrated and want to stop. Maybe they get in a fight with someone else. Maybe they’re doing a political protest (I remember some users doing this when Russia invaded Ukraine). With FOSS software, that’s not much of a problem, because the rest of the world can fork and continue development. That’s often not the case with Skyrim mods.

And a lot of these problems affect modding of games other than Skyrim. It’s just a particularly big problem because Skyrim is an extremely-heavily-modded game.

I’d like to see a cross-platform game-agnostic mod manager. Something that’d have enough scale that it could be maintained on an ongoing basis, past a single game’s lifetime. Support non-interactive operation, conflict resolution (automatically disabling various sets of mods, restarting game, asking user if problem is gone), downloading from a variety of sites automatically. Downloading deltas efficiently, rather than whole archives, if a user has a recent version already. Then, if any game-specific support is required, just have a small extension to add that. That won’t solve all the problems — the license problem on Skyrim mods is, I think, a big root cause — but at least it’d be a starting point.

For the Linux side, I’ve used Mod Organizer 2 on Linux via https://github.com/Furglitch/modorganizer2-linux-installer

The problem is that the Linux compatibility stuff is the first step, and as the Skyrim modding forums will tell you, getting Skyrim modded is basically a game in-and-of itself. There are various incompatibilities between different mods, load orders matter, and so forth. It’s not a low-effort path.

Like, the real answer is that I don’t think that there is really a great low-effort way to get just “modernized Skyrim” up and running. That’s not that I don’t sympathize — I think that there is real demand for someone who just wants a vanilla-with-a-lot-of-community-updates Skyrim with minimal effort and troubleshooting. I’ve done it, and it takes time to debug issues.

Also, there isn’t just one “modded Skyrim”. There are people who want to play a vanilla game, just with higher-res textures and higher-polygon models. There are people who want more changes, like cities that smoothly transition into the open world. Some people want a seriously modified game, like a survival game. There are people on LoversLab and similar who want an erotic open-world game. And those just aren’t really compatible with each other.

I have never used Wabbajack on Linux successfully — haven’t tried recently, either — but it downloads entire collections of pre-set-up mods. The idea is that it has some “pre-modded” configurations to start from that someone’s tested. You don’t get to configure everything, but in theory, it should “just work” on the Skyrim side of things, and it’s the closest to that that I’m aware of.

EDIT: It looks like Wabbajack has “unofficial Linux guides” up off their main page, so some people are clearly using it on Linux these days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

The analog hole (also known as the analog loophole or analog gap) is a perceived fundamental and inevitable vulnerability in copy protection schemes for noninteractive works in digital formats which can be exploited to duplicate copy-protected works using analog means. Once digital information is converted to a human-perceptible (analog) form, it is a relatively simple matter to digitally recapture that analog reproduction in an unrestricted form, thereby fundamentally circumventing any and all restrictions placed on copyrighted digitally distributed work. Media publishers who use digital rights management (DRM), to restrict how a work can be used, perceive the necessity to make it visible or audible as a “hole” in the control that DRM otherwise affords them.[1]

EDIT: I don’t know if I’d say that it’s fundamental, as Wikipedia did — I can think of a couple of approaches to try and address it — but it is quite substantial.

I’m kind of surprised that they aren’t doing Steam Deck-style trackpads. I mean, it probably saves some money, but it seems like a major drawback if the point is “run Windows games on the platform”.