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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Just as a warning, this is licensed under the AGPL, with a CLA that requires copyright assignment. So, they could pull the rug at any time:

    2.3 Outbound License. Based on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, if We include Your Contribution in a Material, We may license the Contribution under any license, including copyleft, permissive, commercial, or proprietary licenses.





  • I’ve had good fortune converting some family and friends to use XMPP.

    People always mention fragmentation, and while there is some truth to it, it can be massively minimised by choosing blessed clients and servers for them to use.

    In my case, I run my own server, and thoroughly test the clients (especially the onboarding flow) that I expect them to use, so that any question they have, I can help them out with quickly. Since we’re all on identically configured servers, it minimises one whole class of incompatibilities.

    There is still unfortunately a bit of a usability gap compared to Signal - particularly on the iOS clients. But they have come a long way and are consistently improving.



  • Thanks for the reply, this is really helpful!

    If you don’t, the Steam Deck will essentially behave as a Xbox 360 controller.

    I see, this makes sense and I guess the “Xbox 360” experience will depend on whether the games themselves have native support for controllers or a very flexible input scheme.

    the touchpads will not behave correctly

    This is interesting, do you know what would be the difference between using the touchpads on other distros vs through SteamOS? Are they not just seen as a regular mouse input device by both OSs?


  • Thank you for writing up such a detailed response!

    I run Debian on my laptop and tend to install FOSS games through the regular package manager. However, I don’t spend as much time playing these games as I would like, so when I was looking into the Steam Deck I was hoping that it would let me have a very similar setup, but as a portable device.

    I see through your reply that, if I want automagic compatibility out of the box, this is crowdsourced and implemented through some intermediate Steam layer. I was hoping there might be some way to bypass Steam and treat the trackpads as regular mouse input, and map the other buttons as if they are keyboard buttons or generic controller inputs, without having to go through Steam.

    I guess this would mean the FOSS games I’m interested in playing would need controller support natively implemented, which I’m not too sure on for the games I’m interested in. Probably time to dust off an Xbox 360 controller and see how they perform!