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, 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.
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.
Good for you, but that’s a meaningless statement from a home user perspective.
Windows 10 “going end of life” only means security updates will stop trickling in. Drivers will work, software will work. As far as your aunt Rita knows, nothing has changed on her laptop when 10 goes end of life, and if she tries to upgrade and can’t for some reason, she’ll just keep using what works indefinitely. The only time you may notice is if you get new hardware that for some reason doesn’t support 10 anymore at which point the hardware incompatibility issue is gone.
People will move to 11 how people always move Windows versions: by buying a new PC with it preinstalled. Because that’s how people interface with OSs in the real world. The only time normies go out of their way to change Windows versions is when the new version is generally perceived as replacing a crappy iteration, like the 8 to 10 jump or the Vista to 7 transition.
All of that is to say that it sucks for MS to actively use a subtle security downgrade as a motivator for people to update their hardware and software combo. Not because people will be pissed and move to Linux, but because they won’t move anywhere and there will be more vulnerable systems out there. Most won’t have any issues until they get new hardware, but it’s still bad praxis from MS’s position of stewardship of many millions of home computing devices.
I mean, see above for my estimate of how big that contribution is, discounting the effect of the rather unLinux-y experience of using the Deck.
Proton and Wine support help, although I genuinely would like to see more laptops shipping Linux by default more than I care about the Deck. I recently tried to move a laptop to Linux and the terrible support for custom hardware made it unfeasible. That machine is back on Windows now.
The underreported key to Linux on the Deck is that it’s configured for the hardware out of the box. In a world where modular, standardized desktop computing is not mainstream outside techie circles, Linux’s problem is that most normies on Windows aren’t on a desktop PC with AMD gear, they’re on some slightly but noticeably custom branded laptop still running its default Windows install.
Everybody here.
I have literally not heard a single person in real life complain about it. I work in a tech field where people largely use Windows for work. Not a one. We talk about nerdy stuff all the time, it hasn’t come up.
I genuinely don’t think people around here get how much of a bubble this weird “OSs as sports teams” stuff is.
As for the impact of the Steam Deck, we can actually cross-reference to estimate it by looking at the GPU numbers. Of that Linux blob, the Deck should account for 0.8% of the total, so that leaves desktop Linux proper at 1.52%. The Deck launched in February 2022. The last survey before the Deck launched had Linux at 1.11%, so that gives you a 0.41% increase. That’s not insiginificant, but… you know, it’s still pretty small.
No it is not. MS stopping 10 support early sucks, but the average user doesn’t know or care.
For reference, by the same point in Win10’s lifetime, 40% of users were still on Win 7, and by the time they stopped Win7 support it was 20% still. Phone manufacturers advertising ongoing software support has made this a bit more relevant or prominent, but most PC users will only update as their OS tells them to, and if the OS goes silent they’ll just keep chugging along. We know this, it’s how it’s been forever. “People still on Windows 7” was a bit of a meme even at the time.
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.