soulsource
I would like to answer Vagrus, as that is what I would want to play.
However, I spent way too much of my spare time playing Lean4, and that isn’t even supposed to be a game!
Almost all the rest of my gaming time goes into Palworld multiplayer with my wife. What left about 1 hour for Vagrus last week…
I am curious how much work it will be to modify that Ubuntu image to fully work on the Reform. The audio chip and some other peripherals are on the mainboard, and need to be included in the device tree for the kernel to pick them up, so I would expect that at least some modifications of the image are needed.
It might already be enough to grab the device tree from the MNT gitlab, compile it, and put it in the boot partition for stuff to work. (You will likely also want to install the reform-tools - either from their gitlab or from their repository. They include a kernel module that is needed to get battery readout and to power off the laptop on shutdown.)
What helped me a lot while setting up the system was that I kept the SD card with the official (Debian Unstable) image around - every time something didn’t work, I could boot it up and check how the official image does it.
I haven’t looked at the schematics, so I am not certain which connection exactly would be needed. I only know that the Reform Mainboard and the Reform CM4 adapter don’t expose any way of writing to the eMMC other than booting the system first. The problem here is that the Banana Pi CM4 boot process first looks for a bootloader in eMMC, and only if it cannot find one there, tries the SD card. So, if one flashes a bootloader that gets recognized by the firmware, but that later fails to boot, one is stuck…
The I/O board on the other hand allows to connect to the CM4 via USB, and there is a weird, but supposedly working, procedure to erase the data in eMMC.
In any case, I now have a spare CM4 I/O board lying around, and if I ever choose to upgrade my Reform to the Rockchip SoM (or something even faster), I can then still use the CM4 as a small standalone PC.
At least in my case, the default OS came on an SD Card, and both, the M.2 SSD (which I had ordered together with the laptop) and the eMMC were empty. The manual contains a section about moving the OS to eMMC, so I guess that’s their default setup.
(In my case there’s an additional thing though: For the Banana Pi CM4 SoM the installation of u-boot into eMMC is officially not supported, as one would need a CM4 I/O board to erase it again, if anything goes wrong. I installed it there anyhow, and it’s working for me, but I did buy the I/O board beforehand as a precaution.)
Me neither. I only (have to) use Windows at work, all my own PCs have been running Linux for decades…
I do know however, that WSL emulates most (but not all) Linux syscalls, so you can ran (nearly) all Linux programs on Windows - including WINE. There is also a driver in Mesa so that you can render 3D graphics from within WSL on any DX12 graphics card.
Technically I’m still playing “Vagrus - The Riven Realms”, but I didn’t play much lately, since I rediscovered my love for the Lean4 programming language and am now playing around with a formally validated heap again.
My top answers are of course Kerbal Space Program, Dwarf Fortress and Stellaris.
However, all those have been mentioned already, so, to add something new to the list: Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It is currently my favourite cRPG.
Edit: Since you mentioned “Great Linux ports”: Kingmaker has a game-breaking bug in the Linux version regarding Gamepad input. However, as long as you play it with mouse and keyboard (as the gods intended - insert PC Master Race meme), the Linux version is working perfectly fine. However, if you plan on playing it on the Steam Deck, you might want to play the Windows build.
If I weren’t currently at work and would have time to think about the answer, I could probably come up with more titles, but those are the top 2 that come to mind, if I ignore cRPGs (at least that’s how I read your “avoiding final fantasy-esque” requirement):
Settlers 2: It’s new enough to still look decent by today’s standards, and has amazing game design. Available at GoG.
Star Control 2: One of the best early open world games. The graphics have definitely aged by today’s standard, but the humour hasn’t. Or maybe it has, but just a bit. Available for free and open source.
Yep, innoextract just unpacks the files, and I then place them into a folder in the home dir. Before I knew about innoextract I also just used WINE to run the installers, and then copied the installed files around. (btw, the apple pkg installers can also be unpacked by a combination of 7z and cpio - in case you just want to unpack one of the many GoG Dosbox games and don’t have innoextract or WINE available)
I have a folder named ~/Games - and the individual games in subfolders there. In Steam’s “add non-steam game” dialogue there’s a “browse” button, and in that one I then select the .exe file of the game. That adds it to the library, and allows selecting Proton as compatibility tool in the preferences.
I am pretty sure the Steam Client reports which games you play to Steam’s “presence” service, such that your Steam Friends can see what you are playing. I don’t know if Valve gathers that data for other purposes (but would assume they do unless told otherwise). Also, some games that ship with Steam integration in their GoG installer (e.g. Loop Hero) will even track as you playing the Steam version - even if you don’t own it there.
And yeah, there is no GoG Galaxy emulation in Steam of course, but I honestly don’t care much about achievements. The lack of cloud support in non-Steam games is annoying though, as I also have a Steam Deck and those saves don’t automatically synch…