I’d go with different system acounts. That way their savegames are guaranteed to stay separate.

That’s because on PC most games just care about the system user when determining the savegame folder, and don’t care about steam accounts.

So, what I’d do is to:

• Give each their own system account
• Set up Gamescope as a session: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam#Big_Picture_Mode_from_a_display_manager
• Configure the Display Manager to use that session for their users (In GDM, for instance, it’s enough to manually select it once on login - GDM remembers the last-used session per user)
• Profit

Gamedev here: For non-indie projects it’s not up to the devs to decide which platforms get a native build. That decision is made by the publisher, and usually depends strongly on the estimated amount of extra work needed to make a native version. I agree with your statement, that if devs use ARM development PCs, they get a strong argument to convince publishers to pay for a native version, because porting costs will drop to near-zero.

However (there always is a “however”): Many devs cannot switch away from Windows. If one develops for PC only, it’s possible. If one targets other platforms too (think: game consoles), one is stuck with whatever development environment the manufacturers of those platforms support - what is typically Windows and Visual Studio. It is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. Platform SDKs will be made available for other operating systems or processor architectures once enough gamedevs are using those. Gamedevs cannot yet use those because platform SDKs aren’t available for them…

It’s, to be honest, a frustrating experience… I personally would switch away from MSVC and Windows the moment I get an opportunity to. However, there never was an opportunity up to now… Our previous tech-director was pushing for Linux on dev machines - or rather: “let the devs use whatever they want, as long as it works” - but there never was an opportunity to switch, due to our games’ target platforms allowing only Windows for development…

I’ve never used Heroic, so I can’t say what to expect, but I’ve never had any issues downloading games via the GoG website.

Have you tried that? Maybe it’s faster?

Though, honestly, I think i might just be some outage on GoGs side. If the downloads via the website are slow too, it might be worth talking to their support.

That “Solid Snake Method” sounds a lot like the emacs doctor…

In case you don’t know what the emacs doctor is: It’s an easter-egg of the text-editor emacs (it is, however, mentioned in the manual). The doctor is a chatbot based on ELIZA, and meant to portrait a psychotherapist. Since it is a rather simple script, it is very limited in what it can do, and mostly just reformulates user input as questions.

For a typical desktop Linux 12 GiB should be fine.

It depends on what you do with the system, of course. If you regularly compile big and template-heavy C++ codebases, work with Blender,… then 12 GiB won’t be enough.

(What really surprised me was how much can still be done with just 4 GiB of memory. My laptop is currently limited to 4 GiB, and with some effort to set up a minimalist system it’s working surprisingly well. I barely ever hit the memory limit - actually only when compiling big template-heavy C++ codebases 😉.)

There was also an option to just install a Debian chroot on Android, with no virtualization in-between.

The app was called Lil’Debi, but isn’t maintained any more since 2018.

shocking and horrifying the player is kind of the whole point of the game

I disagree on the “shocking” part here. DDLC is psychological horror. It does have shocking moments, like the end of Act 1, but this is not the main point. It is way more about relationships than about shock moments. Sadly discussing that part of the game (the later acts…) is massive spoiler territory, so I’ll stop here.

The fact remains though, that it is a horror game, and if the end of Act 1 is already too much, then sorry, but it is only going to get worse. A lot worse. (Or, if you enjoy psychological horror: Better. A lot better.)

Yeah, I could imagine that it would need to be connected to a USB charger for that…

(I hope they make the suggested version with the eInk display. That way the image would persist even if the power runs out.)

Could be wireless. That would also explain the “battery” mentioned in the poll on shitter.

I don’t know if that’s still the case, but when this game launched it required you to be online while playing (despite it being single-player), and you had to login with a Ubisoft account.

I know it’s a cross-post, but since this is not on the cheap, but rather on the libre side: Have you checked out the MNT Pocket Reform?

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.)

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 own one, and am really happy with it. There is some jank to expect though:

• The official system image is based on Debian Unstable. This means that you frequently get broken updates (for instance, currently waybar is broken, and just a few days ago, boot got broken by a buggy initramfs).
  • At least for some SoMs there are also Debian Stable images available, which are, well, stable.
  • I am running Gentoo on my Reform, and once one gets past the initial setup (kernel config is a challenge) it works pretty well. I have written a blog post about installing Gentoo on the Reform.
• DPMS off might not work reliably (depending on SoM). I got it working well on my BananaPi CM4 SoM by changing sway config though.
• Suspend-to-disk (hibernate) does currently not work. Last time I tried it, the system continued just fine, but froze a few seconds later.
  • No clue if standby works. I don’t use standby.
• Some other issues exist with the Banana Pi CM4, but there are workarounds: https://community.mnt.re/t/tracking-known-issues-and-solutions-with-the-bpi-a311d-upgrade
• There are probably more issues that I cannot remember right now.

That said: Now that I have Gentoo running on it, and found workarounds for the most annoying issues (except for the suspend-to-disk issue), I am loving the laptop and would not trade it for anything else.