slackness

Solution: tried native steam and worked instantly. Fiddled around with flatpak permissions and discovered steam need all devices access (rather than just input) for the controls to work when streaming to the deck.

I wanted to stream Expedition 33 to my deck. The game launches just fine but it won't recognize anything but the touch screen and I see MnK controls are active.

So I connected a controller to my PC, launched the game there, then started streaming from the deck. But as soon as the deck is connected the game goes back to MnK inputs and again nothing but the touch screen works.

The PC is running Steam Flatpak and Proton Experimental. With default Steam Input settings (which I think cannot be disabled when using Steam Play anyway).

I cannot run the game using Proton GE, just getting a black screen with audio.

So is Steam Play supposed to be a plug and play experience and I'm unlucky?

A new version of fontconfig release recently with the added option to disable bitmap fonts. If you're using a rolling release distro, this might break bitmap fonts for you. It definitely does on Arch (and likely Arch-based distros) because they opted to disable them by default for some reason (AFAICT upstream gives the choice but does not recommend one way or the other).

This'll cause fontconfig to skip bitmap fonts, your apps won't be able to access them.

To fix it, you need to configure fontconfig to not ignore bitmap fonts. There are a number of ways to do that.

I'd recommend a user-level fontconfig file. Create $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf with below contents and you get your bitmap fonts back. This negates the file in /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps-except-emoji.conf. This is the first time I'm configuring fontconfig so there may be a better way ¯_(ツ)_/¯

This should've definitely been news imo especially because this is not the default behavior of upstream. I shouldn't have to read fontconfig PRs to figure out why my fonts broke, even on Arch.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "urn:fontconfig:fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <description>Accept bitmap fonts</description>
  <!-- Accept bitmap fonts -->
  <selectfont>
    <acceptfont>
      <pattern>
        <patelt name="outline"><bool>false</bool></patelt>
        <patelt name="scalable"><bool>false</bool></patelt>
      </pattern>
    </acceptfont>
  </selectfont>
</fontconfig>

I'm looking into buying one of AMD's newer GPUs. Either a 9060xt or 9070xt. Is there a way to track driver support (I know they're supported but I'm interested in bugs/missing features/performance/etc.) for these cards other than asking people who owns them?

I will be on latest Mesa and firmware so I'm interested in the current state.