Revisionist? I am old, I was there. But if you don’t believe me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian

(And while I didn’t own a Symbian phone myself, a good friend did. Oh, but what I owned was a tablet computer. Way back in 2002. And now you will likely call me a Revisionist again, because I owned a device before Apple invented it…)

It’s funny that you mention the iPhone - a device that had zero innovation compared to its competitors, and just managed to take the market because of marketing.

While Visual Novels are not my favourite genre, there are a few entries that I would like to highlight, because I enjoyed playing them quite a lot:

• Pyre: While it isn’t marketed as Visual Novel, it pretty much is one. To be precise, it is a Visual Novel with sports-game elements. The world-building in this one is excellent, as is the art. The visuals alone would make this game worth playing, but there is also the soundtrack, and the gameplay of the sports events is pretty fun too. Oh, and the story. This game really requires tough choices. It’s from the same studio that made Hades, Transistor and Bastion, and it shows.
• Griftlands: Again, not marketed as Visual Novel, despite very clearly being one. This one is a Visual Novel with card battles and deck-building. Just as with Pyre, the world-building in this one is outstanding. The card battles are well done. It’s no Slay the Spire, but it’s still pretty good. Also, it has some of the best jokes I have seen in games recently.
• Loren the Amazon Princess: Again a Visual Novel that is primarily marketed as something else - this time Role Playing Game. And to be honest, it has everything you would expect from an RPG: inventory management, character stats, JRPG-style turn-based battles, trading, a world map,… But it’s still pretty much a Visual Novel with RPG elements. It has a massive scope for an indie game, and is overall pretty well done. To be blatantly honest, I played this mainly for the RPG parts, but the story isn’t bad either, once one gets past the initial “I see your party has no rogue, mind if I join?” part. The setting is still being actively developed by the studio behind it, who have released several other visual novels (with and without RPG elements) set in the same world, with recurring characters.

Yes. That’s why I was utterly confused when big companies dug out hat dead horse (yet) again.

And they are still trying to ride it.

It’s not “either side”. One “side” is making games, the other is screaming slurs.

Yep. And the worst part is the Fear-of-Missing-Out when disabling them.

Like, there is nothing stopping you from just not doing the kingdom management mini-game, except that nagging feeling that you might actually miss out on some content…

And the predecessor, Pathfinder: Kingmaker is amazing too.

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.

They will likely write their own emulator, but don’t forget about WSL. You can already run WINE on Windows, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could also run FEX+WINE on Windows for ARM.

by intercepting syscalls and executing them directly

Not only syscalls. FEX and Box64 also allow using native libraries instead of emulating them. That leaves basically only the game logic to be emulated.

Yep. The big question is if the gap will close enough that ARM chips indeed end up delivering better power efficiency with emulation than an AMD64 chip that delivers the same performance without emulation.

My bets would be on the native AMD64 chip ending up more power efficient. To be honest, I would not bet too much money though.

ARM based Deck would be a huge improvement to battery life. Don’t get your hopes up too high. You will need an emulation layer like FEX of Box64, and unlike WINE those do have quite a substantial overhead.

It is impressive how far those emulators have come, especially since they got the option to use native libraries instead of emulated ones, but the game logic itself will always need emulation…

This doesn’t mean it can’t be done, it just means that the ARM CPU needs to be pretty fast to counter the emulation overhead, and that’s why I have my doubts about the energy efficiency…

(Btw: I have tried running several AMD64 games on my A311D powered MNT Reform laptop with Box64. It’s impressive how well the emulation runs, and how many games are actually playable already. However, I also encountered a lot of games that don’t reach enjoyable FPS on that hardware. With a faster ARM chip though…)

It depends on what kind of patent. I just googled the term I had used before, and it is indeed what I expected it to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

And yes, that name is stupid. That’s why I am happy that my native language, German, has a better distinction between “Patent” (what you described) and “Geschmacksmuster” (design patent).

About patents being public: They are. That’s because the idea behind patents is that after they expire, anyone can use them to build the technology they describe. The temporary exclusive usage rights that they offer are meant as an incentive for inventors to publish their findings. The only problem is that the legal situation did not keep up with the creativity of patent lawyers… (I will stop now, otherwise this will turn into an endless rant about how broken the patent system is.)

I’m not sure how the term “patent” is to be interpreted here. It could be used like back in the days when Apple sued Samsung because their phone had rounded edges too…

Like a “design patent” (sorry, I’m not a native English speaker, so I’m unsure if this is the correct translation).

A lot of the pals in the game look quite close to Pokémon. Not identical, of course, but so similar that one just has to wonder if the design has been “inspired” by Pokémon…

Amnesia.

Short answer: Whales.

Long answer: Watch the South Park episode on the topic. They explain it in detail. It’s titled “Freemium Isn’t Free”.

This. There is very little need for third-party tools, as long as you don’t want to install a whole lot of games. After all, the installation process only happens once per game, and also without tools it doesn’t take very long.

As a step-by-step guide:

• Download the games from the GoG website. You can find them if you hover the site’s header bar, where your user-name is displayed. There’s a “Games” button which brings you to the list of games, where you can download the installers directly. The downloads are listed under “Download Offline Backup Game Installers”.
• Unpack the game installer.
  • Innoextract is your friend here. No need to run the installer, just unpack the files. Works with both, Windows and Linux games.
  • Alternatively, if it’s a native Linux game, you can just run the installer directly on the Steam Deck.
    • For Windows games you can theoretically also use Proton directly on the deck. However, the process is annoying, so I won’t go into details.
  • Alternatively, you can run the installer on your desktop PC and copy the files to the Deck via sftp.
• Add the game to Steam Library. This can be done in Desktop Mode. There’s a menu entry in Steam’s “Games” menu for that.
  • In the File Browser, you need to disable the file filter, as it (iirc) only shows .desktop files by default. You’ll want the game’s executable though.
• If it’s a Windows game, go to the game’s properties page in Steam, and force a specific compatibility tool for it, namely some recent version of Proton.
  • For native Linux games this step is usually not needed, but some very old games need to set the Steam Linux Runtime here.
  • For DOS games, check out my blog post about DOSBox on the Deck.
    • I don’t know how well it works on the Deck (never tried it, as I don’t feel it’s necessary), but there would also be boxtron.
• Last, but not least, use sgdboop to set some artwork.

I only use my Steam Deck while I am away from my gaming (Linux-)PC. The reasons for this are that for me a big screen wins compared to the small (and relatively low-res) display of the Steam Deck, and also the games I usually play play way better with mouse and keyboard than with gamepad input… Also, the Steam Deck is relatively heavy, so gaming in bed or stuff like that also isn’t that enjoyable…

That said, the Steam Deck absolutely shines in situations where I cannot access my gaming PC. I usually take it with me when I go for a longer train ride, and also brought it along for vacation.

Compatibility wise I am in the situation that all the games I ever tried are working on the Steam Deck, but that’s mostly because I have been using Linux exclusively for decades, and have made it a habit to check if a game is going to work before buying it. Though, in recent years that habit slightly changed, thanks to the work Valve has put into WINE development. While back when I switched to Linux most Windows games would not run via WINE, nowadays one can expect that almost all games do. It is still a good idea to check protondb first, of course. Also, there are still a few games that need tinkering to get them to run, and protondb usually has some info on how to do that.

One negative point I have to mention is battery runtime. It strongly depends on what one is playing, but very demanding 3D games can drain the battery in 1.5 hours. However, I am talking about the old LCD model here, the newer OLED models run longer with one charge (though I don’t know how long actually).

Another negative is the display resolution. Most games don’t mind running on 1280x800, but some do. This can lead to illegible text, broken UI, or, as is the case with Stellaris, a different UI that is less convenient to use.

And last, but not least, performance. The Steam Deck GPU is just enough for the built-in display’s resolution, and also only under the assumption that games are reasonably optimized. I have not yet been in the situation that I would have gotten unplayable FPS, but I have heard a lot about games only running with 20 FPS, and needing upscaling… So, basically don’t expect it to run Crysis (yes, I know that joke is old, and that the Steam Deck can run Crysis just fine).

No. Or rather, not yet. Valve has not released SteamOS 3 for anything other than the Steam Deck, but is planning to do so at some point in the future.

I honestly wouldn’t recommend SteamOS for anything other than a dedicated gaming device though. It excels at its use case of launching games via Steam, but for everything else it is quite cumbersome… I would much rather install a general purpose Linux distribution and run Steam on it.

I would rather trust GamingOnLinux here:

While it is not in any way officially supported by Valve, they have now released Windows drivers for the newer Steam Deck OLED model.

(emphasis mine)