cross-posted from: https://feddit.it/post/23350094

what are your experiences using game controllers with linux, I'm especially interested in the xbox series s controller because it's the one I have, but I'm also interested in other controllers. From my experience the latency is disappointing, but I have no way of proving it.

So, I primarily use this controller in bluetooth mode using xpadneo. There's definitely noticeable latency, but in most games it's fine, I played through a lot of games without bother... until I played Conker: Live and Reloaded. On the infamous race level, it took me like two days to pass it, and I only made some progress when i connected the cable and dropped BT. Even that was fine though, It was just one old game and just one level, there could be a number of things to blame for that. Come hollow knight, as the game got harder after beating Hornet, it quickly became apparent that I couldn't get far without the cable, save for traversing the world, still, not that bad... until I got to fight radiance. It has been extremely frustrating, I tried it for days and eventually I started just doing a few attempts every few days, without any improvement, finding it hard to get to the second phase. Today I visited my parents and in the late evening decided to try it on a windows computer I left here, mind you, the last time I played was more than a week ago. So, I start the game, plug the same controller in, with the same cable, I beat Radiance on the fucking first try, with half health bar left...

It literally happened 10 minutes ago, I'm still riled up, this doesn't make sense, this has to be latency, there is no way I got that better just like that, It is literally impossible.

So, after all that, I need to unfuck the latency of my controller someway... Ok, it's fine on most games, but this situation is... frustrating

what are your experiences using game controllers with linux, I'm especially interested in the xbox series s controller because it's the one I have, but I'm also interested in other controllers. From my experience the latency is disappointing, but I have no way of proving it.

So, I primarily use this controller in bluetooth mode using xpadneo. There's definitely noticeable latency, but in most games it's fine, I played through a lot of games without bother... until I played Conker: Live and Reloaded. On the infamous race level, it took me like two days to pass it, and I only made some progress when i connected the cable and dropped BT. Even that was fine though, It was just one old game and just one level, there could be a number of things to blame for that. Come hollow knight, as the game got harder after beating Hornet, it quickly became apparent that I couldn't get far without the cable, save for traversing the world, still, not that bad... until I got to fight radiance. It has been extremely frustrating, I tried it for days and eventually I started just doing a few attempts every few days, without any improvement, finding it hard to get to the second phase. Today I visited my parents and in the late evening decided to try it on a windows computer I left here, mind you, the last time I played was more than a week ago. So, I start the game, plug the same controller in, with the same cable, I beat Radiance on the fucking first try, with half health bar left...

It literally happened 10 minutes ago, I'm still riled up, this doesn't make sense, this has to be latency, there is no way I got that better just like that, It is literally impossible.

So, after all that, I need to unfuck the latency of my controller someway... Ok, it's fine on most games, but this situation is... frustrating

edit: I think it was steam input. The game was running natively, but I had to use steam input because the controller were broken. I solved by running the game in proton, so I wouldn't need steam input anymore.

I'm trying to find a better solution to manage configuration files, both user's dotfiles and system files in /etc. I'm running an ubuntu server where I have a bunch services with custom configurations, and systemd drop-in files, but on top of that I also have some scripts and user dotfiles that I need to track.

What I'm doing right now is that I have a folder full of symlinks in the admin user's directory (poor username choice, btw) and I'm using bindfs to mount this directory inside a git repository, this way git won't see them as symlinks, and will version them as regular files. The problem with doing this is that as git deletes and rewrites files, bindfs fails to track the changes and converts the symlink to regular files.

I looked into chezmoi, but that is only meant to track user dotfiles and will refuse to add a file from /etc, that is unless doing some extra work. But even so, chezmoi will not track the user:group of files, so I would still have to manage that manually.

I also looked into GNU Stow, and that would not complain about files from /etc or anywhere, but it similarly will not track permissions and I would have to manage that manually.

I see that some people are using ansible to manage dotfiles, but at that point, it would make sense to just migrate to ansible, except I don't want to rebuild my server from scratch to use ansible. Also it looks like a lot to learn.

Is there a better solution I'm not seeing? Maybe something using git hooks?

Edit:

I ended up using pre-commit and post-merge git hooks to launch a python script. The python script reads from a yaml file where I annotate the file paths and permissions, and then copies to or from the file location to the git repository.

I used the sudoers file to allow the admin user to run this specific script with specific arguments as root without password (because the git commands are run from VS Code and not manually), which is dangerous, be careful when doing that. I have taken special care to make this secure:

• I used absolute paths for everything, to avoid allowing running from a different pwd as a way to copy different files
• The script itself is installed in a root-owned location, so an unprevileged user cannot edit it
• The configuration yaml is root-owned, so an unprevileged user cannot modify which files are copied or their permissions
• Configuration files that can grant permission are not managed by this script (the yaml, /etc/passwd, /etc/groups, polkit rules, the sudoers file, ...)

Reposting my question here to cast a wider net

I'm using sunshine for remote gaming on my Linux PC. Because I use Wayland and don't have an Nvidia I use kmsgrab for capture (under the hood sunshine uses ffmpeg).

I have noticed that I can enter tty and kmsgrab will capture it as well. If it just captured after logging in my user I wouldn't be surprised, but it also captures the login screen.

I autostart it at login using my systemd user configuration (not systemwide) so it should just have my user's permission level. I get the same results if I put it in KDE's autostart section, so it's not a systemd thing.

Why does that work? Shouldn't you need special privileges to capture everything?

The installation instructions tells you to do sudo setcap -r $(readlink -f $(which sunshine)) is this the reason why it works? What does the command do exactly?

SOTTR can now run in proton-experimental (it used to crash due to a missing vulkan feature), but how does it compare to the native version?

Normally I would just use the native version, but got the game from epic, which doesn't provide the native build. So if I wanted to run native I would have to acquire the game from other sources (keep in mind that I own the game on epic), which is less than ideal. But I wouldn't do it if there's no advantage.

SOTTR can now run in proton-experimental (it used to crash due to a missing vulkan feature), but how does it compare to the native version?

Normally I would just use the native version, but got the game from epic, which doesn't provide the native build. So if I wanted to run native I would have to acquire the game from other sources (keep in mind that I own the game on epic), which is less than ideal. But I wouldn't do it if there's no advantage.