You could do remote installs with games before, but not demos as far as I know.

Great writeup like usual, I really enjoy reading through these.

It does have PVP, and is generally online only.

They also make their money through in-game-purchases, so they want anti-cheat to protect people from unlocking that stuff for free.

This review by steamdeckHQ has a full section on Deck performance.

TL;DR (AI summary):

Surprisingly playable on the Steam Deck at a mostly stable 30 FPS. However, this comes with significant visual compromises, including dynamic resolution leading to pixelation and blurriness, noticeable ghosting, frequent model pop-ins, and framerate drops in towns. The game also suffers from high battery drain and occasional model glitches. While a significantly better experience is expected on more powerful hardware, the game is still enjoyable on the Steam Deck, albeit with these limitations.

If it’s the bug I’m thinking of, you can get around it by disabling hardware acceleration for web views in the desktop client.

Still annoying though.

Assuming it’s the same as It Takes Two, yes, coop only.

You only need one copy for two people though. There’s a free friend pass to let someone else play with you online, or you can play split screen with someone local.

I’ve never heard of GuardIT anticheat before, no idea if it’s linux compatible or not.

I tried to figure out if this was real, and the closest I found was this article where setting a solid color background in windows 7 would cause up to a 30sec delay during login. The solution was apparently to make a small image in the color you wanted, and tile that image so that it would cover the whole desktop.

Here’s a hackernews discussion on it, includes some other fun stories like how windows 95 progress bars would complete faster if you were wiggling the mouse the whole time.

The former pebble employees at Google worked hard to get the OS open source, so I think it’s fair to assume they were hoping for this outcome. And the repebble team (who are the ones"bringing it back") have been working on providing support and keeping the original pebble watches going for years now.

Microsoft does so many scammy things when it comes to trying to prevent people from using Chrome/Google. Even though Edge/Bing hasn’t caught on, I really think them abusing windows dominate OS position this way should be enough for an antitrust lawsuit.

Maybe you’re thinking of Flatout 3? It’s reviews are pretty terrible, but at lot of the reviews seem mad about the lower quality of 3 because they really liked the flatout games that came before it.