Polaris v1.3.6

Polaris v1.3.6 makes the Nova client work against a Polaris host in places it never has, corrects host setup advice that could not succeed on ostree systems, and hardens the gamescope session and its HDR capture.

Important: upgrading from v1.3.5

Nothing extra is required beyond the usual upgrade. Two notes are worth reading.

If you use seat isolation on Bazzite or another ostree host, the command v1.3.5 told you to run does not work there, and Polaris now prints the one that does. See controller and input group.

If you ran --setup-host on any version before v1.3.5, a copy of the udev rules may still sit in /etc and override the packaged ones. Host setup keeps it and warns rather than deleting something it cannot prove is disposable. The check and removal are in troubleshooting.

Fedora 44

wget --output-document=./Polaris-fedora44-x86_64.rpm https://github.com/papi-ux/polaris/releases/download/v1.3.6/Polaris-fedora44-x86_64.rpm &&
sudo dnf install "./Polaris-fedora44-x86_64.rpm" &&
sudo -H polaris --setup-host &&
systemctl --user restart polaris

Arch Linux / CachyOS

wget --output-document=./Polaris-arch-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst https://github.com/papi-ux/polaris/releases/download/v1.3.6/Polaris-arch-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst &&
sudo pacman -U ./Polaris-arch-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst &&
sudo -H polaris --setup-host &&
systemctl --user restart polaris

Ubuntu 24.04

wget --output-document=./Polaris-ubuntu24.04-x86_64.deb https://github.com/papi-ux/polaris/releases/download/v1.3.6/Polaris-ubuntu24.04-x86_64.deb &&
sudo apt install ./Polaris-ubuntu24.04-x86_64.deb &&
sudo -H polaris --setup-host &&
systemctl --user restart polaris

Bazzite users should follow the exact-output rpm-ostree flow in the Bazzite guide. SteamOS 3.8 already uses an exact output target and a read-only restoration trap; follow the SteamOS guide.

Changes

Host setup

• Tells ostree hosts the input-group command that actually works. On Bazzite the input group is defined in /usr/lib/group rather than /etc/group, so usermod -aG input finds no group to add anyone to and fails; the warning now prints ujust add-user-to-input-group there, the equivalent two steps on an ostree host without ujust, and plain usermod everywhere else.

Nova and the client API

• The artwork resolve endpoint now reports what it actually did. Nova's library artwork update requires that block and returned nothing without it, so the feature reported the host as unsupported against every build that has ever shipped.
• The game library serves platform and runtime, derived from the Lutris runner recorded at import, so a client can label an entry rather than guessing. Values are served only where the runner determines them; a Steam or manual entry whose runtime was never recorded serves neither, and renders no badge.
• A manual artwork match now decides which game a completion estimate is for, and a curated identity no longer falls back to the Steam app id — the id is usually what made a wrong estimate confident, so falling back would serve the estimate the correction rejected.
• The fields Polaris serves to Nova are recorded in docs/nova-contract.json and derived from the source that serves them, so the two cannot drift apart unnoticed. vaapi_vendor is now served, which names the driver generation in a crash report.

Linux session and capture

• Gamescope session teardown and reconnect recover from a dead nested marker, an attach that is not a private session leader, and an incomplete attach generation that previously refused every later launch until Polaris restarted.
• PipeWire format negotiation follows what the stream will actually encode: 10-bit PQ only when gamescope is in HDR mode and the client requested HDR, and 8-bit only when the stream is SDR, so PQ capture cannot feed an SDR encode.
• The stream sink is claimed as the session default while streaming, so applications follow it instead of the host output, and only a session that took that claim releases it — releasing one it never took could restore the host default underneath another stream still running.

Official assets

• Polaris-arch-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
• Polaris-fedora44-x86_64.rpm
• Polaris-steamos3.8-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
• Polaris-ubuntu24.04-x86_64.deb