MudMan

He shipped enough clunkers (and terrible design decisions) that I never bought the mythification of Jobs.

In any case, the Deck is a different beast. For one, it’s the second attempt. Remember Steam Machines? But also, it’s very much an iteration on pre-existing products where its biggest asset is pushing having an endless budget and first party control of the platform to use scale for a pricing advantage.

It does prove that the system itself is not the problem, in case we hadn’t picked up on that with Android and ChromeOS. The issue is having a do-everything free system where some of the do-everything requires you to intervene. That’s not how most people use Windows (or Android, or ChromeOS), and it’s definitely not how you use any part of SteamOS unless you want to tinker past the official support, either. That’s the big lesson, I think. Valve isn’t even trying to push Linux, beyond their Microsoft blood feud. As with Google, it’s just a convenient stepping stone in their product design.

What the mainline Linux developer community can learn from it, IMO, is that for onboarding coupling the software and hardware very closely is important and Linux should find a way to do that on more product categories, even if it is by partnering with manufacturers that won’t do it themselves.

You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you’ve missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.

The published spec sheet says it does dual book with Android 13.

Wasn’t Snapdragon support added recently? I feel like I saw a note on that having happened when I was looking up what SOC this thing was packing, but I could be wrong.

This thing is supposed to be fairly powerful, I don’t know that the straightforward, minimal approach of Garlic/Onion makes sense on it. Ideally you’d want a bit more versatility. For that I think the Anbernic SP and that class of slightly cheaper devices probably make more sense.

I mean, as I said above that’s my thing with these flagship ARM handhelds. At some point it takes a lot to justify spending a couple hundred on one of these instead of a bit more for a more flexible Steam Deck. The smaller, cheaper ones are a lot more charming, and they fit in your pocket, so they can be a throwaway toy to carry with you.

But hey, we live in the handheld golden age, I’m not gonna complain about more options.

Nah. This is running a Snapdragon 865 SOC with an older Adreno GPU. If you think Windows on ARM gaming is a struggle this isn’t going to be your Linux handheld killer. There’s also no reason for it to be, the Steam Deck already exists.

For its intended use case as a retro handheld (or an Android gaming handheld, I suppose), this seems like it’ll be fine, but I’m also less excited about these mid-tier ARM handhelds now that we have good x64 alternatives with decent battery life and better performance that aren’t much more expensive. I still think the cheap, tiny ones are cool, though.

I guess this is nominally cool because other comparables like they Ayn Odin 2, need a bunch of tinkering to run Linux, but beyond that it seems Linux is well represented on both extremes around this awkward middle ground of more expensive ARM handhelds.

Hah. It may be, I don’t know. Maybe both?

I mean… is this a big deal? Every retro ARM handheld out there runs some version of Linux or Android. I gues Retroid was an Android-focused brand, hence the name, but if you wanted to run Batocera on a handheld there is no shortage of options.

See, this is a tough one. Privacy concerns are legitimate, but also, when people keep reminding that Meta was a key player in acts of terror and genocide what is often not said is that a lot of it happened over Whatsapp groups and direct messages, as in India and Burkina Faso. Direct messaging apps are also social media.

I don’t have a solution for this. It’s a mess of an issue and honestly, I don’t know that I trust anybody with a strong, aggressive position one way or the other.

Oh, that works for me, definitely. It just takes maybe two hours, instead of 20 minutes. Same principle, though.

How do you get motivated in the afternoon? I have maybe three, four hours of semi-effective brain function between waking up and what seems to be some form of power saving mode that lasts the rest of the day. If I’ve eaten food with a fork that day, doing things is a struggle. Send motivation tips for post-lunch humaning, please.

I genuinely think Linux misses a beat by not having a widely available distro that is a) very closely tied to specific hardware and b) mostly focused on web browsing and media watching. It’s kinda nuts and a knock on Linux devs that Google is running away with that segment through both Android and ChromeOS. My parents aren’t on Windows anymore but for convenience purposes the device that does that for them is a Samsung tablet.

I keep trying to explain how Linux advocacy gets the challenges of mainstream Linux usage wrong and, while I appreciate the fresh take here, I’m afraid that’s still the case.

Effectively this guide is: lightly compromise your Windows experience for a while until you’re ready, followed by “here’s a bunch of alien concepts you don’t know or care about and actively disprove the idea that it’s all about the app alternatives.”

I understand why this doesn’t read that way to the “community”, but parse it as an outsider for a moment. What’s a snap? Why are they bad? Why would I hate updates? Aren’t updates automatic as they are in Windows? Why would I ever pick the hardware-incompatible distros? What’s the tradeoff supposed to be, does that imply there is a downside to Mint over Ubuntu? It sure feels like I need to think about this picking a distro thing a lot more than the headline suggested. Also, what’s a DE and how is that different to a distro? Did they just say I need a virtual machine to test these DE things before I can find one that works? WTF is that about?

Look, I keep trying to articulate the key misunderstanding and it’s genuinely hard. I think the best way to put it is that all these “switch to Linux, it’s fun!” guides are all trying to onboard users to a world of fun tinkering as a hobby. And that’s great, it IS fun to tinker as a hobby, to some people. But that’s not the reason people use Windows.

If you’re on Windows and mildly frustrated about whatever MS is doing that week, the thing you want is a one button install that does everything for you, works first time and requires zero tinkering in the first place. App substitutes are whatever, UI changes and different choices in different DEs are trivial to adapt to (honestly, it’s all mostly Windows-like or Mac-like, clearly normies don’t particularly struggle with that). But if you’re out there introducing even a hint of arguments about multiple technical choices, competing standards for app packages or VMs being used to test out different desktop environments you’re kinda missing the point of what’s keeping the average user from stepping away from their mainstream commercial OS.

In fairness, this isn’t the guide’s fault, it’s all intrinsic to the Linux desktop ecosystem. It IS more cumbersome and convoluted from that perspective. If you ask me, the real advice I would have for a Windows user that wants to consider swapping would be: get a device that comes with a dedicated Linux setup out of the box. Seriously, go get a Steam Deck, go get a System76 laptop, a Raspberry Pi or whatever else you can find out there that has some flavor of Linux built specifically for it and use that for a bit. That bypasses 100% of this crap and just works out of the box, the way Android or ChromeOS work out of the box. You’ll get to know whether that’s for you much quicker, more organically and with much less of a hassle that way… at the cost of needing new hardware. But hey, on the plus side, new hardware!

I don’t care about Steam, but I’d appreciate a GoG release for convenience.

All the usual caveats apply. Linux still comes behind “unknown” in Statcounter, whose methodology is… dubious, and the Steam survey has Linux at 2%, flat from the previous checkpoint.

Eh… where? This seems like a very location-specific question.

I do for many things. It’s just convenient and their logistics muscle at this point is wild.

That said, I will go to first party online stores for things like hardware most times. It’s often just cheaper and delivery is about the same.

An interesting observation: Back when I lived somewhere else there was a local alternative, because it was a country far enough out of the way that Amazon didn’t directly support it, and it’s interesting that the local alternative wasn’t meaningfully worse at the logistics or availability. Amazon’s existence does, in fact, heavily suppress competition. You don’t need to be as big as they are to do what they do, it’s just impossible to do it if they’re already there.

It’s not just the games that support it, it will also tag other metadata it knows automatically on all games, like achievement unlocks. And you can manually add tags, too. It’s all telemetry that Valve and the devs are already extracting from you, of course, plus whatever you volunteer in manual markers, but it’s still a bit creepy to see it laid out on a timeline like that.

Well, it’s two different things, one is the background record, which is less “freaking out” and more “not for me on PC”.

The other is blending the background recording with metadata on a timeline, which starts getting Recall-y in terms of logging a video recording of what you were doing where there is also a data record of what you were doing. I do think that part starts stepping over to kinda creepy.

It’s more useful here than as a OS feature, though, because yeah, I can see it saving one the trouble of recording different matches separately or having to scrub back and forth to find certain things.

Yeah, I get that, but that’s also true of Steam Link and Steam’s general streaming solution (which I presume is what this is using) and it’s trivial to get a different window to show up or even to get to the desktop from the in-game streaming, particularly if you have a non-Steam app in your library.

So yeah, it’s gonna be on demand recordings from me… assuming the quality holds up (Nvidia’s kinda sucks). Otherwise that’s what OBS is for.