As someone with a foot in Windows and Mac, they both suck for different reasons and you’re trading pain in one for pain in the other.

Windows sucks because of all the stupid one drive and AI garbage. No, I don’t want my desktop and tons of other directories in one drive, stop asking me. The constant migration of settings out of control panel is maddening. Windows 10 end of life is fine, but cutting off older PCs from windows 11 for “reasons” was an absolutely horrible choice.

Mac is fine if you do super basic computing, but if you want to do much of anything it’s very annoying out of the box. Window management is annoying unless you get an app like magnet, the ribbon can’t be displayed on dual monitors and there’s no way of fixing the primary monitor, keyboard shortcuts are inconsistent across applications like command delete and keyboard shortcuts in general suck (command + shift + 3-5), the OS greatly dislikes network storage, etc etc. Macs were somewhat isolated from marketing needing a “new” OS every year until recently. Now they’re in the change for the sake of things to list on the new OS page trap.

Linux isn’t without fault, but my experience has been much more pleasant.

When I was college back in 2009 I was dual booting Ubuntu and Windows Vista on a gateway laptop. I never fiddled with Ubuntu at all. The things that worked out of the box worked reliability and I never bothered fighting with things that didn’t work like the stylus.

The reason why I didn’t make the switch back then was not the OS or the drivers. It was the lack of support for the software I needed for school, like Matlab and orcad pspice. Things have improved substantially since then between first party support (Matlab started supporting Linux with R2016a) and wine/proton letting windows applications run mostly normally without their developers needing to make any changes to support the OS.

IMO the thing that’s most in the way of adoption these days is the lack of mainstream OEM support. Until the masses can easily buy a computer with Linux pre-installed and the driver niggles sorted they’re not going to switch.

More work location flexibility is certainly something I would appreciate. The company I work for is hybrid and with the looming economy mess I’ve been putting off job hunting. I would much rather be somewhere with a network should things go sideways.

Noise cancelling headphones and background music helps a ton when I’m in the office. Stupid open office…

White collar professionals who spend their days developing and deploying software or working on compute infrastructure? Sure, some of them have been on Linux for decades. Although many big corpos love Windows and Microsoft products, so at best you’re going to have a foot in both worlds if you work at one of these companies.

Some admin jobs that don’t require bespoke software (ie very little beyond say an office suite) have started making the jump recently to save $$.

Basically every other white professional that needs to work on a computer with industry specific software like people in medical, engineers, business? Odds are they use windows since the software they use for their job is probably only built for Windows and maybe Mac if they’re lucky. Very few employers are going to mass deploy Linux to run applications via Wine. These employers have support contracts for the major software products their employees use and they won’t get support if they’re not running software on its native OS.

Straight up vibe coding is a horrible idea, but I’ll happily take tools to reduce mundane tasks.

The project I’m currently working on leans on Temporal for durable execution. We define the activities and workflows in protobufs and utilize codegen for all the boring boiler plate stuff. The project hasa number of http endpoints that are again defined in protos, along with their inputs and outputs. Again, lots of code gen. Is code gen making me less creative or degrading my skills? I don’t think so. It sure makes the output more consistent and reduces the opportunity for errors.

If I engage gen AI during development, which isn’t very often, my prompts are very targeted and the scope is narrow. However, I’ve found that gen AI is great for writing and modifying tests and with a little prompting you can get pretty solid unit test coverage for a verity of different scenarios. In the case of the software I write at work the creativity is in the actual code and the unit tests are often pretty repetitive (happy path, bad input 1…n, no result, mock an error at this step, etc). Once you know how to do that there’s no reason not to offload it IMO.

For passive, and even now some active loudspeakers, very much so.

Links for passives: https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/diy https://www.zaphaudio.com/ https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/speaker-kits/ (etc)

Active speakers are usually things like this and use commercially available parts with commercial software. But if you want you can build a DIY DSP and DAC and DIY amplifier. Note that there are tons of other designs for both available.

The DIY audio community is very vibrant. There are tons and tons of forums collaboratively iterating. You can build DIY headphones and DIY headphone amplifiers. Hell, you can even build DIY speaker drivers.

Anything I missed was not an intentional omission, lol.

I didn’t spend a ton of time digging in, but I think the thing that gets the mainstream handhelds with AMD integrated graphics are the custom drivers. Maybe if a less mainstream device uses less custom components it’ll have better compatibility?

No judgement meant, but without understanding your use case it’s hard to make a good recommendation.

What you asked first: I have an Asus Ally X. I’m truly just like @strayce@Strayce@lemmy.sdf.org in that my purchase choice was influenced by the ability to use it with an eGPU. From what I’ve read, using an AMD eGPU with an Ally X is a recipe for frustration, but Nvidia eGPUs are fine. I never actually pulled the plug as my use case for the device changed after I started using it. It can absolutely be used as a full fledged PC, since it actually is one, and I’ve taken advantage of that a few times.

Musings on my pursuit of a convenient single device solution follow. You’re welcome to stop here. I’m not here to try to convince you of anything, only to share my own struggles. Maybe you’ll even be able to help me with them.

I’ve been chasing the promise of a convenient all-in-one device for a while now. Tablet form factor devices (surface pro, iPad, etc) are good as tablets, but propping them up on your lap with a keyboard is awkward. I’ve found that this limits where you can realistically use them. Sure, you can use a tray/lap table setup, but if you need to haul it around with you it starts to lose convenience. I’ve always fallen back to using these devices as tablets. It seems like using a handheld as a computer replacement would face the same hurdles when you’re away from your desk and add another one: the need for an an external display.

As for why I didn’t buy an eGPU for the Ally X, the most frequent time and place I use the Ally X is on the couch, next to my spouse as they watch TV, after my kids are asleep. I quickly realized I was self-selecting which games I play on it. I’m actively avoiding entire genres like real time strategy, which I personally enjoy a lot, because those games greatly benefit from a mouse/keyboard setup. I want a fast/convenient setup and break down. I don’t want to have to worry about gathering and stashing accessories. There’s also the reality of running on battery and heat dissipation. Keeping the Ally X in 13 watt “silent” mode results in 20 watts of actual power draw, very low fan noise, and ~4 hours of battery life. Its 17 watt “performance” mode is still fairly quiet and lowers battery life to ~3 hours. My spouse finds turbo mode too loud and you’re looking at 1.5 hours of battery life. Noise aside, playing while plugged in diminishes the convenience for me.

Despite a few false starts, I’ve still found myself stuck in the camp of portable device + laptop + desktop - although my desktop sees pretty infrequent use these days.

Like @strayce@lemmy.sdf.org my handheld supports an eGPU and can run bazzite. However it’s another mainstream unit. Personally, I got my handheld to be a hand held to play around the house using its built in screen. The onboard graphics have been more than capable, although I’ll admit that I play slightly older games.

If you’re looking for a less mobile setup and/or are more budget conscious, a used PC is probably going to be way better bang for your buck than a hand held with an eGPU. My gaming PC still packs a (used) 1070ti and shrugs off most games at 1440. Sure, I can’t max graphics in everything but with moderate settings I can still have very solid and stable FPS.

It’s probably a design patent, which is more style focused and helps prevent knockoffs.

I’m not an Apple fanboy, but arm based processors seem to be working out fairly well for them.

I own an Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, which was one of the OG snapdragon x laptops released a (two?) and a half year(s) ago. It took a while for folks to get Linux to run on them and there’s enough of a barrier to entry that it’s still not very common. Most of the initial hurdles were due to Qualcomm bootloader shenanigans.

A reminder of more sane times, but also some level of presence

Same, but I do have some level of worry regarding portability. My solution isn’t local or self hosted, as I was looking for easy and works across Linux/Windows/Mac/Android/iOS. I do not look forward to needing to change to a new password manager in the future, but given the way everything seems to be going it seems likely that I’ll have to at some point.

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Spot on answer.

While I totally agree with you, it really does seem like we’re moving back towards the era of centralized committing, at least for mainstream computing. More and more “desktop” applications are really electron apps with a good chunk of the compute happening server side. That’s before you start to consider the many browser based word processing products, etc.

It depends who you’re trying to protect. Joe consumer doesn’t know what OpenWRT is.

Assembly is relatively straightforward, but sourcing all the components locally is likely getting harder and harder. Granted, for DoD contract reasons there’s likely a cottage industry that relies on government rules to keep things onshore. That’s part of the reason why we still have some made in the USA clothing.

This is worth a listen or a watch if you’re interested.

Not on a steam deck, but I did buy another PC based handheld.

As a Dad with a somewhat demanding job, I don’t get a lot of time on my gaming PC anymore. Having something that’s not squirreled away in a corner that turns on/off quickly has made it a lot easier game somewhat more casually.

I’m generally happy with the performance of my handled, but there is some tension between most of the steam games I’m trying to play on it and the realities of a hand held.

For example, many games on steam are designed for larger screens. Sure, they’ll render fine on a small screen, but things that were very obvious on a large screen can become harder to spot because the game designers could assume more real estate.

I also find myself gravitating toward games that were either built for a console or PC games that don’t require a lot of keyboard actions. For example, I’m presently playing through the original Borderlands after having last played it on PC quite a while ago. I don’t think I would attempt StarCraft II on my handheld though.

OnePlus still offers this one on some of their phones.