Sploosh the Water

Looks awesome! I swear, modding the Steam Deck is my kryptonite lol.

100% I haven’t been interested in handheld gaming since I was a pre-teen. Steam Deck got me back into it and I love it!

All for the low low price of…your freedom, privacy, security, and consumer rights.

MS can kiss my piss.

Linux welcomes you :)

Worth it 100% for me, I love mine. I didn’t think I would use it much, I honestly bought it initially to just support the project and help FOSS friendly hardware and software.

But once I started playing on it, I fell in love. I play lots of indie games and smaller studio games, like Brotato, Hollow Knight, Battle for Wesnoth, Core Keeper. I also installed RetroArch and play all of my favorite Game Boy games. I play Old School Runescape with my friend, some kart racing games, some fighting games.

I also have Jellyfin installed on there, so I use it docked to my TV as a box for streaming from my Jellyfin server to my TV for movie nights. Discord runs pretty well on it in the background, so it works well for group party games like Pummel Party with my friends. Also games like Table Top simulator to play DnD, and virtual board games.

Idk, it’s just a perfect device for me. Super moddable, repair friendly, FOSS friendly, powerful enough to play most games without issue, works with every kind of Bluetooth device I’ve tested it with, controllers, headphones, etc. And now that it’s been out for well over a year, all of the most severe and annoying bugs have been fixed, so the general experience is very smooth and stable.

Brotato, even more now since 1.0 haha. Lots of old GBA games via RetroArch. Battle for Wesnoth is great on there too. A bunch honestly.

Wayland is generally great. The only reason I’ve stuck with X11 is a few random bugs and issues that still aren’t solved in Wayland.

I’m planning on switching over to Wayland fully at the end of this year. Seems like every 6 months I try it and there are less issues than before.

Try them both, plenty of folks have no issues at all running Wayland right from the start, so give it a go and see what happens.

Even more frustrating that Chromebooks became a thing. It proved that consumers were ready to buy cheap notebooks with an OS that was basically just a browser and no significant computer power.

Any user-friendly Linux distro could have filled that role and done it much better IMO. That one always felt like on of Linux’s biggest misses recently. I don’t think it was anybody’s fault either. Google had the resources, the marketing, and the vision to push those, right place right time.

Part of the Capitalist mythos for sure, “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.” There’s a rejection of the idea that you could reach a healthy equilibrium of size and just remain there.

And because of the way the rest of the market works, it forces everybody to act like that or get beat out completely. Vicious feedback loops.

Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it’s pretty great.

But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.

I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.

That’s why I don’t suggest Keepass to people vs Bitwarden, even though it’s quote good, I know they’re gunna be put off instantly by Keepass’s ugly look.

Honestly though, all the mainstream password managers have pretty nasty looking interfaces IMO, so maybe it actually wouldn’t matter lol.

Fair point, but I’ll push back a little on your second point. RSS for instance. I really want to like it, but I just cannot get it to work smoothly.

I’ve tried like 8+ FOSS RSS clients, mobile, desktop, web-based. Not one of them has worked seamlessly. I get all kinds of weird problems. The RSS link doesn’t work, thumbnails don’t load, feed headlines are garbled, articles are badly out of order, sync doesn’t work, etc.

I know that if I can’t get them to work right, there’s no way a random person on the street is gunna be willing to tinker and mess around with them.

You bring up a really good point about MS Office UI. Very cluttered and clunky, but so many people are used to it that it doesn’t matter to them. I actually think that Only Office and Libre Office are easily good enough to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for 90% of users out there.

That’s a fair point, I’ve been happy to see that issue addressed more seriously in the last few years by many apps, including color schemes for folks with diminished sight or color blindness.

It would be interesting to create an open standard for app accessibility. Maybe that already exists, idk. But devs and organizations could submit their software to be evaluated and if passed, would be able to include a certification that it meets said accessibility standards.

Yeah makes sense. I wish there was a FOSS UX design philosophy that had caught on. For app design, the Unix philosophy has driven development even to this day, although not as popular now as it once was.

We sort of have bits of it, with the GTK framework and KDE styling. But those ecosystems don’t extend outwards enough, and still allow far too much leeway to the UX design to ensure nice looks/function.

Maybe the nature of the widely distributed development makes it overall impossible. The goal of FOSS makes that kind of universal look and feel largely impossible. Heck, even Microsoft can’t get that to happen in their own OS. There are many applications/utilities that look pretty much the same now as they did on Windows XP or even earlier.

The general attitude of function over form in our community also makes it hard, and I get that. Especially with limited dev resources as you pointed out. Would you rather have better functionality, or a prettier interface? Tough choice sometimes.

Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.

The general public isn’t interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.

Say what you want about that, I’m not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn’t the world we live in right now.

The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.

Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don’t know what is the correct approach. All I know is I’ve heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.

Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.

Sad truth. I’m super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I’m also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.

Steamy Deck ;)

Sniff the air vent softly while playing an intense game. The heat creates a wonderful sweet, sort of electronic savory smell.

It’s really lovely. I sniff my Steam Deck air vent probably once or twice a week on average. Some weeks much more if it’s cold out.

It feels nice to lightly brush the tip of your nose across the ribs of the went while inhaling too :)

Libre Office user for over a decade, recently moved to OnlyOffice and liking it a lot so far. Seems to do better with MS formats than LibreOffice, snappy and responsive. UI is cleaner IMO.

Libre is still good though.

Planning on getting this myself soon, I’ll let you know if and when I do how it is.

Thanks for your contribution! Ever since I started seriously transitioning to FOSS over the last few years, I’ve been happier and my enjoyment of technology has only increased :)