I appreciate that arch’s package manager is a bit of a monster - but that’s also what made it the prefect choice for me.

In the immediate aftermath of the release of the Steam Deck, there was many hot weeks where arch’s ability to turn on a dime was exactly the tool needed to run all the new things valve released (fast development to deploy is aur’s specialty). This advantage was destined to not last more than 6 months, as that’s the release cycle for other distros.

Nothing prevents ya from using Arch to install Flatpack, tho. It’s also really well documented at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Flatpak 😅

To be fair - this mindset is hardly exclusive to self-hosters. The dotcom era itself kicked off because it was easier to get advertisers to pay for server costs than users.

Garuda was a great distro for a hot minute. It was right where it needed to be to access Steam on Linux right as the Steam Deck came to market. It got all the performance benefits of Proton immediately as other distros had to play catch-up.

It still is a great distro, but it’s lost some is that exclusivity.

AI: taking another hit of acid in preparation to research the reason why the last thing it did after taking acid didn’t work out.

I mean, then you’re describing bog-standard capitalistic exploitation, and it’s not exclusive to designers.

In FOSS world, this is only as true for the subset of developers (including both programmers and designers) that are contributing code as their job duties. Additionally that effect is only prominent in projects that are dominated by one organization. Both those things do happen, but there’s also numerous exceptions, too.

Some developers are paid to write unrelated proprietary code and the developer also contributes to open source on their free time. Some projects have so many corporate contributors that none of them can single-handedly direct the development.

After investigating various releases, I suspect that that) slightly modified likely mostly means ‘directly welded to the motherboard instead of socketed’ and it is otherwise probably mostly stock.

I imagine the direct welding is a cost-saving measure to make the product more competitive with consoles.

Given that they announced that the recovery image should now work with a wide variety of systems and that they have stated in multiple places that they plan to eventually release a general version of the OS, they’ve done the work of making it compatible with mostly all AMD stuff. My bet is they’re also working with Nvidia and and their driver support is the holdup.

I imagine that’s because that’s what they tried back in 2015 with the Alienware steam machine.

Because they were forced to do the work of making a custom cpu for the handheld, now they have the contracts and relationships to tailor a CPU for their 2026 machine. But you can tell they still want it to be primarily a PC because they only “lightly modified” it.

I don’t inherently agree. Gatekeeping often is a magnified issue for novice users. Perhaps they came over with the latest reddit exodus, saw recommendations for self hosting on the new platform, got pushback and created an account to complain. I appreciate the concern, but I don’t think it’s valid to assume because the account is new, it must be a troll.

Good thing /c/technology@lemmy.world subscribers isn’t exclusively populated by those users!

Finding a group of people who don’t care about a thing is generally like shooting fish in a barrel. Caring is fundamentally hard.

I appreciate the thought but which would you choose:

Full time minimum wage US worker at $7¼/hr or $15,080/yr vs $20,000 one time purchase?

I agree with you that these things are likely underpaid labor (maybe including literal slavery, or job conditions close enough to count anyways), but I don’t think your argument is going to be convincing to anyone actually considering getting one.

Hard disagree - the point is a decade ago there wasn’t enough Linux market share for bad actors to target Linux. Proton is a compatibility layer, which while technically being a sandbox, it isn’t designed around security the way a browser sandbox is. It would not be hard for a virus embedded in a made-for-windows program to identify that it’s actually a proton sandbox, then deploy a Linux-specific payload (assuming the malware designer gave it some forethought for that situation). Heck - there’s plenty of viruses that do their work in scripting languages that don’t care what OS you’re running on.

It’s a lowest common denominator kinda issue, methinks. Gnome is chasing it’s own tail trying to create a single UI that will please everyone, plus have it simple to use and both similar enough yet distinct enough to/from Windows/Mac experiences. It’s a noble enough goal - but honestly strikes me as well impossible.

KDE gives you a barely updated Win95 era desktop and then becomes a tinkerer’s paradise - whenever there was two or more options, they focused on making each available, but neither becomes the default.

Not sure I follow - both the Xbox Ally X & Steam Deck have touchscreens.

Yeah, and if it weren’t for the techbro nonsense, it would be tossed onto the pile of mathematical curios that don’t have nontrivial uses.

The thing is - we often do find uses for those curiosities years later.

In the mean time, I wouldn’t mind if a decentralized video game came along where game assets were decentralized, distributed by bittorrent, and player assets were decentralized and tracked by blockchain.

Much the same as blockchain - it could have been exciting and fun, but it was immediately put to work to exploit people, and in the end that’s what the tools effectively were.

Working on it …

Succinctly said for a complex topic. Seconded

I’ll agree to that.

And I also think that there’s no way I trust Alphabet (holding company of Google) to be the sole arbiters of who gets to run code - neither in a philosophical sense nor as a gatekeeper to one top five compute platforms used by a substantial chunk of the world population.

It absolutely does not justify creating a policy that would wholesale obliterate F-Droid, arguably one of their larger competitors.

The whole value in searching is to get me to primary sources in a reasonably efficient way. Everything about AI is inserting extra middle men. I just don’t understand how anyone tolerates it.