Total agreement.

It sucks when a device category dies and disappears. Most people might not care, but those who do really do, and it sucks when you can’t upgrade to what you want anymore.

I’m not a handheld guy, but for me, it’s phones with keyboards.

So if there’s somebody making boutique devices for niche audiences, more power to them!

Handheld gaming PCs are really not necessary devices, so if you can’t afford a high-end one, get a cheap one. And if you can’t afford that, stick a gamepad on your phone and boot up a switch emulator or winlator.

Leave people their niche hobbies!

The title of the post could just as well be the description of some occult rite :)

I googled a bit about this, and you are right, it did require installing via Live CD, but you could also directly boot it from live CD.

The PS2 on the other hand had an official Linux on PS2 kit though that came with Linux pre-installed if I understand correctly.

Anyway, I wouldn’t hold my breath that the Steam Deck will usher in a bright new future of Linux usage.

They might have as well moved to Windows handheld or Nintendo Switch. They specifically chose the only Linux handheld on the market.

No, they chose a Steam console. A device with the same high convenience and low bar of entry as any other console, but with their (almost) whole Steam library on it.

Why is this a core requirement with Linux only? There are millions and millions of Windows users who have never installed an OS. Sounds gatekeeping to me.

Because conciously choosing and installing Linux is currently the requirement to run Linux on your PC.

If I go to the local electronics store I can pick up a Windows, MacOS or ChromeOS device that has everything pre-installed: OS, drivers, dependencies, all setup for instant usage.

And if I don’t even know what an OS is, I’ll get a Windows PC recommended by the sales people at said electronics store.

That kind of user experience is usually not available for prospective Linux users.

Unless they buy a Steam Deck, which is pretty much the only native Linux PC that’s popular enough that a non-tech person would know it.

(Technically stuff like Tuxedo and Framework exist, but they are pretty unknown.)

The PS3 also ran on Linux and allowed users to boot into full desktop Linux. Didn’t exactly lead to the Year of the Desktop Linux, did it?

Spoiler: we are talking about 0.32% rise in Linux gamers.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

It really is kinda hard to justify wrapping a << 16 | b in a function.

Or just: “Skill issue.”

Proton is not that heavy. In many cases it’s less heavy than Windows.

And sadly I cannot see a future where all of Linux rallies under the same APIs without giving in to the urge to forge.

Vi/vim is honestly a horrendous tool. It’s nice if you want to spend a few hours memorizing commands and learning how to use a text editor. Then you can do cool stuff.

But it very much shouldn’t be the default tool for anything really.

In any OS published some time within the last two decades you’d expect a decent GUI settings tool to handle all that work for you and if you really need to sudo a text config file it should at least by default launch a GUI text editor for that purpose when running in a graphical shell.

vi/vim/nano/emacs are ok for CLI only setups, but there’s no point to have any of that as defaults or even recommendations for graphical sessions.

And it’s not only obscure software on obscure distros.

The Arduino IDE doesn’t run on Fedora 42. It just doesn’t work.

I personally don’t need it, I use ESP-IDF on Platformio, but Arduino is an incredibly common piece of software and one I would have expected to work flawlessly on Linux.

Seriously though. You are sadly totally right there. “Works on my machine, so it must be user error.”

There’s now game developers dropping native support for proton, because proton has a more uniform, stable and predictable API.

So while Linux in many ways becomes the better way to play Windows games, it’s also better to play Windows games on Linux than Linux games on Linux.

I can see a future where more and more of Linux just becomes a wrapper around Proton.

That happens so often with non-corporation FOSS. Some dude makes something cool and shares it for free, and in turn they get a butload of entitled support requests of idiots who think that “customer is king” applies for stuff they didn’t pay for too, and who think that the developer owes them something for using his software.

A similar thing happened with M66B. He got so fed up that he pulled all his apps. Luckily people managed to talk him out of it, but it’s really understandable.

Because he kept getting entitled support requests for badly packaged versions of his project in some linux distros.

The entitlement is strong. But not with the person who creates an open source emulator in their spare time and gives it away for free, but for those who demand free support.

It’s a quite common issue with open source stuff.

• Dude makes a thing.
• Dude thinks maybe others could benefit from it, so he gives it away for free
• Entitled morons think customer is king also applies for stuff they didn’t pay for and demand free support
• Dude gets overwhelmed and frustrated by having to play free customer support hotline for his free product and after a while pulls back
• Entitled morons get up in arms and call dude condescending and worse for not doing free customer support for the free thing, somehow believing that dude owes them something.

It originally was released in 2019 as the Pro^1 with the then 2yo Snapdragon 835.

The Pro^1 X was supposed to be released in 2019 too, and it would mainly differ in software, but it was delayed and delayed again until 2021. By then Qualcomm stopped manufacturing the now 4yo Snapdragon 835 and so they downgraded to the inferior Snapdragon 662. According to tests at that time, this was a major performance downgrade.

Actually getting them into the hands of buyers then still took ~1.5 years after that, so it really was released in 2023.

All in all, pretty much all reviewers agreed that it was a terrible phone with an ok-but-not-great keyboard bolted on for a very steep price. Can’t find a price right now, but IIRC they sold for ~€800.

Current prices on ebay are totally crazy. North of €1600.

It’s a bit of a dry spell for us keyboard fans.

The formatting most likely didn’t help with people being able to google it, or to remember the name even.

It’s quite old now and has been out of stock for a long time.

I might be the only one, but KEYBOARDS!

I even designed my own keyboard attachment to get one back.