A human who has opinions
It’s an immutable filesystem fork of Arch, not vanilla Arch. It’s as stable as any operating system is, doesn’t update in the same way Arch does, and doesn’t even allow the user sudo privilege. Also, you don’t even need to interface with Linux. The front end is extremely intuitive, but you also have the option of a pretty great KDE Plasma desktop mode if you switch over. Fortunately, it has no Candy Crush, Teams, or Cortana in the Start Menu.
Gotta get Majels voice so I can hear “Liquid metal alloy” in her playful voice
Be kind, rewind… and drive past the Wal-Mart of rental stores to go to the Mom and Pop rental shop where they consult their kids on what good games to stock. They also have some secret stuff behind saloon doors, but I just spend my time playing their Terminator 2 pinball machine.
They switched from a Debian based OS to an Arch based immutable fork for the Deck. There are folks who have built a close version to SteamOS 3, but there would be no need if Valve would just release the official OS. I can’t imagine why they haven’t. It would only make it cheaper for other hardware manufacturers to release a product. I don’t know how much of the Ally’s price is just covering the Windows license, but it has to be a substantial percentage of the overall retail price.
Bobbi Flekman confronted the sexism in the Spinal Tap album “Smell the Glove” back when she worked artist relations for Polymer Records in 1982. She has known for years that “Money talks, and bullshit walks”
While not the official Steam OS, which Valve still hasn’t released officially, people have thrown Arch on one to do benchmarking comparisons and there are tutorials for getting Linux on it.
I want an edit of T-2 with the Lwaxana Triominator replacing Arnold in every scene.
I don’t mind people being in the business of being sexy. I just don’t go to YouTube for that. I mainly use my YouTube on a living room HTPC. I go out of my way to keep a clean recommendation profile so I don’t have to explain embarrassing videos that pop up when I have people over. YouTube just really wants me to see her.
Choice in this market is good for end users, as is competition. Both of the machines are a compromise in one way or another and different in substantial ways, so it’s really just down to personal preference. I can’t wait to see how this market grows over the next few years.
I just can’t believe that they expect people who bought the Ally to interface with the regular ass Win11 desktop without touchpads. Sure, horsepower and a better display is cool, but not at the expense of battery life and heat. I hope it’s successful so we get revisions and incentive for others to get in the game, but it it’s not quite there for me.
I’m gonna have to set something up to hide the thirst trap shorts of the girl who plays guitar poolside in either just a bra or braless in a thin light colored shirt. I just want videos from old dudes who teach me how to make pedal circuits.
While Arch does allow a user to do a lot, including breaking their system, I would note that it’s not a herculean task to build and run a stable machine. I broke my Arch system a few times by going against best-practices and it did teach me about some risks, but I knew exactly what I did and why it broke every time. It taught me how to quickly recover, which is good to know for any OS.
I’d call myself an intermediate enthusiast and I don’t have a career that uses Linux, but I have never found Arch “hard”. It just takes some reading and a little patience. The Arch Wiki has a majority of the answers, but if you have tried and failed to find the answer you need, the community is extremely savvy and are there to help you. They just prefer you to dig into the wiki and try for yourself before asking for help.
For desktop Linux, I use Arch. It’s a community driven base distribution, so the needs of the community are what drives development and there are no financial decisions of a company that get priority, which is refreshing. It also has access to the latest and greatest that Linux has to offer.
They have a philosophy of expecting basic effort from users and to have a tinkering mindset. Historically, Arch devs and users have a reputation of being grumpy greybeards, but many of the rough edges have been rounded off in the last few years. If you are willing to do a bit of reading or watching some YouTube videos, it’s not really that hard.
You can really build a lean and powerful machine that has just the software you want on the system with Arch. All it takes is a little effort and willingness to ask for help from the community after you have tried and failed to solve problems yourself. It’s really not the badge of elitism to use Arch in 2023. It’s never been easier to use and doesn’t blow up on you nearly as often as the reputation implies. Just use good hygiene and make snapshots so if you blow it up, it’s only a 5 minute recovery.
Okay buddy. You obviously didn’t come here to do anything but grind your axe. 3% of desktop use is pretty cool, even if it’s likely just a ton of Steam Decks. Anyway, have a nice time developing.
I don’t know what to tell you. If you want to blame Ubuntu for your issues, but you aren’t willing to go through the standard process of troubleshooting or filing a big report, maybe Linux isn’t for you.
I can’t speak for Ubuntu or your situation as I don’t have your issues and I don’t use Ubuntu, but I would advise you reach out to the Ubuntu community with your issues and if you can’t find a solution, file a bug report. They are a large community with a lot of engagement, so I would think that you might have luck either solving your problem or pointing their devs toward fixing the issue on their end. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Older hardware and software that are made by companies who have hostile or ignorant stances towards FOSS are major contributors to at least some of the issues you mentioned. I can tell you that there is active development around solving some GPU/Wayland issues, but the limitations on what Linux can or can’t do isn’t fully the fault of Linux.
There is definitely room for improvement in Linux. The improvements in just the last three years shows that it has improved at a pretty brisk pace. Free and open community driven operating systems work toward the active needs of the community, so hopefully any issues or bugs you had got reported and you’ve actively checked up on them. I am making an assumption here, but if all of these issues you have had were extremely common, there would be every incentive for development of solutions to them.
There is some level of compromise that is needed when using proprietary software or hardware from hostile vendors or using some older hardware with Linux. This also goes for company supplied or required hardware/software. Linux might not be for everyone on every piece of hardware right now. The tradeoffs for having control over your hardware and software can sometimes be frustrating.
As for “blaming the users”, I don’t think I did that at all. I just feel like some folks prefer appliances over heavy machinery. That’s personal preference. Sure, Linux should make onboarding as easy as possible, but in my opinion, the active pursuit of being #1 or #2 in desktop OS use is going down the wrong path. There is a certain type of person who chooses to go down the desktop Linux path and catering to their needs seems much more important for the long-term health of the OS.
One of the first things I asked ChatGPT early on as a test was how to edit the pacman config to make little pacmans eat pellets as the progress bar. It was having none of it and just explained the difference between the package manager and the Namco character in a mocking fashion. While it wasn’t the correct response, I was pretty entertained.
I feel like we can cherry pick situations on other operating systems where you might have to open a terminal window to solve an issue, but I agree that there are roadblocks that many won’t even try to get past. There has been a load of progress around usability and informational resources for less advanced users over just the last few years. I feel the main barrier to entry is the willingness to learn something new.
Not out of the box. You don’t have sudo privileges on the SteamOS 3. Valve made an immutable fork of Arch for stability and to dissuade unskilled folks from punching stuff into the terminal that might cause customer service nightmares.