Definitely agree. Had a couple of them and loved some of the ideas (touchpad sticks, gyro to mouse aim, all of the Steam Input flexibility) but they never really eclipsed my rechargeable Dualshocks in terms of feeling right. Taking some of the Deck’s refinements and giving it another spin is welcome.

Seriously. I want a personal HUD for navigation and reminders that also corrects my vision (like normal glasses), not to become a walking surveillance device / info mine.

In a weird way this makes Linux a microkernel. They’re “macro” but isolated and cooperative. Coolest patch set I’ve read about in a while.

You are getting this from Xwayland, so you’re running a rootless X server in the background. It’s nice that it works seamlessly, but it’s not really Wayland doing anything but managing the X window.

This is about Linux kernel driver maintainership… It’s all open source.

I don’t have experience with MSI recently, but I’d be really surprised if you couldn’t flash a new BIOS off the system partition or FAT32 USB. You may not be able to update from Linux directly, but almost all motherboards I’ve seen support doing it from the BIOS interface.

Yes. It has basically the same issue that any compatibility layer is going to have. It will either faithfully reproduce X11 so well it will bring all of the nonsense Wayland was meant to do a way with (everything not directly related to displaying graphics, like font and geometry rendering from the '80s, network transparency, insecure event handling) OR it will attempt to get a reasonable subset working for modern X apps and it won’t be compatible with dusty old binaries and X forwarding etc.

Right now it looks like a shim for Xwayland so it’s the first one, but as it matures we’ll see.

Intel has been struggling overall, and lately has been letting some of its Linux engineers go. Nothing absolutely fundamental has been affected yet (AFAICT) but I guess Clear Linux didn’t make the cut.

I never had an issue with Lutris + a pirated copy. It’s trivial to find the anadius rip around in a torrent. Fuck the EA launcher.

It would allow SSH if the desktop is locked, they’re separate. If you can get in via SSH then you can poke around logs like dmesg and see what’s up. There will probably be some messages to give you something more specific to search with.

I couldn’t find the specific reasoning for this change, but I feel like QEMU is probably just too holistic to be appropriate for this kind of project.

QEMU needs to be able to emulate all the ARM hardware with enough fidelity to boot a naive operating system. For the purposes of running userspace applications almost all of that is not required, you really just need to convert one ABI to the other and translate the instructions. No need to handle firmware, the MMU, interrupts, disks etc.

Yes! It used to be so hit or miss with Wine, but I played WoW in it around the same time and it was crazy that it worked (at least most of the time).

There’s just no reason to do this work. Even if you ignore the fork’s controversial maintainer, and just favor the fact that it’s maintained at all (which is what the proposal’s author is suggesting) just… Why?

X11 is basically over at this point, why throw a last minute wrench into the existing, working Xorg infrastructure?

When we dropped XFree86 back in the day there were license issues, packaging issues and a real alternative didn’t exist - all justifying the effort to switch. None of these are a problem today.

Also, does anyone seriously think they’d do this without some sort of carve out for Steam to work? I can’t imagine a worse idea at this time than for a desktop oriented distro to break the gaming use case that hard.

Yeah, I was part of those arguments too. In a perfect world Linux would have enough market share to warrant native ports, but Proton getting Wine one-click integrated into Steam and easily targetable is a more realistic bridge to that scenario than holding out on principle. As it is Linux gaming is in the best shape it’s ever been in thanks to Proton.

I also think the argument held more weight 20 years ago, before we started packaging up end user apps in giant self-contained images regularly.

This is a non-issue. If you’re a gaming company in the era of Proton, it makes more sense to just focus on Windows issues than to open yourself to support requests from people running any brand of Linux. Proton is just so much easier to target than standalone Linux and you can serve the Linux community / Steam Deck users without needing any actual expertise.

I agree. I have become more amenable to things like Flatpak or Podman/Docker to keep the base system from being cluttered up with weird dependencies, but for the most part it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge upside to going full atomic if you’re already comfortable.

I used mutt back in the day, opening vim for message editing.

I wouldn’t do a mailing list these days, but as someone who spent the early part of my career interacting with devs that preferred this method, it’s actually pretty ergonomic by a 2005 standard. A message thread aware, text based email client that can turn messages into patches in a keystroke makes it actually pretty comparable to modern code review…

I think it’s hard for younger devs to get this because they’re used to email being stuck in a crappy, unthreaded browser interface or Outlook etc. (which are terrible for mailing lists) and most collaboration taking place in code review and chat platforms like Teams/Slack but for decades before these were feasible, email was the way…

GNOME 3 introduced the current shell paradigm where you don’t really have a start menu but a variety of searches, integrated indicators, per-app desktops with a dock etc.

Before, it was far more conventional experience like Plasma/Windows/Cinnamon are now. GNOME 2 was forked to be the MATE desktop if you want to check it out.