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With a dock you can have a keyboard and a mouse :) Moreover, given that the Steam Deck is essentially a PC, any investment in the Deck in drivers, APIs, deskto

by Zhyl 5y ago

With a dock you can have a keyboard and a mouse :) Moreover, given that the Steam Deck is essentially a PC, any investment in the Deck in drivers, APIs, desktop environments, display manager (Valve have invested in KDE Plasma/Wayland and Gamescope), native game compatibility, compatibility layers (applies to all software, not just games) is also an investment in desktop Linux as a whole. Even if we are just limiting it to games, having more games on Linux makes the platform more viable for people who want to use their computer for gaming. This isn't even mentioning how much has moved to either web or cross-platform electron apps in the last 10 years (which includes Teams, Spotify, Discord, Youtube, VSCode and others) >which by the way is also woefully inadequate for shipping tablet apps I will bow to your experience on this one, I don't have any experience in this area. >adequately run the majority of desktop software for Windows that people actually want to use Actually you can run pretty much all Microsoft Office on Linux - the big ones that people still have trouble with are Adobe Creative suite.

md8z 5y ago
All of that stuff is fine and good but it's the same incremental progress as always. I don't see anything particularly special about using this device with a dock, that seems like a really niche use case. These type of devices are not new and have never been big sellers. I'd assume most customers would just use it for games and don't care that it technically runs Linux and allows them to switch out of their game and fumble around trying to use LibreOffice or GIMP on a touchscreen until they get frustrated enough to plug in a keyboard. Unless Valve is planning to invest billions of dollars in overhauling KDE for general uses (including non-gaming uses), then I don't think anything is going to change significantly. Yes, that's how much money it would cost. This is what Google had to do to with Android to make that kind of "Linux" a viable platform, it won't happen with anything else unless similar amounts are invested. And for windows software I'm not talking about Microsoft Office or Adobe, I'm talking about the "long tail" of Windows apps that don't get attention from Wine developers. There's still a lot of those.

by Zhyl 5y ago

md8z 5y ago

All of that stuff is fine and good but it's the same incremental progress as always. I don't see anything particularly special about using this device with a dock, that seems like a really niche use case. These type of devices are not new and have never been big sellers. I'd assume most customers would just use it for games and don't care that it technically runs Linux and allows them to switch out of their game and fumble around trying to use LibreOffice or GIMP on a touchscreen until they get frustrated enough to plug in a keyboard. Unless Valve is planning to invest billions of dollars in overhauling KDE for general uses (including non-gaming uses), then I don't think anything is going to change significantly. Yes, that's how much money it would cost. This is what Google had to do to with Android to make that kind of "Linux" a viable platform, it won't happen with anything else unless similar amounts are invested. And for windows software I'm not talking about Microsoft Office or Adobe, I'm talking about the "long tail" of Windows apps that don't get attention from Wine developers. There's still a lot of those.