The windows kernel isn’t all that great, particularly in the realm of memory security or scheduling.

You know, to each their own. Question is really whether windows maintaining a closed source kernel even makes sense from a maintenance burden perspective when it really doesn’t give them much money in return. (Most of their money in 2025 comes from cloud services, not operating systems)

The best path forward is that developers make their linux drivers before they release their hardware to the market. You know, like what they do for windows.

There’s no silver bullet here. You have to wait for someone to reverse engineer the drivers if the developers of the hardware don’t care enough to supply even basic linux driver support. Either that or linux becomes so popular that it becomes senseless to ignore it (let’s be real though, MacOS is popular enough for this to be true and yet there’s still new hardware made that ignores that platform too.)

I mean, my issue is that most buttons on my huion are still non bindable, and some graphical interfaces cannot be interacted with in mouse mode and only register as touch. Lastly, occasionally programs completely ignore pen sensitivity, such as blender.

This experience was when I was last on gnome. I’ve been on budgie for a while as a result of needing a tablet for my hobbies.

The lack of proper tablet support in wayland prevents me from being excited for this. I wish there was more news on that front.

Sure.

Valve’s operating system is read only and, when steam decides to update, any root level file changes will be lost between updates. This is partly good because the system will always be recoverable and update reliably, but comes with the downside that users have to take extra steps to install some base level packages (things like tailscale, syncthing etc. There’s always work arounds, but it’s not a guarantee that these work arounds will continue to work on new updates.)

OSTree is also a read only file system utility that allows packages to be layered, so users can install their own packages. When the operating system updates, these packages are rebased and preserved on the next update so user level changes can be preserved.

There’s more to this than that, but basically steam os is dependent on valve updating packages and generally leave all extensions either hand off or need to work around root filesystem. Ostree/silverblue/bazzite allow user modification by having a slightly more sophisticated updating process.

I would say it’s great but would strongly recommend using Bazzite over steam OS even on the deck.

My biggest gripe with the steam deck is that it’s not well equipped to handle user packages in the same way OSTree is. Bazzite solves this while still mostly adhering to the design principles of steam os, so I feel it’s actually better than the stock operating system.

It’s very strange that you’ve made a post about bugs but chose not to list any of the bugs.

Like, how can we make a recommendation if we don’t know what types of issues you’re running into? What type of hardware you have? What expectations you have?

It just kind of screams of disgruntled user syndrome. These are community lead projects so, yes, they’ll have bugs. But if people never say what they are or what issues they had with what they used, the best the rest of us can do is just guess!

The Elon Musk method: Buy some shit for no reason with only the attempt to ruin it because, idk, oligarchy or some shit.

You could almost say… Parodied 😯

Right, legally speaking that would be covered in the US.

But Japanese law is completely different and IIRC parodies are not covered which is why anime always censors their parody references to other anime. It’s stupid, but it’s the society that both developers are from.

Only time will tell what they’re actually accusing Pocket Pair of doing though.

edit: censors, not sensors. 🤣

I’m pretty sure I saw the same tweet from Stephen Totilllo (sp?) just to give you some credence, but I think many people called him out for it as it was below his usual reporting standards.

We’ll have to wait and see when the case developers further.

But if it’s just about the concept of “collecting monsters” and using them in battles somehow, then they can go fuck themselves.

I don’t think it would be that because it would be unenforceable. There are plenty of games where you collect monsters, some of which existed before Pokemon’s creation and plenty that have existed after. It would be the King Kong case all over again, but inverted.

Without a doubt, Patents and Software are a bad mix.

But there’s definitely a truth to the idea that Palworld in particular were aiming for a legal battle against Nintendo from the beginning with provocative action. There’s a reason why Nintendo has rarely gone after Pokemon-likes but have decided that this particular company is worth pursuing.

This is kind of a lose-lose situation. Palworld was clearly kit-bashing existing Pokemon models and were engaging in creative bankruptcy, but software/game patents serve only to hurt creatives and developers around the world and Japan in particular is poor around SLAP suits.

So, I agree, grab the popcorn. But I hope that whatever patents they’re choosing to enforce here don’t have a major ripple in game development as a whole. There’s a world with the brazen IP theft of palworld actually does us all a disservice by making it an easier case for Nintendo to enforce Patents that would otherwise be unenforceable or difficult purely out of optics.

Yeah, thanks for sharing this. I’m going to have to give this a try sometime.

I had previously been building it manually, but I think I’m starting to realize that gitlab/github CI is basically essential to running a proper repository anyway.

Even better: do a git history of certain files to get a broad sense of history and understand it’s evolution.

I highly advise this practice for familiarizing yourself with parts of a codebase you may otherwise not know anything about. Interesting commits you should git show.

Though combining this with scripting would also be interesting. 🤔

I hate writing a serialized format

I mean, that’s why it’s serialized. It’s not supposed to be written by hand, that’s why you have a deserializer. 🤦

2024 is the year of a lot of gaming and gaming-tangential products being made with a ridiculous price tag but not a clear audience of people who ever asked for it. 🤔

I mean, yes. But also no, it sort of depends.

If you have very low bar of needs (needing a web browser and some utility apps, without specific apps in mind) then it’s actually never been easier. If you use a Silverblue based system, all updates are done in a transactional way and old versions can be booted into at any time in case something breaks (which basically never happens with silverblue, with some exceptions.) Read only systems means you can’t muck around with the root files and can’t accidentally “break” your system in the way you used to be able to on older OS designs. I would say that “Linux with Guardrails” is effectively invincible, and I would like to recommend that new users try OSTree based systems. For example, Fedora Silverblue, Ublue’s Aurora / Bluefin, Bazzite (Steam OS clone), etc etc.

If you have more specific needs, it can be a crapshoot depending on whether or not the hobby in question has a strong linux presence. Particularly, bespoke non-game windows apps are still a bit tricky to get working and require some Wine (Windows process wrapper for compatibility) knowledge. There are edge cases where running certain applications in flatpak (Steam, Bitwig) can mean that, while it’s impossible for these applications to break your system, you’ll be very limited in options for these programs. For Steam, this can mean more difficulty with out-of-steam application management. For Bitwig, this can mean no choice in VST. These are all programs that have work arounds, but on a read-only system like Silverblue (which I would like to recommend for new users due to the indestructibility) those are all a little more difficult to implement and require you to know a thing or two about virtual desktops. (Thus, not new user friendly.)

I would still say that it’s never been easier, but as you get more famililar with any system, you generally demand more and more from it. Thankfully, with linux, its always been a case of “if there’s a will there’s a way” and the UX utility applications being made by other people have been getting better and better.

My recommendation to you would be to try UBlue Aurora. It’s familiar to Windows, it’s being managed in a way that makes gaming relatively simple, and it has an active discord community to help new users. It also has that indestructability that I was talking about before, but has a lot of the “work arounds” pre-setup for new users.

I would use BTRFS and Snapper over using Timeshift due to the lack of granularity it has. You should be able to back up any volume you want, not just the home directories like Timeshift does.

Some applications, such as those with tablet demands, are not met by current wayland des with proper tablet support and xwayland is currently the better option. This may have changed in the last year or so, but this is roughly my recollection of certain big art programs.

I’m currently using debian with Docker.

If I were to do it again, though, I’d probably just use either fedora or the server equivalent to silverblue (I can’t remember the name). I am so heavy on docker use at this point that I wouldn’t mind going full immutable.