Quoting: slaapliedje[...]

Anyhow, the AUR is still questionable in my mind, and even the Arch devs don't readily recommend it. So if you're going to use AUR, keep it to a minimum, it's far too easy for malware to be installed on your system with it. Also the packages get orphaned randomly when people decide they don't want to keep maintaining the PKGBUILD. The fortunate part is the PKGBUILDs are simple and most should be able to read / write them.

Yes, I know, but from my understanding, the same is true with PPA, for example.
And without AUR:

• No easy Skype


• No easy DaVinci Resolve


• No easy Mangohud / GOVerlay


• No easy Heroic Game Launcher / Gamehub


• No easy Blender / Phoronix benchmarks

And of course a lot other useful tools that are equivalent to what I had in windows, with the same ease of installation / removal :smile:

Seriously, if I had to manually install / compile each of those, I would probably be using Windows 10 by now...

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For me, Linux is now finally a sane alternative to Windows, since the end of Windows 7 support, and despite all its remaining defaults (GPU drivers, dual monitor support, gaming support, music production, random peripherals not recognized properly...).

I remember the first time we tried Redhat 3.2 on a friend's computer, who just got it on a magazine, and as it was supposed to be "incredibly stable" compared to Windows... and how we managed to freeze the whole system in 3 minutes, simply by... inserting an audio CD (to be sure, we even rebooted and reproduced it :grin: ). We had a good laugh, and put the CD back in the magazine...

Since then, I tried several times to give Linux a chance to convince me: Mandrake (later renamed to Mandriva), Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, Puppy,... each time, the result was the same: nothing works, you're supposed to type commands like on the Amstrad from my childhood, and hope the documentation vaguely found on the internet is not obsolete...

But, in september 2019, I was looking again for a Linux distro, to be a replacement for Windows 7. I tried several, and found that Linux Mint was actually useable out-of-the-box (and with a nice DE too: Cinnamon). Then, I found out about Manjaro, which has a Cinnamon edition, and also, the AUR, which is probably one of the best selling point from a Windows user point of view: no need to manually (try to, ahem :whistle:) compile anything, it's all done under the hood.

And that's what made me switch. And seeing like 40% of my games in Steam were Linux native (and most of the one I was playing at the time: Dead Cells, Wizard of Legend, Slay the Spire,...) made me stay :smile:

Quoting: Philadelphus[...](I've just discovered I even wrote a very angry blog post [External Link] about it :whistle:)[..]

I read it, and I found a lot of similarities with my past experiences with Linux, so it's not only you :wink:

Quoting: AussieEevee[...]

ETA: Outside of gaming, I think Linux is perfect. You can do virtually anything you can imagine. While it is true that Adobe products present an issue, there are other powerful alternatives like Davinci Resolve.

While I agree that DaVinci Resolve is a great software (I am not a video editor though), I guess it is not enough to make a lot of people make the switch.

Also, when it comes to music production, Linux is still very far from being a viable alternative ; even if I hope that Bitwig releasing their DAW for Linux will help change this in the future.

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Do you dual-boot with a different operating system?

Question: does a VM count ?

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Quoting: BielFPs[...]

Any DE who doesn't support Wayland, sooner or latter, tends to no longer being relevant to the majority of users in the future (not counting those corner case of users who'll stay with x11 for some reason), which will be sad because those are very good desktop environments.

Yep, I love cinnamon, and I think there still have no plan to switch to Wayland.
On the other hand, I am still stuck with an nVidia card, so... :whistle:

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Quoting: KohlyKohl

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: KohlyKohl

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: KohlyKohl

Quoting: GuestThese regressions cannot happen when the Steam Deck ships and these fixes must NOT be needed. It will reflect badly on Proton, linux and ultimately kill the device

Don't worry, Windows users are already used to workarounds and games not working 😄

In my experience only tinkerers and retro gamers are used to stuff not working.

But even them are more used to the latest or more popular games working out of the box.

Go to any Steam forum or discord for a game and you'll see that this isn't true.

A hundred posts in a forum for a game that sold between 1 to 90 million copies isn't the compelling argument you think it is.

Most games don't sell millions of copies. Also, there are well known cases of games being terrible at launch and in some cases are never fully fixed.

Drivers, antivirus software, Windows updates, and poorly designed software issues happen a lot in Windows. Heck most of us are here because of these issues and Windows gamers have to do deal with those.

All I'm saying is that Windows gamers are used to dealing with issues with games not working and I think that it'll be less of an issue on Steam Deck and not something to worry about.

I am not so sure about that. First, having been a Windows gamer for years, of which not so many AAA titles, I can tell that I rarely encountered issues with games which required tinkering.

Second, the Steam Deck is more of a portable console (in the mind of potentiel users), and most people do not expect having to tinker on a console to make a game works properly.

Quoting: KohlyKohlIf the Steam Deck sells millions and most stay on SteamOS 3, developers are going to ensure their updates work on the Steam Deck. If it doesn't sell enough then it will not matter anyways.

On the other hand, Valve has been marketing the Steam Deck to developers as "just target Windows, and it will work on Steam Deck, no added work needed"...

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Not much else has been revealed about Intel Arc today other than codenames for future generations including "Battlemage", "Celestial" and "Druid".

Can't wait for the Necromancer class :tongue:

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This one was in my wishlist, in case a Linux version would appears... Time to clear the wishlist :smile:

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Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: SalvatosThe amount of electronic waste would be dizzying.

Certainly most things in our throw away society could be described as such, where do you draw the line ? How much waste realistically is a tiny microSD card (fractions of plastic and sand) connected into a SD card reader to PC vs running vast town sized data centers for downloading and the associated electricity costs. Not to mention, not everyone would use this option probably a minority. So im not sure how much more wasteful if you did a cost analysis on it considering if you had a big enough microSD it could double as storage for your steamdeck.
Are people to stop owning things altogether? why can't you recycle the SD card and use it for other things.

There is more to this: if magazines come with a small SD card, what would prevent someone to just open the plastic, and get away with the SD card (this already happened at the time of discs, unfortunately) ? What would prevent damaging the SD card during transport ?

Packaging is usually a compromise between protection (transport, storage,...), preventing stealing, and wasted materials.
Shipping CD at the time was kind of useful, since a lot of people did not have a (good enough) internet connection to download the contents, but nowadays, it would not be so useful, hence mostly a waste.

Also, the trend shifted from demo versions readily available / shareware versions, to no demo / "early access". I am personally glad that demos are a thing again (especially now to check compatibility with proton).

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A few months ago, I have bought myself a vertical mouse as well, but I am not still fully convinced unfortunately.

Before, I was sometime felling pain on the top of the hand, between the index and the middle finger ; now, it has been replaced by a (lower) pain on the side of the wrist (little-finger side)...

Unfortunately, it was already difficult for me to choose a correct "standard" mouse, but with vertical mices, the choice is even more limited (but I think there is more choice now than a few years ago, maybe correlated with the g@merz ageing ? :tongue: )

Quoting: Nanobang

Quoting: KeyrockI've been #TeamTrackball for decades, once I got past the initial weirdness of the change, which lasted roughly 1 day, I found them way more comfortable to use. To be specific, I prefer trackballs where you move the ball with your index, middle, and/or ring finger, rather than your thumb.

I'd be keen to hear more about this Keyrock. Would you be willing to post a link or picture of your model mouse? I've become so enamored with the trackball emulation on the Steam Controller that it's like slogging through waist deep snow whenever I have to resort to a track or mouse pad (calf-deep snow with a mouse). I'm already making plans for what to use when all three of my Steam Controllers break beyond repair.

I guess it is probably something like this ?



I owned a trackball years ago, but it was only 800 dpi, and thus not very practical with modern resolutions. The ball was moved with the thumb ; I had doubts about the ones moved with the other fingers... But I am curious to see Keyrock's actual model as well :smile:

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Quoting: Comandante Ñoñardo

Quoting: KohlyKohlGnome out of the box is ugly and to make it useful you have to add plugins to it. The default should be a useable desktop without the user having to do anything.

Imagine if a Windows user had to add a taskbar themselves...

Say what you want about KDE but out of the box it is useful and a user doesn't have to do anything to it.

Indeed it was necessary to add a start menu taskbar in Windows 8

I didn't know about this, but I know that Windows 8 was not particularly loved for its interface....
I believe Microsoft released Windows 8.1 partly to try to fix the UI for desktops

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