Quoting: GuestOn a different note, what games would people think to play on this? It's not like most of the games in people's existing Steam library are designed for this form factor.

It's funny you should ask. I gave some broad strokes in the last article, but just the other day I was having a look at my Steam wishlist and thought to myself, "those Supergiant Games [External Link] games would be just perfect for playing on a Steam Pal, if Valve release one. "

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I've just had a horrible thought: am I going to be compelled to say, "I use Arch, btw," everywhere I go?

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Quoting: 1xok

Quoting: CatKillerSo it is Van Gogh - Zen 2 and RDNA 2 - and it does have 16 GB RAM. It's not quite as big as I was hoping for, but I guess it couldn't hit the right performance target for 1080p.

It has a 1280 x 800px display (16:10).

I know. That's why I said that I was glad that it's 16:10. In the last article I was hoping that they'd go for 8 inches and 1920×1200.

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So it is Van Gogh - Zen 2 and RDNA 2 - and it does have 16 GB RAM. It's not quite as big as I was hoping for, but I guess it couldn't hit the right performance target for 1080p. I'm glad to see it's 16:10, though.

The price increases for more storage are steep. 64 GB really isn't much for a Steam library; I think the base model mostly exists to get the headline price point, and they're only expecting to break even/make a small profit with the middle 256 GB tier at $529. Then the 512 GB gets pushed all the way up to $649 to make the first price bump not look so outrageous. SSDs access chips in parallel, though, so the bigger ones will be faster as well as bigger.

They're getting people to pay a small (£4) deposit with their preorders to combat bots.

Wishlisted.

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You should definitely see if they'll send you one to review.

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Quoting: MohandevirI'm wondering if SteamPal's futur OS isn't going to be ChromiumOS based... Just a tought.

Valve won't want to be beholden to Google any more than they want to be beholden to Microsoft.

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Quoting: Liam DaweAn interesting point that, and I do agree fully that familiarity sells often and quite well so if more people end up sticking with Chromebooks and it pulls more onto the Linux version of Steam - still a net win for us overall.

It was something that Microsoft exploited ruthlessly (as well as when they were starting out) during the netbook era, funding PR saying that Linux was too confusing for inexperienced users, and extending the life of XP and making it free, to starve of oxygen any low-cost competition to their desktop dominance.

Android is the most widely-used consumer OS these days, so Microsoft don't have the muscle that they used to, but people are still people so the same dynamics will apply. Sauce for the goose.

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I've always said hardware is what we need. Hardware on shelves in stores and in more well-known online shops, it is the missing key.

Not just hardware in shops, although that is very important. Getting prospective customers to already have familiarity with the product so that they'll want to buy it is also very useful. Microsoft did it with business machines, so people bought the same thing to use at home. Apple and Microsoft have both tried to get a stranglehold on the education market at various times and, at the moment, Chromebooks are dominant there. With more other reasons to use them it's more likely that the cheap Chromebook they got from school could translate into a more premium Chromebook model, or a Chromebook as their own first computer, later. Google doesn't really care if it's a premium model or a cheapie, but the manufacturers will be after the higher margins and more sales. If Chromebooks expose sufficient Linuxness then the users might not be scared away from upgrading to a full Linux machine in those circumstances, since they'll already be familiar with it.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeIf you have to use a third party repository for something, make sure it is for new packages that don't replace things in your distribution.

Out of interest, does Debian have ppa-purge? It tracks which versions of packages come from a PPA rather than repositories so that if you want to stop using a PPA it can automatically switch you back to the repository version. Much cleaner than the can't-downgrade dependency issues from the before times when people would add full repositories to their sources.list.

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Quoting: denyasisVery cool. I didn't know it existed in the animal kingdom.

It happens in people, too. It comes up every now and then with questions of maternity, organ donation, and things like that, or if there's mosaic skin colouration or differently-coloured eyes. Otherwise no one notices. It's become more common since the invention of fertility treatment, since you're then more likely to be carrying more than one embryo.

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