Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThis is mind-boggling. And makes me all kinds of confused. I skimmed the Ars article at the time and figured it could only be good.

Is the Steam program for ChromeOS just some kind of weirdly packaged webapp pretending not to be a webapp? Can it not run normal binaries? What about CrossOver? On the one hand, so long as web environment integrity is not a thing, that's great for compatibility for all OSes. Rising tides and all that.

But why would you purposely GIMP your OS like that?? It's one thing to be web-first, but web-only is something else...

(with apologies to the current GIMP maintainers)

Quoting: CatKillerThe thing that ChromeOS can do that desktop Linux can't (but which Windows can) is run Android applications. But people generally don't think of Android (or Windows) as a desktop Linux OS.

I remember there being something that could do that on Linux. Waydroid?

Quoting: CatKillerChromeOS has been able to run Linux applications in a container for around five years.

Quoting: mad_mesaMy hypothesis is that statcounter is seeing Steam Deck, and/or that the new ChromeOS Flex may have a slightly different user agent string that is making it miss their special case exception that would otherwise prevent it from getting grouped in with the other Linux distributions.

In either case we should probably expect that they will further break Linux apart in their stats by shifting Deck to the tablet section (or making a new handheld category), or adding more special case exceptions for ChromeOS or other distributions.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI've never owned a Chromebook—surely there are native programs on there not accessible from the web?

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI'm willing to accept this if programs built for ChromeOS work on Linux distributions like Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. Is that the case?

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAt any rate, in an odd way a good sign. I mean, I'm happy the Deck exists and believe it has led increased Linux adoption for gaming. But, if overall Linux is up despite Steam OS within that being down, that means overall Linux is clearly growing. That's a happy thing for me, since I want to see continued growth of desktop Linux in general, along with growth in use of the Steam Deck in particular; it wouldn't be so great if the Steam Deck became huge but the rest of desktop Linux shrank and became an irrelevant appendage.

Of course, caveats as usual given the bounciness of polls and the unknown nature of Steam sampling--none of this data is necessarily that real. But taken at face value, it's nice.

Quoting: ageresWhat is "Freedesktop SDK 23.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit" and why has it risen from 0 to 5%? Was it some SteamOS update that changed something and affected the Steam Deck statistics?

Quoting: Highball

Quoting: ArehandoroSteam OS Holo has -2.46%, is that a typo or are people removing Steam OS to to install other distros?

It just means less Steam Deck machines were apart of this recent survey.

Quoting: gradyvuckovicStuff like this is why Steam's still ahead of the pack by a mile on PC.
I can imagine that being very useful for stuff like making sure you and all your friends have the same mods when you play an online game together.

Quoting: kshade"If we only had a few more programmers" he said while drying his tears of sorrow with the stack of microtransaction dollars he made that same minute.