Quoting: dubigrasuSo, a better Steam Machine? :)

That's rather like looking at the PS3 and then calling PS Vita "a smaller PS3." On the surface, it might not be wrong, but there's a lot of dynamics that change how one should view it as.

The Steam Machine was basically just a pre-build made by partners, running a limited Linux distro with small amount of games. At a rather unjustified premium at that.

Steam Deck is closer to a tablet with built in controller, produced by Valve themselves with a decent yet uniform spec, running a Linux distro that makes more sense (hopefully, at least, judging by its Arch base and Plasma DE), that can run the majority of games (specifically mentioning that they're targeting anti-cheat now and 800p30fps minimum performance with decent efficiency).

The Steam Machine was a garbage overpriced prebuilt that does nothing. The Steam Deck is a real alternative to Switch and has better flexibility being a tablet/mini-PC running a Linux distro. You're not going to do work on it, but it's a good multimedia device on top of being a more flexible version of a device (Switch) that's been proven to work in concept.

The only question is how well can they market it. Or, well, judging by pre-orders, how much can they actually make because they're competing with everyone for those chips.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I've used Ferdi, but unfortunately I believe it is electron-based and thus has almost the same footprint as an actual browser. It IS very handy if you have the memory overhead to use it, but I found that running official Telegram app (or the AUR version) + whatsapp-for-linux on snap actually has less footprint in my case. That's important since I only care about Whatsapp while working while using my rather old laptop, and I do need a client seperate from the browser as sometimes I need to swap between Firefox and Chromium (Brave) which makes WA for web rather annoying to use even if it is the most efficient option (not to mention that Firefox on Fedora 33 has a drag-and-drop bug where it randomly crashes after a few drag-and-drops).

It's something that you gotta try though, and the Workspace function is very nice as it allows you to set what stuff to be opened, when, and what should be kept opened depending on what you're doing.

View this comment - View article - View full comments