Valve mentioned before that the Steam Deck can be used as a controller on PC. Have you tested this function yourself? I am interested in plugging in my Deck to my PC and using it as a controller when not playing on the Deck itself.

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Oh, I'm surprised to see Super Robot Wars 30. Figured a title like that would come later. Not complaining though.

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No Fortnite, huh? Fine with me. I won't be losing any sleep over its absence.

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I don't really have anything to contribute other than to say that I love KDE and Plasma. Many thanks to all who work on it.

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I don't use Discover, myself. I've gotten used to installing everything I need through the terminal.

That said, I like it better than GNOME Software.

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I made my reservation late in the afternoon the day Valve started taking reservations, and my shipping timeframe is "Q2 2022". I don't expect to see mine until Spring.

Which is fine. I'm in no particular rush. Gives me time to get a few good size microSD cards.

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What I'm about to say is going to be EXTREMELY optimistic...but with Microsoft's recent moves, I really hope the Steam Deck succeeds and Sony dives in with it. Whatever you think about Valve, what they're pushing would allow for a more open ecosystem for video games going forward than anything from Microsoft.

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: CyborgZeta

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualOn a rolling-release distribution like Arch? No way. All of the packages are up-to-date, and if they're not, they are up-to-date in the AUR. Flatpak is way too much complexity for me.

I'm on an Arch-based system and use several Flatpaks. Firefox and Thunderbird for better Plasma integration and the sandbox, with everything else for being more convenient and not bloating my system with dependencies.

Also, I never touch the AUR, and Flatpak helps with that.

Using Flatpak and saying that it results in fewer dependencies is somewhat of a strange argument to me. Sure, you need to download more make dependencies for some AUR packages, but you can immediately uninstall them after compilation. With Flatpak, the more applications you use, the more duplicate runtimes/shared libraries (just different versions) you end up with. That's bloat in terms of RAM (having to run multiple of the same runtime) as well as hard drive space.

I don't know how effective Flatpak is at sandboxing applications, and because I use almost entirely free software or applications I trust, or applications that aren't distributed via Flatpak anyway (Microsoft Office), I wouldn't get much benefit out of it anyhow. For Firefox, I use uBlock Origin and block Javascript, remote fonts, the usual blocklists, disable WebGL and hardware acceleration, and that gives me more assurance than any sandbox would.

I look at it this way. The less dependencies on my root filesystem, the less chance of breakage I have when updating the OS or programs. I have encountered dependency hell issues on Ubuntu + Debian before; so that's one reason I like using Steam as a Flatpak, because I'm not introducing a bunch of 32-bit binaries to my filesystem.

A good case in point is the LTT video involving Pop OS and Steam. No, I'm not criticizing APT, since the fault was likely a packaging issue on System76's end. However, my point would be that installing Steam would've been a non-issue had he used the Flatpak.

This is the primary reason I avoid the AUR. It has nothing to do with trust. I did my research before switching to an Arch-based system, and most of the people I talked to told me that the majority of stability issues they'd run into with Arch involved programs installed from the AUR. I don't use the AUR because I don't want anything from outside the official repositories on my computer. Flatpak at least has the courtesy to not touch my filesystem and update independently of the core OS. Perhaps your experience running Arch is different, but I've been doing things this way for over a month now since installing EndeavourOS and have had zero issues with the OS itself.

As for Firefox, well I only have few extensions installed myself, uBlock included. I just like the sandbox because the way I see it, if my browser is somehow compromised then at least it's separate from the root filesystem. Also, I've noticed that using the Flatpak gives me a less identifiable fingerprint when checking https://www.deviceinfo.me/ [External Link]

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualOn a rolling-release distribution like Arch? No way. All of the packages are up-to-date, and if they're not, they are up-to-date in the AUR. Flatpak is way too much complexity for me.

I'm on an Arch-based system and use several Flatpaks. Firefox and Thunderbird for better Plasma integration and the sandbox, with everything else for being more convenient and not bloating my system with dependencies.

Also, I never touch the AUR, and Flatpak helps with that.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThat video says "Flatpak is the future". Well, I'm willing to believe Flatpak is (the future of proprietary software on Linux). I don't think it would be such a good idea for every damn application and utility, the open source ones, the main Linux software ecosystem, to be using Flatpak instead of normal package management.

I agree. I like Flatpak, but I don't think every program needs to be one. Things like the file manager, image viewer, etc. are better off installed through the package manager IMO.

Music players, such as Elisa and Strawberry (they're what I use), actually lose features in the Flatpak version. So those are best suited to being installed from the package manager; at least for now.

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