I'm curious to know what anyone's experience with The Technomancer is. On desktop and Deck!

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Quoting: eldakingalso competing with phones/tablets

I would never seriously play games on a phone. I much prefer having separate devices that are good at doing their own thing. i.e. phone for communication (SIP, XMPP, Matrix, E-mail,...), gaming console for games, something else with a good DAC for music, eBook for reading, desktop for srsbns. etc. All running GNU+Linux of some variant of course. :wink:

Quoting: ElamanOpiskelijawhat is this device offering that is so important, that a small laptop cannot? What is the use case?

It's the built-in gamepads/buttons/sticks and the form factor. Also, perhaps a different mindset when it comes to expectations for the device. It's designed to play games first and foremost, everything else it does is just a bonus.

Quoting: eldakingI'm looking more for the equivalent of chromebooks for this form factor than for the equivalents of Alienware.

You probably want something single board computer (SBC) based like a Raspberry Pi retro gaming device. RP4 can run Ubuntu MATE fine but I'm not sure what kind of games it could play because it's aarch64 / arm64 rather than x86_64.
reviews: https://retrododo.com/best-retro-handhelds/ [External Link]
DIY book: https://www.pishop.us/product/retro-gaming-with-raspberry-pi/ [External Link]
OS: https://www.lakka.tv/ [External Link]
Otherwise, perhaps some Intel or AMD based 2-in-1 that runs GNU+Linux. Garuda Linux KDE Dra460ized Gaming Edition [External Link] is an Arch based distro, like SteamOS is, that ships with a bunch of game related software.
There are plenty of controllers that can expand one way or another to hold a tablet. I wish the Madcatz L.Y.N.X. 9 [External Link] still existed. Maybe if we send them enough e-mails. lol.

Oh, and https://itch.io/ [External Link] has plenty of Linux, Android, HTML, and web based games available. Many are from small indie devs and don't require the horsepower of an army. They're also less expensive and the site has great deals/bundles regularly.

Quoting: Leprotto

Quoting: CatKillerNot all of them: the GPD boss went on a public rant about how the Deck was terrible because it couldn't run pirated games. I think he was feeling rather threatened by it.

I'm quite sure i can run pirated games on Linux, so why i couldn't on the deck?

I'd be wary but, if Steam is running in a sandboxed flatpak that only has permissions to read certain directories then it should be fine because the Steam client should not be able to read the separate directory that has questionable game files. Or, simply multiboot.

These "questionable game files" could simply be backups, purchased elsewhere, or bought by somebody else that the device is shared with. :) Or, these days, even cached data from some archive or streaming service...

addendum:
I wonder what the possibility & potential of all these small game ODMs getting together to form a co-op organization to increase their buying power with OEMs. Like, if they had one buying account they pooled their money into but negotiated to still have at least slightly different components.

In niches like this, I think cooperation rather than cut-throat annihilation would be the best for everyone. And, I certainly don't mean buy-outs and mergers because that often leaves the consumer in the dust. Competition and innovation are good. Choices are good and I'd rather not see any company fail that doesn't deserve it for being, in short, "evil".

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Quoting: EzequielPersonally I think it's embarassing to not host your own game's backend, and it's disrespectful to your customers if you don't have this transparency, most people didn't knew this was going on until it exploded.

I mostly agree but, I do sympathize with them and understand why they don't.

Have you ever ran your own dedicated server box and had to scale to the thousands? It's another whole skill set that perhaps none of them have or have the time for because they need to focus on other aspects of making games and running the essential business side of things. Maybe it's on their / someone's to-do list. It's also quite possible they don't have the money to pay another person to run the server for them.

It'd be nice if they, and everyone else, did run their own server hardware and could guarantee 99.99% uptime but, that is a high bar to meet and I'm sure if they don't, gamers will have their torches lit.

That all being said, taking a look at LoG's website, there sure are a good number of individuals involved. Let's see if they can make it past the $3,000-10,000 hurdle to buy a server and get everything setup, backed up, migrated, and running smoothly.

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Well, to make light of this one piece... InstallCore sounds like a subgenre of Nerdcore. 🤓

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Quoting: elmapulif valve simply give up due to an change of leadership (eg: gabe newell die and the succession dont see future on linux) then we could only hope that someone else try in the future, but the future would look darker than black.

RMS for Valve GNUsident!

(but really, I hope neither die anytime soon!)

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Quoting: Leprotto"if you cannot win them, embrace them"

If you cannot Linux them, Steam them!

Yeah, Valve would be awfully naive if they thought no other manufacturers were going to offer SteamOS on their devices or that hackers wouldn't get it to work smoothly.

Now that they seem to believe there is enough people talking about it, some of us have to actually buy this version when it's available. lol
And the dominoes begin falling...
GNU WORLD ORDER

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Oh, I wanted to add that I was debating one of these if Purism [External Link] doesn't put out a 2-in-1 tablet in the near future. But, that was before I pre-ordered a Deck. "¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

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Addendum:
I see that GPD [External Link] has some "WinControl" program for mapping the shoulder trigger keys. They need to be introduced to QMK [External Link] and adopt a GUI like Oryx [External Link]

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Quoting: StoneColdSpiderAnd as for the Steam Deck increasing Linux marketshare by any significant margin well that depends on how many people install Windows on it.....

What we need to do as GNU+Linux users is ask all the game devs we can to support SteamOS/Linux/Steam Deck.

For each person who says something there's 100 who didn't. For each of them there's another 1000 who don't even know that they should.

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Quoting: BogomipsI still don't understand why nobody wants to take the ortholinear route as an option.

Fortunately, a lot of custom keyboards are available in the OS/OH world but still not cheap and for tech savvy people.

I present you: https://www.zsa.io/planck [External Link]
Small, portable, mechanical, open source, completely customizable in layout/button functionality & keycaps ortholinear keyboard. :grin:
That being said, I still wouldn't use it as my main kb. It's fantastic for portability though. Just imagine this with a ~14" portable monitor, a 10 yr warranty USB dock [External Link], and a Steam Deck. All you need for a portable office + spectacular gaming station. :woot: Oh, and maybe a trackball mouse [External Link].

Spoiler, click me

I haven't tested it. Feel free to send me one! XD

I'm with you guys. As much as I want to trade in my Logitech G910 kb for a ZSA Moonlander, I like the 9 extra G keys, number pad, multimedia keys, and especially the volume roller. I wish it had better software support and even more G keys.

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System76 thinks they're cleaver by releasing a 67 somethingsomething, don't they?! :tongue:

306.5mm x 107.5mm is still too big compared to the ZSA Planck measuring 234mm x 82mm which they claim is pocket size.
I do like a few extra keys but, it still feels like it fits into this weird middle area.

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Keep in mind that the QMK keyboard firmware that S76 forked allows any key to be mapped to any other key so you can still have a number pad, multimedia keys, et. al. You just have to hit an extra key to get there (and maybe get back). It's just a matter of playing around with different layouts. :D

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Quoting: WorMzy

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: WorMzyInteresting choice to have firefox baked into the image -- it'll pull in the gtk3 stack (:sick:) and increase the size of the image considerably (would add ~300MiB to my plasma system). If they just need a basic browser for people to use to navigate to flathub or whatever, konqueror might fill that niche (+~25MiB).

Konqueror is based on webkit, right?
I wonder if there is a browser using chromium web engine (still blink?) using qt5.

Falkon, although with the qt5-webengine package (and related deps) you're probably looking at ~200MiB.

Konqueror was great back in the day. Is it still viable for browsing the web? It's a scary place these days!

Falkon [External Link] is severely out of date and more-or-less in maintenance mode.
Eh, maybe it's not fair to say it's "out of date". I don't know what security vulnerabilities it could possibly have. That being said, there are people on the mailing list and last I checked, in the IRC, who are willing to discuss things and help out. I did hear that they aren't planning on actively developing new features. (we need to hire some devs or something...)

I admit that I do use Falkon [External Link] for certain things and it is delightful on it's own right.
Alas, nothing beats the site isolation that Firefox does. Plus all the extra tweaks and addons....

Other Qt based browsers that I haven't used much are
qutebrowser [External Link] | flathub [External Link] which is keyboard driven and certainly not for everyone but it gets updates
Otter Browser [External Link] meant to be like classic Opera and gets weekly updates

In my experience, Otter was okay but unstable on my machines. YMMV. I could never memorize and smoothly operate qutebrowser as nifty as an idea as it seems. I'd say that one is only good for certain tasks like browsing documentation. lol. Again, your mileage may vary.

That all being said. A properly sandboxed web browser could be a very good thing from a security standpoint and I'd say that's worth a few hundred extra MiB. The themes are pretty customizable these days. Still not a perfect fit.

I wish someone would write a solid Qt frontend for Firefox. Let's crowdfund that! lol

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No! I'd say LibreWolf [External Link] would be a much better choice. It's Firefox but, with all the telemetry stripped out. It's meant to be more secure and private out of the den.

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