If you're trying to get into PC gaming and are looking for a really dirt cheap entry price this could be a component of a really cheap build:
$319USD - Refub 64GB Steam Deck -
$25USD - 256GB SD card (eg: SanDisk 256GB Extreme)
$27USD - Bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo (eg: Logitech MK270R)
$25USD - USBC-HUB (eg: Anker 332)
$49USD - Bluetooth gamepad (eg: 8BitDo Pro 2)
$120USD - Cheap 27 inch 1080p monitor (eg: Acer KB272)

Can use the Steam Deck's speakers and mic for audio needs. At most you might need to add a small desk and a cheap chair if you don't already have one, but you have a setup which lets you play first person shooters at a desk with a mouse and keyboard, or play some racing games on a portable gaming system you can undock easily, or play some emulated console games on your TV for some couch gaming etc. All well supported and with good performance.

Bam, $565USD (plus taxes/delivery fees etc) and you have a great entry to PC gaming.
At $1149USD, it's less than half of the cost of a new RTX 4080! [External Link]

And you could easily upgrade the setup later with a dedicated desktop gaming PC if you wish, upgrade the keyboard/mouse/monitor/etc, as you need/like, and the Steam Deck will always be still useful regardless.

Prices based on searches for products on US Amazon store.

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Always great to see the Steam Deck is helping encourage developers to ensure their games run on Linux even with anticheat.

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Quoting: gaboverstaThe recent news about AI generated images getting worse as previous AI generated images end up in the training data shows that it is still far closer to copying than actual creativity.
An intelligent artist improves by referencing their own work, not degrades.

I think this is the key. One of the biggest objections I have is the way many people have insisted there's 'no difference' between AI software having it's parameters tuned on a dataset of copyrighted images and 'humans learning art by studying the works of other artists'.

"They're both just looking at pictures and learning, what's the difference bro??"

And every time I hear that my first thought is, "Clearly you don't understand either AI or art".

Those two things are not even remotely the same thing. They really aren't. Humans look at examples of things, find patterns, learn, invent new things based on what they've seen, they experiment and try things, and stick with concepts they like or which they show to other people and are well received. None of the AI image generators in the market today do that.

The first artists who learned to paint and draw, and stylise humans with interesting representations, did so without any examples to look at at all. They just looked at other people, and experimented with different strokes and lines, and experimented until they found something they liked, and kept going with it and evolved their style over time.

AI image generators are certainly not doing that, they don't experiment, they have no sense of even 'liking' or 'disliking' what they're generating or being fed, a crucial aspect of how humans learn to do art and how new art styles are developed, so how could the AI be 'learning' the same way humans do?

All AI image generators do, is take a bunch of examples of data, and their algorithms are tuned to reproduce that data, and to combine it together based on keys. Combining the image data of blonde hair with image data of blue eyes to create an image of a person with both. There's no 'learning', there's no 'experimenting', and there's certainly no 'art'.

To me legally there's little difference between running 100,000 images through an AI image generator and claiming copyright over the result, and running 1 image through an image editor with a hue slider to shift the colour and claiming copyright over the result.

The only difference is, the latter example is infringing the copyright of one prior artist, the former example is infringing the copyright of likely thousands of artists. Both equally wrong.

AI image generators do have potential uses, such as a means of automatically generating variations of artworks automatically to fill a need for a large sum of procedural data, but AI image generators should not be used as a smokescreen to basically steal copyrighted works from artists, which seems to be the way they're being mainly used right now.

So I think it's very good to see Valve insisting 'If you're using AI image generators in your game, then you should be able to prove you have copyright over the images that were used to train the AI image generator'.

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20% off the 512GB Steam Deck is a hell of a deal. That thing was already well worth the price at it's normal price, but 20% off? If you don't have one I'd snap that up.

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Blender is OP!

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Quoting: Mountain ManIt's somewhat disheartening that despite a big multi-year push from Valve, Linux still sits behind MacOS at less 1.5% market share.

It's OK, this was always going to be a marathon and not a sprint. The important thing is that Linux's marketshare is growing and as long as it maintains that direction, this can take as long as necessary.
2 years ago, MacOS was closer to 3%, and Linux was back at 0.8%. Now it's more like 1.5% vs 2.4%. We're much closer and still gaining ground.

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I have some theories and opinions on why Linux isn't particular popular in non-English speaking countries.

It's because, in my opinion, the experience for Non-English speaking users on Linux isn't particularly great.

Aside from often lackluster translations available for software on Linux, and the OSes themselves, and even the distro websites, or OS manuals, the bigger issue is that the UX on Linux is still not quite at the point where someone could sit down at a Linux OS desktop PC and figure out every issue through navigating a GUI alone. It's not that completely self explanatory. It's still necessary to go online for help, and often the answers will be on Reddit, or Github, or some online forum, etc, and all of it in English.

And it's often the case that there's no where to go online to ask for help because most of the Linux communities are English-only. Either through enforced rules forbidding people from using languages other than English or simply because no one in the communities happens to speak a language other than English, or at least few enough speak non-English languages to make finding help online basically a non-starter.

I just don't think multilanguage support on Linux seems to be a particularly high priority and so it's not surprising to me at all that the userbase numbers in non-English speaking countries is so low.

English is spoken by less than 1 in 5 people on the planet, as long as multilanguage support on Linux remains lackluster, I think that's going to keep holding back growth in non-English markets.

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Blender is OP!

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Overall the direction sounds good.

I think the main focus for Flatpak/Flathub should be:

- Ensure any application on Flathub works as intended, with all functionality the user would expect to see working, without issues. If that isn't the case, use whatever 'temporary' solutions are necessary to make it so until better long term solutions are in place. No one is going to want to use Flathub to download applications if they experience too many occasions of applications not working due to mishandled sandboxing. Prioritising 'Everything must be sandboxed!' at the expense of functionality, is prioritising ideals over users, which will result in less/no growth over time.

- "Developers, developers, developers!"... laugh if you want, but Palmer was right when he said that. If you want to make a platform successful, make developers happy. It should not be assumed that developers will just 'figure it out', if you leave the pieces on the floor for them to pick up and assemble a solution. There should be a very straight forward 'hand holding' process for getting apps onto Flathub, and enough documentation that even a non-programmer can easily figure out how to get an app on Flathub.

- Finish the permissions system, and by that I mean, do the other 50% of the 'Android on Desktop' like permission system Flathub/Flatpak has started. Add APIs for apps to check if they have permissions they want, add APIs for apps to request permissions, list what permissions app are asking for before install, if permissions change with an app then list the changes, make it easy to grant/revoke permissions, notify the user when something is blocked by a lack of permissions (nothing is a greater source of user frustration than something failing silently without explanation), etc etc.

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Sounds like a great idea. There's room for free/open source stuff alongside 'pay what you want' stuff, and paid/subscription based commercial software, it all has it's place on Linux in my opinion and the more developers are encouraged to engage with Flatpak, Flathub and the Linux ecosystem, the better.

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