So “warm plugging” is a thing - it means a piece of hardware is detachable while the machine is asleep.

I’m a monthly donor to KDE EV and to the Mozilla Foundation.

Kubuntu

In cases like what you listed I believe they normally mark it as playable with a note that the button names might not align.

Yeah, I think their rating of unsupported is correct. It’s pretty easy to play with the default configuration though (touchpad as mouse).

Which one of the three games I listed are you talking about?

I don’t want to argue the semantics of whether or not it is a handheld PC

And yet that’s exactly what you’re doing, and missing the forest for the trees as you do so…

If it’s “just a handheld PC,” how do I setup cups as a service that starts on boot?

The answer: as a minimal change I have to enter developer mode and understand that the next update will wipe that away. (If I want to use it for this purpose regularly, it’d be better to install another OS, at which point you might as well call the Switch a handheld PC too.) This is a limitation of the Deck, but it’s a very intentional one. It’s a gaming appliance first and foremost, which makes the comparison to other gaming appliances apropos.

Are “Steam Deck has X many games that Valve have certified on it, up from Y 17 minutes ago” articles particularly useful? Only really to people who are using them for ad revenue. But that doesn’t make the comparison to the Switch a bad one. In fact, comparing the Steam Deck to the Switch is a better comparison than comparing it to a gaming desktop.

Form factor very clearly isn’t the only consideration though, and when combined with the other factors it becomes very useful. The comparison here is of two devices for playing video games, and form factor makes a difference there. Back in the early 2000s, people weren’t really comparing the GBA to the PS2, the Xbox, the GameCube and the Dreamcast. These simply were different markets. Likewise, the Steam Deck and the Switch are more comparable than the Deck and the PS5 specifically because of form factor, even though as computing devices the Deck and the PS5 are more similar (both are running custom AMD Zen 2 CPUs with custom RDNA 2 GPUs, for example). The Steam Deck is, in practice, only slightly more “a PC” than the PS4 is.

Doesn’t matter for how they’re measuring. None of those games are marked as either Verified or Playable by Valve, so they’re not included in these statistics, despite working fine on the Deck.

Yeah, a few examples from my own Deck include Rymdkapsel (works perfectly, not verified or marked as Chromebook Ready), Surviving Mars (playable, but not rated) and Turmoil (explicitly unsupported, but works fine).

Are you trying to equivocate motherboard form factor (a specific terminology used for the sizes and locations of screw-holes in motherboards) with entirely different types of device that happen to have similar shapes and sizes?

The motherboards in those computers could have the same motherboard form factor, but that doesn’t make comparing a rack-mounted router with specific design constraints to your gaming PC a reasonable thing to do. Your gaming PC is, most likely, far better at its job than a router in a data centre would be, and the DC router is most likely far better at its job than your gaming PC would be, because they’re totally different categories of device. Likewise, a Wifi router and an Xbox are totally different categories of device. Even discussing just form factor alone, the Wikipedia summary you posted includes:

other physical specifications of components

An Xbox lacks many of the things considered as basic functionality for a router, such as a second Ethernet port. Likewise, a wifi router tends to lack many of the things considered crucial for modern game systems, such as a GPU and video output. In both cases it’s perfectly possible (at least in theory, though I’m sure at least one person has actually done it) to reconfigure one for the alternative purpose, but that is utilising the device well outside of its design parameters.

What I’m saying is that the PC comparison simply misses the point, whereas the Switch comparison is a comparison of how the devices are intended to be used (and for the most part actually used). The Steam Deck is not a good device for running a development environment or most of the things one thinks of as “PC tasks.” It’s not designed for that.

One can use it in that way, but one of the biggest differences between the Steam Deck and its “more pc-ish” competitors like the Ally is that Valve has done a lot of work to make desktop mode unnecessary for the vast majority of users. The user experience puts it much more directly in competition with the Switch than with other handheld PCs, and that’s a strength of the Deck, not a weakness.

One can install Linux on a Switch too, at which point it’s basically an ARM-based handheld PC. But a reviewer who reviewed the Switch for its power as a handheld Linux machine would be missing the point too.

While the Steam Deck is technically a handheld PC, as a Linux enthusiast who’s tried to use the desktop mode for laptoppy things… No it isn’t.

It works in a pinch (well… Not for my job, but I also don’t expect Valve to put lxd into SteamOS), but the comparison to the Switch (which I also own) is much better than comparing it to even a gaming laptop. In fact, if I were the type of person to emulate stuff (which, don’t worry Nintendo, I totally am not), I would say my Steam Deck makes a better switch than my switch. If I’d emulated a Switch to play Mario Kart (which obviously I haven’t) I’d say it was a better experience on my Steam Deck than on my switch.

You could build some additional sidings

I think this is mostly just practical. Tainted kernels are more problematic for a variety of reasons these days (thinking about things like TPMs), so moving that stuff out of the kernel lets NVIDIA keep their proprietary drivers without sacrificing certain use cases.

I’m more interested in seeing NVIDIA hardware usable with mesa, which would be a much longer term project.

Yeah I bought a 6 pack of them when I bought my pixel slate. They expired after I’d used two

Probably because it’s a template and somebody copied and pasted without remembering to paste as plaintext

Yeah, and when we find cases like this the best thing for the industry would be for a company or two who are very affected (e.g. Red Hat) to step up and offer a trustworthy person payment for maintaining it.

Michigan Intensifies