“But Apple did it with absolutely 0 consequences”

I don’t think it’s a super common sentiment across all crowds, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some groups see the benefits Apple got by switching and wanted that for themselves.

One of the benefits is only needing to have 64 bit libraries. With this change most people can drop their 32 bit stuff.

Bits are literally “binary digits”. So more bits means bigger numbers. The reason you get more memory, is because when the code says “put this data in memory spot (number bigger than 32 bits)” … you cant with only 32 bits. How do you represent that number.

Imagine that you want to put something in memory spot 150, but you only have 2 digits. You cant. Bumping it up to 4 digits, you can say “put this data in memory address 0150” and its fine. “bigger numbers == more addresses == more places to put stuff”

So anywhere you need a number bigger than 32 bit represents, you can either just use a 64 bit number, or do a bunch of shenanigans. Those shenanigans require extra calculations inevitably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,147,483,647 If youve ever seen this number before, it’s probably because of a 32 bit limitation. It shows up all sorts of weird ways.

Bigger numbers here aren’t about taking up more space, just representing literally bigger numbers. “9999” only takes up 2x as much “space” as “99” but it repesents a number ~100x bigger.

Sorry, I’m tired and rambling.

Another solution I’ve played around with, but it didn’t work super well… would be krfb-virtualmonitor

KDE’s remote framebuffer tool for making a virtual monitor to VNC into. For me it didnt do what i wanted because I have 3 other monitors and I couldn’t assure that things would launch directly into the virtual monitor… and it doesnt support any sort of dynamic resizing… But there might be something there.

I also hope that this kind of stuff improves in the future because of the Steam Frame. In Tested’s video, he calls out that he can only stream games at 21:9 if his 21:9 monitor is on. And other VR friends have pointed out the desire to dynamically resize content in the headset. So maybe this will get better in the future.

For me the issue is that i have a OLED 21:9 desktop, and streaming to my Steam Deck risks burn in on my desktop, and annoying black bars on my steam deck… I’d love to just have a 1280x800 faux monitor to stream to my steam deck, nothing needs to be visible on the desktop (headless, like you want).

But anyway tl;dr - krfb-virtualmonitor vaguely worked but not for what i needed. Virtual monitors are definitely a possibility

https://www.amazon.com/DIOOEER-Dummy-Headless-Adapter-Emulator/dp/B0HBQJQSDS

This might not be what you want specifically, but this is the kind of thing that came to mind. Basically a stub that feeds EDID data into the GPU so it THINKS there is a physical monitor with any resolution you want connected.

There are more advanced models out there that will allow you to custom program the EDID that it feeds, so you can use higher resolution or frame rate or whatever.

The home assistant voice is the mic and speaker but isn’t a system itself. You attach it to your existing home assistant. If you don’t have home assistant set up you’ll want to look into that first.

Well sorry. If it works for glxgears there is probably some other weird interaction happening with Steam + Gamescope + Game launching. (you could try to add glxgears as a non steam game to further push the boundaries of if anything will run from steam).

I don’t have an nvidia GPU so I couldn’t even possibly comment on the state of that situation, but I wish you the best of luck.

Out of curiosity, what happens if you try to run gamescope from the terminal to just run anything (not even having proton in the mix).

For example:

gamescope -f -W 2560 -H 1440 -r 144 --force-grab-cursor --mangoapp – glxgears

If this doesn’t run, you should get some log lines at least to let you know whats on fire with gamescope.

I feel like “Japanese games” is pretty vague. Square Enix and Fromsoft are some of the largest Japanese studios out there and their games work great on Linux.

I’m so impressed by what the jellyfin roku team has come up with over the years.

According to Debian users, “stable” means “unchanging” and not “doesn’t crash or have bugs” … If you still ship 100% of the changes but just delay them by 2 weeks, you have the same number of changes. So by the Debian definition of “stable”, no, it is the exact same as arch.

By the everyone else definition where “stable” means “doesn’t crash or have bugs”, then also no. Shipping buggy code 2 weeks later doesn’t reduce bugs. And if you use the AUR at all, then things get worse, I’ve found, as the AUR pkgbuilds expect dependencies to match current up to date Arch repos.

tl;dr - no

An “official” arch package? The arch package is packaged by the arch maintainers. https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/discord

The maintainers of the PKGBUILD are all arch maintainers, which just downloads the generic .tar.gz file discord provides and puts it in all the places you need for you.

The “official” arch packages are just PKGBUILDs like the AUR, except prebuilt, managed (and signed) by the arch team.

Unfortunately that is the target frame rate for steam deck most of the time.

So runs like crap is more like “runs as intended”

Sure.you figure out which parts to scale when.

But point being that it quickly pivots into automating away tasks you were previously doing by hand.

I didnt notice at first but a friend pointed it out: it’s the same game loop as cookie clicker. This is just an idle/clicker game. You start manual dealing/clicking. And then you automate it. and it turns into a game of managing your automations rather than actually clicking yourself.

“I was expecting it to be a joke 20 minutes then throw away game, but holy crap, this is actually pretty deep and well thought out.” - Also my friend.

My arch install is 10 years old at this point.

I would be interested to know what inspired the need to “feel fresh” from OP. Is this an extremely underpowered laptop that just can’t handle having a few extra packages installed? Is it the Windows bad habit just making them perceive it as “needing a cleanup” ?

If you have hard drive space, unloaded packages are generally never loaded and just take up storage, not CPU/memory (though you should check to see what services are running too).

Also importantly. pacman -Qdtq and pacman -Rns are 2 separate commands. “Qdtq” means “Query, dependencies, unrequired, quiet” (“quiet” makes it so just the package names are output, to be more neatly piped into the second command. This queries the unrequired dependencies (ie, packages that were installed along with another package, but are no longer used by another package), and lists them “Rns” means “Remove, no backup, recursively” . and the - at the end means “Use the values from the first half of the pipe”… This removes the packages listed, skips creating any .pacsave fields for config files, and then once the package is removed, checks all of ITS dependencies to see if they can be removed as well.

For this command, a “dependency” is any package that is installed as a dependency of another package (and hasn’t been directly installed manually). If you installed package X, and it brought in package Y and package Z, then uninstalled package X, and now youre worried about package Y and Z, this will find them and clear them out.

This also teaches us that if you uninstalled package X with pacman -Rs packageX , the s bit would make sure that package Y and Z were cleaned up at removal time in the first place.

But overall, there’s very little reason to reinstall arch unless you are running out of disk space due to how many obsolete packages you have hanging around and they are all explicitly installed so wont be cleaned up with the above method.

But worst case, if you manage to break things just by clearing out unused dependencies, you can just copy your files off and do a full reinstall. Your system works right now, why reinstall? Might as well try to improve it a little bit (if thats even needed) before giving up and starting over.

My take is that Windows experience sucks so bad that even HP won’t touch it. But “HP sucks” is a very valid point.

This can go one of two ways:

• More devices running SteamOS/Linux means more support, and helps Linux
• HP manages to make a device so bad that it makes SteamOS look bad, and hurts Linux

The second way shouldn’t even be possible, but never underestimate HP’s ability to make something worse than you thought possible.

Back in october I travelled for a lan party. I didnt bring my linux desktop with me, and just brought my steam deck and dock, and when I got there, borrowed a keyboard/mouse/monitor.

Then i swapped it to desktop mode, and the people I was with all commented on “Oh wow! it’s just like a regular computer”

One of them has explicited said they were fed up with microsoft’s BS and would swap their gaming PC over to steamOS once it’s formally released for desktop (they were uninterested in Bazzite and wanted an official Valve release for their gaming PC).

It’s immutable (you can’t break the core OS, there is no deleting system32). You can’t install packages (like you would from AUR), but have access to flatpaks.

Firefox is preinstalled, but anything from flathub is also available.

So yes, it has all the things most people need from a desktop OS, and is harder to break, and is supported commercially.

It has a desktop mode, I’ve never looked into whether you can boot to desktop by default. But I would imagine if they released a desktop friendly version, that would be an option.

SteamOS has a web browser.

It boots by default into Steam Big Picture mode, which is the SteamOS/HTPC style “intended to be used with a controller” layout.

In the power menu, it has a “switch to desktop” button that drops you to KDE. Firefox is pre-installed, and immediately available for use.

But also, it’s just an immutable OS with plenty of things installable via flatpak in KDE Discover. Which means Slack, Discord, Zoom, Chrome… all of the “desktop” things most people need are available.

You may not agree, but some people actually like the platform integration features that Galaxy and Steam and the like provide. Cloud sync and achievements and things that you may not care about are important to other people.

And then there’s just the whole “They said they would, and this is not very reassuring about their commitment to Linux users.”