Have you ever noticed how vendors who ship computers with Linux often do so at the same or greater cost than Windows?

Yeah… Even when going to Linux exclusively, it’s usually better to pick the Windows device.

[Update - 12/26/2025] - Taiwanese outlet, CNA, has received a statement from ASUS regarding the DRAM rumor and stated that it currently has no plans to invest in a memory wafer fab.

https://wccftech.com/asus-enter-dram-market-next-year-to-tackle-memory-shortages-rumor/

Lesson hopefully learned: Don’t link to the regurgitation of a regurgitation of a regurgitation of a Persian language article. At the very least go back the first English version of the article chain.

Didn’t realize Mattermost still existed.

Is Steam off Flathub that complicated on Slackware?

Or they keep the prices up because consumers got used to them.

A few weeks ago journalists said that complete systems will not be affected short term because OEMs order RAM and SSDs a year in advance.

So what is it?

https://www.stardock.com/products/start11/

Costs money but works with only minor quirks when switching between iGPU and dGPU.

What about WebKit? That makes 3 browser engines although it’s primarily used on Apple devices.

WebKit-GTK is fine, Ladybird and Servo also exist.

The vehement defense of a shitty, proprietary Microsoft browser here is astonishing.

I mean the choice between only two browser engines isn’t what I would call “free” though, especially since Firefox is also pulling more and more bullshit.

Gecko and Chromium are both fully free software. Old Edge isn’t.

He made a good overall point.

No. It was a very weak defense of proprietary software.

Just saying he is wrong doesn’t actually make him wrong.

Just saying that doesn’t make it wrong but the “argument” is wrong.

Doing so reduced the amount of diversity in rendering engines

It killed the last proprietary engine. It made the web more free.

That’s a loss for the Web as a whole.

You’re wrong.

Moving from a shitty proprietary web renderer to participate in Chromium development was an improvement.

It’s not really enshittification when “Google reads your mail” has been the entire point since the launch of GMail. Relevant ads, grouping mails into topics, find spam, etc. has always been the selling point of GMail.

Sounds like they’re leaving the option open for Android developers to make their APK distributions compatible with Steam to play on Frame.

It was first reported months ago that Valve is involved with Waydroid (Android app compatibility for Linux with Wayland) and then at the Frame announcement confirmed to ship on Frame.

This could also potentially mean that Steam itself comes to Android (at least in the EU) to allow cross-buy and cross-progression.

Google is developing a Linux runtime for Android, Valve are making an ARM version of Steam, so it could be usable but I don’t think it’ll light the world on fire.

Early Valve was totally pro Windows tech. Back when HL1 launched, it was the first idTech-derived game with a Direct3D renderer out of the box (yes, Doom95 existed but that wasn’t the default, DOS was). OpenGL was still a massive force on Windows and yet Valve decided that what their fork of GLQuake needed was a Direct3D renderer.

Valve’s stance only changed after Microsoft’s attempt to force Windows Store on everyone and Valve’s subsequent “Faster zombies” experiment (because DirectX was stagnant as well).

I’ve seen a lot of folks waiting for this to make the switch, it’s silly but having a familiar name attached to it gives them a sense of comfort, and SteamOS is solid for what it is.

And should they be not native English speakers, they’ll wonder why the desktop is only in English, why they can’t even check the spelling of their native language. Or why playback of WebM videos glitches.

I really like my Steam Deck and actually use it as desktop PC from time to time but you can tell desktop mode is an afterthought. Traditional Linux distributions are actually a better choice for regular users. Valve luckily open sources and upstreams everything of SteamOS other than the actual Steam client, so it’s not like SteamOS has some special sauce nobody else gets.

It’s very difficult to justify the additional effort of implementing a platform that serves exclusively the playerbase with a ~3% market share

And yet there are many games that have a native Mac port and no native Linux port, such as the recently released Ball Pit: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2062430/BALL_x_PIT/

How is it to justify that a platform with an even smaller install base gets the native port? Two ports, actually, because ARM and Intel are both natively supported. Why aren’t Mac users expected to use Whisky to play Windows games but Linux users are expected to rely on Proton’s battery munching API translation? Apple is even worse in breaking compatibility, so game developer cannot even expect their Mac games to still run in five years.

The problem isn’t “the playerbase with a ~3% market share” because 3% is still millions upon millions users in absolute numbers given the massive PC install base. According to https://www.theverge.com/pc-gaming/618709/steam-deck-3-year-anniversary-handheld-gaming-shipments-idc there were 6 million Steam Decks sold last February and Linux is still rising in Steam’s Hardware Survey. According to a bit of googling, Steam hat 1.5% Linux users that month, a third of that using SteamOS.

I’m too lazy right now to extrapolate even a rough ballpark of the overall Linux user base on Steam but even if we assume that a big number of Steam Deck buyers doesn’t use their device, I don’t think a user base north of 10 million is too far fetched.

So the problem isn’t the 3% number, it’s the developer’s / publisher’s attitude to expect that Proton just works without any QA and that Mac users are somehow valuable while the Linux peasants are not.

Leave a bad review then.

Also save data is not shared between the versions, so if you’ve already sunk a lot of time into playing the buggy native port, switching to proton requires you to start over.

To mess this up one as to be a special kind of stupid. It literally only requires to set up a few paths on the SteamWorks web UI: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloud?l=english#steam_auto-cloud

Linux just barely broke 3% share. As a company, whose goal is to make money, would you focus on what 97% of your base uses, or the 3%?

If your game is mobile friendly, treating Steam Deck not as an afterthought may be beneficial. Proton is not perfect. It has bugs, it loads a whole fake Windows environment into memory and API translation costs CPU and battery.

Further more, the company needs to spend QC resources for 1-2 versions of Windows, vs the multitude of Linux distros

That’s completely wrong. For games, the developer only needs to target whatever the latest Steam Linux Runtime is. It’s 100% identical across all distributions where the Linux version of Steam runs. That’s its entire point. Steam Linux Runtime is a more stable target than playing catch up with yearly Proton releases.