Is “AI” just a meaningless buzzword? Like, is there actually anything in common between this hurricane tool, the LLM chatbots, and the image-generation stuff?

Now glue joycons to the side and batteries to the back to make a steam deck!

Good news! I’ll often pick up random indies from itch.io and nothing kills my enthusiasm like on-screen buttons being the only controls. It was fine when I was emulating pokémon over a decade ago, but for anything where you need passable reactions it’s just not a good experience. Touchscreen controls are for when you want to be looking at what you’re clicking, if you’re looking elsewhere then you need physical buttons so you can feel where you’re clicking.

Do we think it’ll be ready when they can give it specs to match the steam machine so there’s a single target for developers, or the more exciting option of building something arm-based using whatever fex wizardry is going on in the frame?

Because we, the techies, are a tiny minority. There are billions of comparatively clueless users who can apparently easily be scammed into installing malware. Governments and banks will be exerting significant pressure on Google to make their phones “secure”, and they can actually threaten them. I don’t see this as some grand conspiracy to destroy the hobbyist scene, Google just doesn’t care about the individual.

It was the first android tablet that was actually decent

Not something I noticed from several years of use. Every touchscreen I’ve used has behaved the same since they moved from resistive to capacitive!

Has there ever been a good one?

The original nexus 7 was pretty good (for the first few years of its life)

Don’t go for a whole guide, pick something smaller like all the recipes or a map of Dry Dry Desert (two things I remember printing off back in the day!)

Well if you add the games to steam then you can launch them all from game mode

Here is a good resource for whether you can install another OS on a particular Chromebook

The official itch launcher works on Linux too!

They get what I have so when they have questions I’m more likely to know, and if I don’t I have a machine with me that I can check. It was Mint when I was still learning, now it’s Fedora Atomic. Or for the really tech-averse, ChromeOS Flex.

I have an xbox controller (I think it’s a “series” one, but could be a “one” one, they look the same) and it seems to run fine with a steam deck. There’s probably a little latency, but it’s pretty negligible.

It’s basically what the steam deck does, and that’s very much for Linux noobs!

Amusingly the last Signal outage I remember was actually caused by Musk when he tweeted “use Signal” and so many people did that it took down their sign-up servers

I’ve only been a Linux user for a couple of years though so I’ve got no excuse!

XFCE is fine, it seems to largely behave and while it doesn’t have any bells and whistles it can do everything it tries to do fine. Gnome on the other hand… everything I wanted it to do required a plugin which had since been broken by a new version. Plasma seems great so far!

I just moved to Plasma from XFCE and my first thought was wow, this runs fine on old hardware, why have I been suffering through the 2010 experience when I could have had features all this time!?

Maybe they’d only ever used it headless?