DeX is infuriating. It’s forever almost good enough to fulfill its promise of being a truly mobile desktop but somehow it’s never gotten there.

So like ChromeOS? I wouldn’t say DeX is the greatest thing ever but whenever I get home from a stressful work day, sit down at my desk, and then realize that I left my backpack with the notebook at the door, I just plug the next best thing into my USB C dock and sometimes that’s my phone. Heck, I even did image editing with Krita from F-Droid once (the Android port has not been updated in years and is alpha quality, so the experience was bad but that’s on the Krita port not Android/DeX itself).

The biggest problem now is that most android apps don’t present correctly in desktop mode, don’t behave intuitively, and / or look like ass.

The quality of Android apps in desktop mode isn’t really dependent on whether they run on ChromeOS or DeX. If anything, the division in OS strategy into three operating systems at Google (don’t forget Fuchsia), caused needless developer fragmentation from both 3rd parties but also within Google.

Does that mean we’ll start seeing desktop apps like IDEs running in Android? How are you going to develop python on android? A linux container / VM?

Non-web applications on ChromeOS already run in containers. Developer mode (or however ChromeOS calls it) is just installing Debian in an LXC container.

That’s going to be so wasteful.

Have you ever tried browsing the web using Chrome? THAT’S wasteful on resources. A command line-only container for Python development is nothing by comparison.

Finally. ChromeOS has always been a dumb idea. Making an entire OS just to use sluggish web apps in Chrome. Who thought of that? As if Android could not do web apps. Then, years later, ChromeOS got “native” apps, in quotation marks because those were just Android apps. So a whole dedicated OS, just to launch Android apps in a compatibility layer. Some additional years later, ChromeOS got “native” games via Steam. Again, quotation marks, because those run in a Debian-based container.

Samsung DeX shows since many years that a Android with a desktop UI is a possibility.

Xbox is locked down and barely has any security issues on user hardware.

Not a single Microsoft game runs natively an Windows ARM.

Also it’ll be running windows

Xbox’s Windows is not the same as PC Windows.

So, Microsoft – how’s Windows for ARM coming?

Phil Spencer doesn’t know his employer makes ARM computers. Not even Microsoft Solitaire Collection has a native ARM port.

Probably not. The main culprit is probably the bundled, Chromium-based web renderer (CEF), not Steam itself.

My Steam Deck runs most games just fine.

Also the market is pretty saturated at this point. People who want a Switch got one years ago.

Backwards compatibility on both Xbox and PlayStation cause problems as well.

By default Steam Deck users are presented with the “Best on Deck” tab in the store which is for verified games only.

Deck allows for tinkering and unverified games but it’s not the default experience. As a daily Deck user you should be aware of that.

Nothing screams “Workstation” louder than Reddit Mobile.

It is ridiculous that many companies are still providing security patches every 3 months for maximum 2-3 years.

The expected change is about how long the actual updating process takes, not for how long updates will be provided. The article is not that long. You could have read it.

major Wayland compositors are still written in C

KWin is written in C++ but yes, it’s not a “safe” language.

something like this isn’t too unlikely to happen again.

With at least three mainstream implementations – KWin, Mutter, and wlroots – it’s highly unlikely that all would ever be equally affected by one bug.

https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube

Even a potato can run Linux so regardless of a distro it should be all fine.

A potato with a GPU only compatible with deprecated Nvidia drivers would still be just that and a hard pass for Linux.

Luckily this notebook is AMD-based, so should be fine. Maybe the WiFi card could cause trouble.

Always porting not-yet-upstreamed patches to new release kernels is additional work to the upstreaming work towards the latest development tree. The Valve engineers interviewed around the very first Steam Deck announcement said their goal with moving from Debian to Arch was to minimize the patchset maintenance burden. Their approach surely has that goal in mind. There are only two variants of Steam Deck with minor differences between them. If backporting patches from newer kernels is less work than forward porting their patches, they just stay with that version for a while. Updates to drivers for hardware they don’t use and filesystems they don’t use aren’t relevant to them anyway.

Them switching to PowerVR GPU is also interesting. Not sure if itis related to Qualcomm-ARM lawsuit.

They used Mali graphics previously.

there’s more to an operating system that a program needs other than the kernel(?)

Yes, and the other parts have other names, like the toolkit GTK or the C standard library glibc and all those things make up a Linux distribution, like Fedora.

android just uses the kernel

Yes and the kernel’s name is “Linux”. No other software is named “Linux”. Ask Linus Torvalds if you don’t believe me.