Rainy

okay sure, there's a steam deck refresh, the funny ~$650 OLED model announced today, great news if you've got the money and don't already have a steam deck.

but also, and i've seen less fanfare around this - they've dropped the price of the LCD models to ~$400 (and the dock (which doubles as a little stand, and is designed in such a way that prevents strain on the USB-C port) to $80).

i feel like you could do a lot worse for the hardware spec of the deck for $400 as a portable Linux computer that Actually Fucking Works. and this is me saying this. this is the only modern x86 end-user product that strikes me as genuinely worthwhile.¹

on the portability angle, i've been able to toss this thing (in its hard-shell case) into a backpack with a bluetooth keyboard and a mouse, set up at a friend's place and plug into an unused HDMI monitor and have a nice ergonomic working setup where i'm not dealing with neck strain looking down at a laptop. desk space permitting, i've even got a tiny little extra screen on the deck itself!²

on the "a Linux PC that Actually Fucking Works" angle, this is a preconfigured KDE desktop that's had reasonable decisions made around it, running atop a distro that happens to be Arch-based but you never actually have to think about that part, as they push full-image updates for the base system to you that you leave immutable -- you instead install things through "Discover" app-store-ish frontend to Flatpak, which does some light containerization of each application for additional security (you can poke at the permissions boundaries with a program called Flatseal, which you can also find in Discover). this all means you genuinely don't have to hit the terminal at all, or become a Linux Person, to use it effectively. from my perspective³, in 2023, the desktop-mode of SteamOS is doing a better job than every other mainstream Linux distribution⁴ of being a normie-accessible Linux desktop. (which is a fucking afterthought for this machine! it's positioned as a game console!!)

the drivers all work, all preconfigured for the hardware at hand. in fact, a lot of major contributions to the Radeon drivers for Linux are being made by Valve engineers these days. they're clearly pouring a whole bunch of labor into making this little guy a good experience. in a world where Windows and Mac and their ecosystems are ever-increasingly becoming different kinds of toxic slime, "enshittifying," whatever you wanna call it, it can be good to just have a little reliable computer that doesn't get worse with every update. (dear future-Valve, please don't make me regret saying this)

and spec-wise.. 16GB DDR5 RAM, a custom Ryzen APU that's efficient and good enough to play modern games (if not on the highest of settings -- it is a portable after all. i think the discrete GPU in my desktop is itself the size of the entire fucking deck), and yeah, it does games too, and it's got a nice gameing interface, and a Wayland compositor they made specifically for playing games, and their Proton fork of WINE for better compatibility with games without Linux ports... those are all the selling points, i don't need to go over them here.

i guess what i wanna outline is, hot damn is it nice to have a portable desktop PC that i don't hate, that i didn't have to set up myself. you can just purchase a working Linux desktop that you don't have to maintain yourself! The Year of the Linux Desktop is upon us, and it's taken the form of a value-add on a weird game console.

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1. i've got an x86 allergy so severe that i've been running a PowerPC desktop as my main machine for the past four years (though i just recently moved to ARM)

2. okay, so i mentioned i use it to do work from friends' places? how does that happen? you do have to hit the terminal to set this one up at the minute, but it's possible to set up Tailscale on this: https://tailscale.com/blog/steam-deck/ (what's Tailscale, you ask? well, cohost's full of folks in their 30s, right -- remember Hamachi? it's Hamachi for zoomers). once the deck is on the tailnet with my work machine, i can remote-desktop into it (install Moonlight or KRDC or TigerVNC or whatever you need from Discover)

3. and at this point in my life i'm a gentoo sicko. and i've got regrets, and opinions, and other regrets, and lots and lots of experience with running and building Linux distributions. it's very rare to find me happy with an off-the-shelf software configuration.

4. Ubuntu and Fedora keep getting worse, largely owing to GNOME being up their own ass and Canonical and IBM having shareholders. maybe OpenSUSE is still fine? i hear they're doing some big things this year.