How would y’all feel if Valve started selling PCs with their flavor of Linux on it?
Cheap ARM Linux laptops with all the gamez, GPIO, RJ-45, interfaces and space for 2-3 SSDs plz. And battery that holds 4 days (without gamez). And a choice between amoled and e-ink display options.
Having typed that, I suppose I won’t live to see that. Still, something like RPi or OPi, but with 2 M.2 interfaces, would be sufficient to assemble a convenient enough laptop. EDIT: and upgradeable memory
I love to check on crowdsupply what people can make, take a peek at this pc and laptop section:
Didn’t work out that well last time. But Valve got a lot better with Hardware since then.
I had an alienware Steam Machine and it was perfectly fine.
I think the criticisms of the Steam Machine suffered from what I would call the Verge Syndrome, which is only being able to comprehend things in a binary of instant success or failure, with no in between and no comprehension of other definitions of success.
Steam Machines were a low risk initiative that were fine for what the were. They did not have a ring of death, they didn’t have a blue screen, the OS itself was not glitchy, they didn’t lose money, and they didn’t fail any stated goals. They got the Proton ecosystem up and running, and got the ball rolling on hardware partnerships, which led to the smash success of the Steam Deck which would not have been otherwise possible.
And the software ecosystem, much of which they have funded/developed. In 2015, there was no proton, no DXVK, no vkd3d, and most important, no Vulkan.
No “if”, no “would”, we are millions of gamers using our (portable) PC with SteamOS running on it for few years now already.
As others have pointed out already, the SteamDeck is exactly that. I even travel with it, use desktop mode with my BT mouse&keyboard with a USB-to-HDMI adapter and work on large screen and do my presentations with video projectors.
If they were to sell a desktop too… well I have a Corsair ONE already, naming a gaming desktop (2080Ti) with a very small footprint and relatively silent. It is not easily upgradable due to how compact it is (but can be done) so if I were to have an equivalent of it from Steam and they were to keep on contributing to FLOSS it would probably be an even easier buy because I trust their RMA and I imagine I wouldn’t pay a “Windows tax” with it as it would “only” come with SteamOS.
TL;DR: I’d prepare my credit card.
I can’t remember the last time I bought a PC. I just incrementally upgrade over the years. I would be disappointed if they came out with a PC that only ran with their flavor though.
I personally think it is a very bad idea to “speed run development” of protocols. This will only lead to broken designs which will then cause each desktop top do things differently.
Wayland protocol development is slow and heavily debated in order to make sure everyone is happy implementing them. You want all desktop to use the same spec and this could lead to additional desktop specific protocols which would totally break compatibility.
In short, this is a really bad idea and should be rejected by everyone
I personally think it is a very bad idea to “speed run development” of protocols. This will only lead to broken designs which will then cause each desktop top do things differently.
and thus we have slow development which has resulted in absent designs, which has caused each desktop to do things differently to fill the gaps
I’ve been waiting for HDR and color management for like 5 years now and it feels like progress is dead in the water and now we’ve ended up with two custom implementations between KDE and gamescope. Heck, Kodi has supported HDR for ages when running direct to FB.
I know it’s tricky but geez, by the time they release an actual protocol extension we’ll already have half a dozen implementations that will have to be retooled to the standard, or worse yet we’ll have a standard plus a bunch of fiddly incompatible implementations.
HDR is a little more standardized as there was a meeting sponsored by Red hat to work it out
Eventually gnome will get support and maybe some others after that
I personally think it is a very bad idea to “speed run development” of protocols.
Stalling the development of protocols for nearly a decade is bad, too.
They should talk and meet somewhere between “Just develop in production!” and “I personally dislike it for non-technical reasons, so I will block it for everyone!”
Wayland development is crazy. The features it needs to include are those that Mac OS and Windows support. The debate should be around implementation, not the necessity. I’m still on Xorg in 2024 because of idiosyncrasies in Wayland that I don’t want to deal with, particularly regarding HiDPI and screen sharing. I personally wish Wayland were developed by the Pipewire team. Maybe something would get done.
The problem is that you could end up with protocols that certain desktops don’t want to implement.
That already happens constantly and I’d consider this the consequence of it, rather than the cause. You can only issue so many vetoes before people no longer want to deal with you and would rather move on.
The recent week of Wayland news (including the proposal from a few hours ago to restate NACK policies) is starting to feel like the final attempt to right things before a hard fork of Wayland. I’ve been following wayland-protocols/devel/etc from the outside for a year or two and the vibes have been trending that way for a while.
That depends on how you speed it up. For example, the Covid vaccines were “accelerated” compared to normal vaccines but they did that by spending additional money to run the steps of the process in parallel. Normally they don’t do that because if one of the steps fail they have to go back and those parallel processes are wasted. For the Covid vaccines, the financial waste was deemed worth it to get the speed up of parallelization.
The thing is Wayland needs consensus. You need the desktop developers to all agree to implement it. Asking KDE and Gnome developers to work together is like asking my cousin to agree with his ex wife. It takes the stars aligning and blessing to make it happen.
I love how people are complaining about Wayland not being ready or being unstable (whatever that even means, because it’s a protocol), while it’s the default on both GNOME and Plasma now, which combined probably run on more than 50% of Linux desktops these days.
And not only that, but Cinnamon, Xfce and others want to follow, so very clearly people who know a fair bit about desktops seem to disagree with Wayland being “not ready”.
Wayland is ready, ‘nobody’ else is ready to use Wayland. And by nobody, I mean any software packages that are doing anything at all out of the ordinary. Text expanders are a hot mess, remote control apps or dodgy, OBS screen capture is dodgy. We’re still playing catch up, support for Wayland in applications is honestly quite lacking.
I daily drive Wayland and I just have to ask, why is the clipboard and associated tooling so much worse‽ I just want input leap and neovim to both be able to properly read from and write to my clipboard. Input leap never can, and neovim has like a 50% shot at doing what I expect. Also I understand we’re moving away from x11 in general but why is there no replacement for x11 forwarding over ssh?? I know I’m a niche user, but it drives me crazy.
why is there no replacement for x11 forwarding over ssh??
There kind of is. The project you’re looking for is waypipe.
Knowing how these things tend to go, I predict you’ll try to use it for your use case and it just won’t work for whatever stupid reason. But I successfully used it to tunnel an app from my Debian machine at home to a Windows machine under WSL.
Ironically enough just 2 days ago I posted this https://lemmy.ml/post/20691536/13906950 namely how the 1st thing I do after installing NVIDIA drivers on Debian is disabling Wayland to rely on X11 simply because it doesn’t work.
Sadly that’s relevant here precisely because if we are talking about Valve it’s about gaming, if it’s about gaming one simply can’t ignore the state of NVIDIA drivers.
So… it might run on 50% on Linux desktops but on mine, which I also game on, it never worked once I had drivers for gaming installed. Consequently I understand “how people are complaining” because that’s exactly my experience.
I just yesterday tried Wayland under Arch with a 1070 after a long time. Single WQHD monitor though. Although X11 is really performant, Wayland was more smooth regarding KDE desktop effects. Witcher 3 (via Heroic) showed fewer microstutters and I will try some more proton games and other applications over the weekend.
I recently had to downgrade nvidia drivers from 560 to 550 because wakeup from sleep and hibernate would coredump. I read that this is fixed with 560 but only under Wayland. The developers definitely progressed on the nvidia front.
That I can understand, however I want to piont out that this is an Nvidia problem entirely. Wayland works perfectly fine under 2/3 hardware vendors.
Luckily, they finally open-sourced their shit so going forward, this will probably change. But chances are only from the 2000 series on, so it might take an upgrade for many folks…
Agreed, cf https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-nvidia-which-more-popular-linux and I do hope to have the choice soon.
Great, can you clarify your setup then? I might be able to learn from it.
That’s NVIDIA’s fault for refusing to adopt the agreed upon methods for rendering graphics on Linux. They tried to force EGLStreams on everybody for almost a decade while knowing GBM was better.
Absolutely, I’m not blaming any Wayland implementation about this, just giving my current situation as an example.
I do so because I imagine it’s a popular setup (according to https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-nvidia-which-more-popular-linux based on ProtonDB data, more than 60% Linux gamers had an NVIDIA GPU) and thus might prevent adoption.
I hope NVIDIA will fix that. Maybe a push from Valve would help.
Okay, is there a vnc server for wayland which can be autostarted and runs as a service? I havent found one and been looking for one for ages.
I think it kills the community. Making a Wayland window manager is so much harder to do than an X one. This monolithic solution solves the problems of Gnome, and KDE developers but less people want to be involved in windowing systems. I’m just being sad for X11, because, although it had nonsense features, it made linux desktop applications compatible with every desktop and we had huge variety of wms, compositors, desktop environments. Personally I’m still on X because of bspwm, but eventually there will be wayland-only features which will slowly kill X.
I think this is intentional. Call me paranoid.
Elaboration: we have seen in the past how RedHat’s and others’ policies would always not reach some part of Linux users, and those users still wouldn’t feel as second class citizens - it was just a matter of choice and configuration to avoid PulseAudio, systemd, Gnome 3, one can go on. That was mostly connected to escaping major environments and same applications working the same with all of them. Wayland, while not outright making Gnome the only thing to work, creates a barrier and doesn’t make that a firm given anymore.
It won’t be too long until using Linux without Wayland will cut you off from many things developed with corporate input - and that’s developers’ time paid as opposed to donated for or volunteered, so much more effort.
Now, there was a time when there weren’t that much corporate input and still things would get done. But it will be hard to fall back to it, when the whole environment, one can say, ecosystem, is so complex and corporate-dependent.
I would say this is the time of all those corps whose investment into Linux was so nice in 00s and 10s reaping what they sowed. This wasn’t all for free or to profit on paid support. And people who thought that it’s GPL that was such a nice license that “forced” corps to participate in FOSS projects they benefit from, with those projects remaining FOSS, are going to have to face reality.
Fat years are ending, so they are going to capitalize on their investments.
This has already happened with the Web 10 or more years ago, when Facebook, Google and others have suddenly gone Hitler, while now they are in terminal stages of enshittification.
Same process.
You can disagree, no need to insult me.
well, yes, but for e.g. I wrote a software piece that happened to be only a hotkey daemon. And I could write it with X. Now, hotkey daemons are no longer a separate thing unless the compositor exposes a grab API. Which never going to be in Wayland protocol, because they consider this client server architecture a problem.
Now instead of having Wayland covering everything, applications try to cover every desktops. In the good old times, it worked everywhere.
Why does flameshot need to handle different wayland desktops separately? Because simply the protocol doesn’t do it’s job. It doesn’t cover everything. It’s indeed not ready.
It won’t need to for much longer. The protocol for screen capture was merged weeks ago.
The change was 95% unnoticed for me. I looked at the session one day and thought “oh yeah, I have been using Wayland”. I don’t mess with many games or AI GPU stuff though, so it may be that more complex use cases result in a worse experience.
Wayland was subject to “first mover disadvantage” for a long time. Why be the first to switch and have to solve all the problems? Instead be last and everyone else will do the hard work for you.
But without big players moving to it those issues never get fixed. And users rightly should not be forced to migrate to a broken system that isn’t ready. People just want a system that works right?
Eventually someone had to decide it was ‘good enough’ and try an industry wide push to move away from a hybrid approach that wastes developer time and confuses users.
When people say its not ready, it’s normally some specific use case that worked in X11. So, they’re not wrong, but not right either.
They could start by making the Steam client be able to run in native Wayland
