Not here. More annoyed about them on side walks than bike lanes.

I wouldn’t worry too much about not knowing this. The steam deck is still relatively new and proton/dxvk is improving at such a blinding pace compared to the rest of Linux that my head is still spinning.

From my limited understanding, because of Arch’s rolling releases and Valve basing the steam deck on Arch. DXVK the compatibility layer for DX games to vulkan is managed by the distro. How this works is magic is still magic to me. I also think graphic drivers gets pushed on arch early too, since it’s a rolling release.

However I am in complete agreement, Arch isn’t beginner friendly, I personally like Manjaro and find it friendlier, but that’s like having a pet cat, and it’s a Bob cat. Sure it’s not a Lion, but it’s not a Kitty.

Have you not heard of the Steam Deck and Proton? Running MS APIs through a compatibility layer is the main goal for Linux gaming for the past few years, as it allows legacy games that had no hope in getting a Linux native port (or a terrible Linux port) to run in Linux, through the Proton Compatibility layer.

The apps I was using were running with DXVK, but due to a bug with intel iGPU driver which affects both Windows and Linux users, it didn’t work. A Intel Mesa update patched the bug, and my game worked better. When I moved back I was on an older driver and had to wait for it to be added in.

This comes from personal testing of games. There was a DX11 bug intel igpus where UE4 games crash instantly on boot. I was able to work around this by forcing dx12 in arch, but when I moved to fedora it wasn’t working, that was until about 2 months later after an update. Since I don’t know exactly how far behind fedora is in terms of graphics drivers I said it in ambiguous terms.

From my personal experience Arch is several months ahead of other distros and depending on the package and sometimes has everything you need already included for gaming.

I believe this is due to the Steam Deck.

However for ease of use, I agree there are other better distros. Fedora is only 2ish months behind arch in terms of graphics drivers and Ubuntu… has the latest proton from steam and lutris since proton isn’t installed from the local app stores.

They feel nice too. I love chamfering and filleting my designs when possible

Using my cells camera. Probably could’ve put more effort into the shot, but honestly don’t want any more eBay and etsy sellers to sell my stuff using my images.

Bad images are my defense against it

For the first time in over 10 years. LBP Vita. Wanted to record it and just got sucked back in.

Also playing LBP PSP but not getting as sucked in

I was more going for ease of use. If you are playing the latest and greatest then I agree you’d probably want Arch based or at the minimum Fedora based distributions. However if you are playing some more stable games, or I do titles and Ubuntu is fine. The updates will come.

My SO enjoys Zorin. Based on Ubuntu (like pop os) but had built in themes that makes the desktop environment easily customizable.

They found it easy to use and set up.

Anything locally sourceable. For me it’s a local company called Eureka Technologies that sells filament for a good price, but also in between batch filaments called Random for $8 that’s perfect for prototyping.

Other than that there is a local Canada Computer that sells ANet, Sunlu, and flash forge filament that works well enough.

Yup. We use to have Netflix and another service depending on what was coming out I.e. Disney plus when Mandi was releasing.

Now we just do the other service,

Please ignore the iPad usb c dock with the hdmi splitter connected to it.

Many reasons. Many of which is down to how Google as a company is reaching between the proverbial couch cushions to get at the loose change to make a profit. Default opt-in tracking, breaking ad-blockers, and probably more which I forgot about since I abandoned Chrome years ago.

I’ve tried Linux on my Surface Go. It was awful but not in the way you’d think it would be.

Pros: Honestly Linux made the anemic processor on it feel snappy again. I couldn’t play the newest games, linux is not a miracle worker. But compared to the bloated experience its better than Windows 10.

Cons: The smallest features didn’t work. SD reader never worked. Needed the Surface firmware to get the webcam to work and even then it was worse than it was on Windows. No good on screen keyboard software, and from my testing no DE had a good tablet mode.

Plus the giant red “unsecured” bar on boot was an eye sore.

I know Linux is has more compatibility on different Surface models so maybe it was just my Go. Or perhaps it was Manjaro. Either way if you don’t have a machine yet maybe look at other laptop/tablets

Hey my old monitor setup isn’t here.

Main display is normal with a laptop underneath, a vertical display to the left with a laptop display on the bottom under the first monitor

I do not consider a Mac for a gaming machine since it’s library is extremely limited compared to a pc.

With that said, a steam dec+Mac would be a good combo.

Depends on use case. As others have suggested please ensure that she is in the discussions.

M powered macs are both a blessing and a curse. They are fast, battery efficient, and have the ports you need with the Pro.

But they force you to be stuck with the storage amount you leave the store with, no ability to upgrade, and a reduced software library thanks to the removal of x86 code. If she plays games on her machine, she’s going to have a bad time.

Meanwhile, Windows machines haven’t changed much since 2015. Yes they can still do everything that they could, so software isn’t an issue and games play better than they ever did. But the cost is the amount of extra research you need to do to ensure you are getting a good machine.

My current windows laptop looked good on paper, but the battery life turned out to be worse than I expected and the speakers are so quiet I can’t hear them.

With that said. If you have the budget, the Macbook is the better work machine in my view. Especially if your are just typing. We are leveling out on storage and RAM requirements, so long as you get more than 256GB of storage (1TB recommended 512GB min) and at least 8GB of RAM anything you get will feel snappy and quick.

However if she intends to use it for more, I.e. games, video editing, photo shop, connecting other devices to it like a Garmin. Then you should ensure that whatever you get can do it. (Web browsing doesn’t count any more)

You can’t just fallback on Linux just yet, as there is only a few distros for it and software is still limited.

I miss Pebble. ePaper Display, week long battery life, and I can see all my phones notifications and reply to texts on the watch itself.

Made my old phone with bad battery life usable.

Garmin is the only “smart watch”/fitness tracker that does this and does it well. Wish it wasn’t as pricy for the week long battery devices.

I agree with you. But with how fractured the software and hardware space has become. Building native is expensive and time consuming.

For example a web browser is compatible with x86 amd64 armv7 aarch64 on any OS from Windows, Linux, Mac OS, iPad/iOS, and Android.

Which means that if I make 1 web page, I can support all these platforms at once.

The customer doesn’t care, they just want funny cat pics.

Building native requires both the hardware (especially if you need to build for the walled garden known as iOS), and frameworks. Where its just easier to recompile chrome, and bake in a Web Page, I.e. react native

Yup