Very cool, sincere thank you for the clarification and even on-boarding process. Installed this way, feels quite efficient. Will dig a big deeper while using them more.

We need a complete CoreBoot + OSS silicon-chips + OSS firmware + all-community / all-commercial dual production lines.

Where are the gaps?

Both global and EU store still sell things. They are still active on social media. I have plenty of their products (PinePhone with keyboard case, PinePhone Pro with LoRA add-on, Pinecil, PineTab2, PineNote, PineTime) which I use often, some on a daily basis, other weekly basis. They just work. As others have pointers out they don’t do software, “just” hardware with some community fostering. If tomorrow they announce another product (not sure what that could be as, simply by listing now they are covering already a LOT) and if I need it, I would buy it without much hesitation.

Now I imagine if they don’t have anything new they don’t announce much, which is reasonable. They might not need the “buzz” as long as they manage the sales in their pipelines.

I would honestly like to see more products but arguably they already have good coverage. Let me ask you then, what do you wish they would add to their existing product line?

Ah! Wonderful. I’m always a bit reluctant with system-wide install so I’ll put AM on hold for now but probably tinker with AppMan/dbin soon.

Out of curiosity, one of the app I’d usually get outside my package manager is Chromium. I’d usually download the latest build from https://download-chromium.appspot.com/ so in this situation, how would you do it using any of those solutions? Would it support adding extensions e.g https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/immersive-web-emulator/cgffilbpcibhmcfbgggfhfolhkfbhmik that I need for development?

PS: note to self, go through bash history to see which failed apt install attempts could be replaced with such tools.

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.

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.

Also this is a good way to re-consider integration back, e.g. generating .desktop files for /.local/share/applications/ when using KDE rather than having to manually do it each time.

Hmmm very interesting thanks for the links and explanation!

I’m not “ready” for it yet so I’ve bookmarked all that (by adding a file in ~/Apps ;) but that’s definitely and interesting, and arguably neater solution.

Honestly I try to stick to the distribution package manager as much as I can (apt on Debian stable) but sometimes it’s impossible. Getting binaries myself feels a bit “wrong” but usually works. Some, like yt-dlp as I see in your list, do have their own update mechanisms. Interesting to consider stepping back and consider the trade off. Anyway now thanks to you I know there are solutions for a middle ground!

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.

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.

FWIW I installed Debian few times this weekend, both Sid and Bookworm, with a 2080Ti and iirc following the official documentation, e.g https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Debian_12_.22Bookworm.22 was enough, nothing exotic needed namely :

• adding contrib and non-free, updating, install drivers
• rebooting and sticking to X11, not Wayland (which for me with KDE Plasma didn’t work)

Another “trick” I use is having an ~/Apps directory in which I have AppImage, binaries, etc that I can bring from an old /home to a new one. It’s not ideal, bypassing the package manager, and makes quite a few assumption, first architecture, but in practice, it works.

I did more than 5 installs this weekend (for … reasons) and the “trick” IMHO is …

Do NOT install things ahead of actually needing them. (of course this assume things take minutes to install and thus you will have connectivity)

For me it meant Firefox was top of the list, VLC or Steam (thus NVIDIA driver) second, vim as I had to edit crontab, etc.

Quite a few are important to me but NOT urgent, e.g Cura (for 3D printer) and OpenSCAD (for parametric design) or Blender. So I didn’t event install them yet.

So IMHO as other suggested docker/docker-compose but only for backend.

Now… if you really want a reproducible desktop install : NixOS. You declare your setup rather than apt install -y and “hope” it will work out. Honestly I was tempted but as install a fresh Debian takes me 1h and I do it maybe once a year, at most, no need for me (yet).

It’s… Debian?

Ubuntu is based on Debian which doesn’t have snap by default AFAICT from bookworm/unstable. In fact it’s precisely why I switched back recently. Going from Debian to Ubuntu and now Debian again due to excessive bloatware and “worst” ways to deliver it IMHO.

Just ran a VR game for Windows just this morning, worked like a charm, didn’t tinker one minute (using Proton and SteamVR, Valve with NVIDIA, just for context).

Then you also read things like https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2024/08/21/linux-scores-a-surprising-gaming-victory-against-windows-11/ on non technical websites… and can’t help but wonder if it “will” be easier or… if it’s already done.

plain old Konsole

Come on now, it’s pretty active! Cf https://invent.kde.org/utilities/konsole/-/commits/master/?ref_type=HEADS 13hrs ago, a new feature weeks ago and https://konsole.kde.org/changelog.html

I’d clarify that the shear customizability of Linux is optional.

Take a SteamDeck with SteamOS versus a RPi with e.g Debian.

If you “just” play with the SteamDeck and you don’t tinker, well, it “just works”. In most, even though not all, normal situations, e.g plugging a screen, pairing a BT headphone, mouse, keyboard, etc it is solid. It has no problem even while using a compatibility layer like Proton for games themselves made for Windows. It even enable some tinkering thanks to its immutable OS and let the player switch to desktop mode. Not everything works but my personal experience since it’s been out has been pretty much flawless.

Now, take a RPi, with just as stable hardware, with Debian, even stable, and put on it some IoT device, make some weird modifications for it, try a bunch of stuff, remove package, tinker more, chances are it will still work. Tinker more, make stranger modifications to the point it becomes unstable. Is it Linux itself? I’d argue it’s not. I’d argue that instead because we CAN tinker we sometimes do then forget that it’s not the same context as something expected to run without hiccup because it’s been limited to basically the same verified usage.

So… IMHO Linux is even better than it is, we just shouldn’t confuse weird (and important) tinkering with how it can be actually used day to day.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain.

I did notice CTF on the description so I imagine “escaping” it is “harder” than with containers. I recently participated to SplinterCon which included a “block-a-thon” (cf day 2 of https://splintercon.net/brussels/ ) to try to escape a limited environment, approximately simulating the limited Internet access of some political regime. It might be interesting in that context too.

Could also be interesting then to distinguish which defaults are changed compared to Docker ones or examples for which nsjail is currently preferred.

No and to be honest without a clear comparison with the advantages AND disadvantages with the most popular solutions, e.g containers with implementations like Docker or Podman, I don’t think I ever will.

Obviously it’s nice to have alternatives which I bet can be interesting in specific use cases but without a way to understand in which specific situations it would be worth investing to learn the tooling, principles, etc then I would, naively, stay with the status quo.

TL;DR: any comparison vs Docker?