• 3 Posts
  • 106 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • It would have to be game changing! Get it?!? “Game” changing?!? Ah, whatever.

    Awful puns aside, it really would have to be a major step up in hardware. The Steam Deck is a platform developers (plus accessory makers and open source devs for emulators and stuff) seem to care about. Even modern AAA game devs will often try to make their games playable on it even if they have to compromise. (It may not be technically possible or economically feasible but devs seem to all want to support the Deck even if their bosses have other plans.)

    At some point, it’ll be impossible for the Deck’s hardware to handle recent games and then we’ll all upgrade to something that sets a new baseline and strikes a better balance — whether Steam Deck 2 or a competitor. But my guess is that it’s going to be more about hardware generations than something Microsoft does. (Proton might be nearly perfect by the time Microsoft makes a decent controller interface and they seem to be focused on shoehorning AI into Notepad and Paint instead of doing useful things.)




  • I don’t have Linux on a tablet right now but my first thought was that you might want to check into what Steam Deck users are doing with “Desktop Mode.” It has a touchscreen and virtual keyboard so it’s essentially a tablet-like experience (though it has touchpads and a few buttons, obviously, and isn’t a tablet). It runs KDE by default, which I’m not as familiar with as Gnome, but it might have more users than any other GNU/Linux touchscreen product.

    Last time I had a Linux tablet, there were also some Firefox/Chrome/Gnome extensions that made it more touch-friendly. Like instead of selecting text, one finger swipe scrolled, two-fingers zoomed in, etc. like a typical tablet. Not sure if that’s still an issue. But if you do run into an issue, it might already be solved by an extension.

    Hopefully, someone has more up-to-date advice. The tablet I had (and probably still have in a drawer somewhere) was an experimental Ubuntu Touch device and there’s been huge strides since then.


  • My only problem with both designs in your images is the colors. It’s a pretty standard part of UI design (in real life and on computers) that “red means cancel” and “green means continue.” Apple using blue is no big deal and I’m 90% sure they just use a user chosen “highlight color.” (Maybe Gnome as well?) But cancel or delete or similar things should probably be red or another color that signals “Stop.”

    I’ve always thought Bootstrap, the web design library, has a good set of base colors. Red means danger. Light blue means info. Green means yes or success. Yellow means warning. Other buttons are a darker blue — basically the highlight color. (Not saying they chose the best version of those colors. Just that the general idea is consistency and what users most naturally expect.)



  • I prefer the PS5/SteamDeck joystick layout to the Xbox/Switch layout but I’m addicted to back paddles now — I even got 3rd party joycons for Switch that have two (and also are as thick as the Steam Deck so it feels familiar when I jump over to play Zelda or whatever).

    They’re BINBOK controllers and have been great for my needs in handheld mode. The back paddles aren’t fully programmable and I think there’s some features missing but nothing I really notice. And they’ve probably lasted longer than the official Joycons.

    What I’d really like is a controller that’s basically just the deck without a screen.


  • Probably because Windows is best suited for games and cookie-cutter corporate applications while basically every supercomputer, cluster, etc. runs Linux. Professors aren’t usually running games or cookie-cutter business software so why not? If your one-off, experimental research code is going to ultimately be run on a more powerful system running Linux, why write it on Windows and waste time debugging once you try to run it for real?


  • Or maybe the two countries with a larger population than the United States have significantly lower per capita income and so fewer people own desktop/laptop computers. Most of the world probably has, at most, a smartphone.

    If anything, Brazil seems like the outlier on the that map. You’d expect the U.S. to have the most computers. But Brazil and China are roughly similar in terms of income.



  • My default move is to map the L3 and R3 clicks to two of them. (I even unmap the actual stick clicks sometimes because I click them by accident a lot.)

    I also find it useful in games where the situation changes and A B X & Y completely change what they do. Like if a game is mostly exploring but sometimes in a car/plane/spaceship/whatever, I’ll map the back buttons and use them when I’m in the secondary situation. (There’s lots of other examples of games that temporarily switch genres on you here and there and using the back buttons helps me remember the controls.)


  • I think it’s perfectly possible to use Mint, Ubuntu, or Fedora without the terminal. But a lot of online tutorials are like, “Just run this command.” because it’s faster.

    I’m an experienced terminal user but I know with my Steam Deck, I barely ever use it. Really the only time is when I want to update packages quicker than using the GUI tool. But you could successfully use a Steam Deck without ever launching into Desktop mode, much less opening a terminal.


  • I use mine a ton. I actually prefer it (or Switch) for 90% of games. I have a PS5 and gaming PC and I actually bought the PlayStation Portal because as it turned out, I just like the format more than playing on TV. (I know about Chiaki — the Portal is seamless so I can hand it to a kid without getting them set up first and it never really disconnects.)

    I think in part, it’s just a function of age. I don’t necessarily have uninterrupted time for big, cinematic games that work best on TV. Half of them have a 2h intro before you can even play the game. So, I end up playing games like Hades where I can get a few runs in and stop if I’m interrupted.



  • Yeah, then he probably was mixing things up (either who was mayor or when he did what where). I doubt he’d be talking about the Ebola outbreak since we only had 4 cases in the U.S. I think it was the biggest Ebola outbreak ever in West Africa but unless the mayor of Detroit’s duties include being the super secret Global Emergency Epidemiologist, not sure why he’d talk to him about that.

    Just an aside: it’s kind of crazy that we had SARS, MERS, the Ebola outbreak, multiple Avian flus, swine flu, and several more since 2000 and COVID-19 is the one that spread around the world and killed the most people. It really illustrates how a relatively low mortality rate — I think SARS and MERS were 30%-40% and COVID-19 was like 2% — can be worse overall if it’s transmissible enough between humans.


  • I’m not turning a blind eye to it. I know he (and Trump) are sundowning. My personal opinion is that Trump is worse off just based on how they both were in the 90’s or 2000’s. Like, look up a video of Trump on Leno or Letterman and he’s not rambling on or angry like he is now. Biden always had “gaffes” or whatever you want to call them.

    Everyone their age declines. To me, Trump is showing some of the early Alzheimer’s signs with the anger and the non-stop rambling (which he didn’t do in the past). Biden seems like he’s aging in the way where, if you were his kids, you’d stop letting him drive and be concerned but he’s substantially the same person he was 10 or 20 years ago (even if that included verbal gaffes).