Homeless people aren’t living in the bus. Cool your stigmas. It’s weird your biggest concern is the people who need the most help. Life must be pretty good for you to attack those in need.
I did for a year in DC. There were some folks who were struggling - talking to themselves, intoxicated, fragrant. I sort of liked it. Made me feel alive.
Half of these can’t be real issues because macbooks had the same issues for decades and an aluminum body was enough to overcome that. What happened? Oh right the vanity shot through the roof.
Battery life that needs to last all day is a first world computing problem. Most people leave their laptops plugged in and as long as you don’t run 10 chromium apps or other reasource hogs in the background, you will easily get 10-12 hours of battery.
Then please don’t make the leap. Because beyond your specific hardware design requirements that are “must be a macbook” there is a lot more trade offs you’re going to have to make. Letting go of your prudeness about what constitutes good and bad hardware should be the easiest barrier to cross.
Out of the box on CachyOS with KDE Plasma, I don't even have windows remembering their positions across a multi-monitor setup. That was shocking to experience with a current-day DE. And I believe it's not KDE's fault specifically but Wayland not having that feature yet, but that makes 0 difference to the user. If OP is hesitant to switch because of superficial hardware complaints, they're going to have a hell of a time actually using it as their main operating system for any significant amount of time.
I’d wait to see if they open source the Machine, Controller, and Frame before assuming buying their products supports open source that matters for everyone. Right now the Steam Deck is the only product that open source and supports that vision.
Even this article it is not clear how beneficial some of their open source work is for everyone except Valve.
For a few years before I eventually got a Steam Deck, I played a lot of games that I bought outside of Steam, and over the past decade, the experience of doing this on Linux has massively improved. Plenty of their improvements get upstreamed to Wine, and there's nothing stopping you from obtain proton (or even one of the various unofficial tweaks of it) to run games that you don't buy through Steam to get the benefits that aren't upstreamed (or haven't been yet). The article itself mentions that they've implemented a driver for Mesa that has equal or better performance on ARM than the proprietary one from Qualcomm.
It's not clear to me what you're attempting to convey by saying the Steam Deck being the only product they have that supports the open source vision. The Steam Deck is the only new hardware product they've had since 2019, when they released their original first party VR headset that presumably is being replaced by the new one. Other than that, the only other hardware products they've ever worked on were earlier headsets made by other manufacturers or the previous iterations of the other two products announced alongside the new headset. From that standpoint, you could make a credible argument that the only product they even have right now that benefits from the open source work they've done in the past six years they did is the exact one you say supports this vision.
Exactly they have no track record so the benefits remain to be seen how gaming improvements to Linux are advantageous to people who use FOSS beyond paying Valve for Steam DRM’d games without requiring a Windows license.
I'm not sure what you're reading into what I said, but to reiterate: I've been seeing benefits personally from their work for years playing games that were not obtained via Steam. It's unclear to me why you think this is "exactly" the point you're making, because it's quite literally the opposite.
Because games are entertainment and this technology is not necessary for the betterment of humanity or enabling some kind of real technological progress, therefor it only really benefits who? Valve and really only in the short term. Once the contributions back are good enough, people will start to use the stack to cut Valve out. There for Valve only has incentive to contribute things that make their products great. If you enjoy playing older games on Linux because of Valve, that is only a side effect of the current efforts.
No, I still don't have any idea what you're trying to say honestly. At first I thought you were trying to say that they didn't contribute to open source in a way that actually helped anyone outside of themselves. I stated that it definitively helped me do something I already had tried to do sometimes but would sometimes have issues with, and no longer do in large part because of their work. As best as I can tell, you're essentially arguing now some combination of an assertion that it's impossible by definition for a company's open source contributions to benefit anyone else in the long run (which feels pretty reductive, like the economics arguments that everyone always acts purely rationally, despite the fact that plenty of people quite often don't do that) and that because it's only software that helps running video games, it can't possibly be beneficial to humanity in general (which independent of whether it's accurate feels kind of irrelevant given that the original proposition from the parent comment was that they did care about that and therefore wanted to support it financially).
The repo[0] is basically an issue tracker and the hardware is not open either (but they're repair-friendly which is already an improvement over... everything else.)
Sorry my point is that the Steam Deck is the only product of theirs that really supports beneficial open source in software and hardware. If you don’t think fossing the case is enough then you’re making my point for me that buying the machine, frame, or controller doesn’t do anything for foss.
It’d be like donating to Mozilla and expecting the money to go to Firefox development.
Adjacent projects to those have if anything only eroded the credit is where credits due. Ask any non-technically inclined Steam Deck owner who contributed to Linux to make it desktop useable and people will tell you desktop computing wasn’t possible until Valve did something. Valve does a very good job scrubbing the OS to look like Steam OS and not Wine, KDE, or Arch.
So while their adjacent projects have moved users to Linux, it is not the reason the desktop is a good experience.
Again Valve’s contributions have been mainly beneficial for Valve. They are perfectly comfortable taking money from Windows and Linux users and claiming to fight some sort of freedom of technology war, but the benefits for wider non-entertainment computing remain to be seen.
NY state just signed a bill to include ChatGPT in their learning and planning. Previously there were deals to bring in Google hardware for students.
Of course people are fleeing public schooling when we’re selling the kids to big tech for laptops and services that require network connection to write a word document, enable cheating, and their data sold for profit without consent.
People might be fleeing public schooling because lawmakers are dictating what happens in the classroom. There are lots of good teachers who struggle with the resources given to them and the constraints imposed on them.
At home, parents can be flexible. They can let their kids use AI when appropriate or discourage its use. They don't have to wait for legislators to get involved. If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it instead of waiting for some committee to evaluate it.
> If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it
How do you know if the math book is great if there hasn’t been consensus about it. The problem isn’t the committee that will always be there in some form. The problem is the politics the committee is used for. If the committee were to prioritize and offload their specific requirements for review instead of requiring substantial analysis twice then the school system would be just as quick.
I don't think you're wrong but I think you're being too quick to attack the gp. They're not wrong either. The point you brought up doesn't contradict theirs but adds nuance.
I'm all for nuance. Its also why I'm biased towards long form media as it's more likely to contain nuance, but not guaranteed. The gps specific example of lectures is quite narrow and more likely to have depth. Which is the entire problem of short form media, that we live in a complex world where we can't distill everything into 1-2 minute segments. Hell, even a lecture series, which will be over 10hrs of content is not enough to make one an expert on all but the most trivial of topics.
You're right that we need nuance but you're not right in arguing for it while demonstrating a lack of it. A major issue is we need to communicate, something we're becoming worse at. We should do our best to speak and write as clearly as possible but at the end of the day language is so imprecise that a listener or reader will be able to construct many, and even opposing, narratives. It is more important to be a good listener than a good speaker. I'd hope programmers, of all people, could understand this as we've invented overly pedantic languages with the explicit purpose of minimizing ambiguity[0]
