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.)

Centrists putting fascists in power and then selling out the left to (temporarily) save their own asses is a tradition as old as fascism.

The perfect plan. The only thing that could screw it up is if the climate somehow changed.

Maybe they asked Quora if it was legal.

In all seriousness, though, I don’t get that site’s popularity. I only ever visit Quora by accident (because Google ranks it highly) and it’s basically always garbage answers. And speaking as a developer, the UI/UX causes my eyes to roll back in my head and say, “REDRUM” in a demonic voice. It’s hard to even tell where the answer is because there’s so much superfluous shit on the page.

Yet another example of leveraged buyouts being bad and dumb. The “risk” may be technically on the company you’re buying’s books but it’s really on the employees who actually face the real consequences of the bet failing.

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 don’t use KDE as my daily driver but it’s on my SteamDeck and I haven’t once been trying to change a setting or something and encountered a window that looks like Windows XP because no one at a whole multi-trillion dollar company could be bothered to update it. It’s way better than Windows 11.

I obviously got it. But not everyone appreciates high culture.

Meh. I’m an American and I don’t hate it here. But I’m from (and moved back to) a culturally distinct place (New Orleans) so I don’t really identify with the dominant culture. I loathe the politics/corruption and how our government is structured. (The amendments are the best part of our constitution and maybe we should think about that for a bit.) I’m deeply ashamed that we’re the world’s biggest arms dealer and oil/gas producer.

That being said, we have beautiful landscapes and individual American people are usually kind, decent people, at least on an interpersonal level. The corruption of companies and elected officials doesn’t usually extend to the middle class. (Like, you don’t have to bribe someone to get a driver’s license or permits or whatever.) There’s obviously loads of advantages to being an American citizen, just as there are to being an EU citizen. I love our national parks. Just the western half of the United States contains enough varied forms of amazing landscapes to keep a person occupied for a lifetime.

So, I wouldn’t say I like America as a political entity. It’s definitely in my top 30 or so countries to live. I wouldn’t give up my citizenship for a random place but, having travelled extensively, there’s a lot of countries that have a better form of government and a healthier balance between oligarchs and labor.

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?

Are there shared whitelists? It seems like something that isn’t really practical without them. I’m a web developer who has never served one ad but the front-end tools now basically export all JavaScript. You’d probably just get a blank page on any site made recently that’s more complex than a portfolio/resume page.

GitHub owner Microsoft would never engage in IP theft of source code. They leave that to OpenAI and then rebrand it as GitHub Copilot.

Someday, we’ll have the technology to generate an image of a centaur with 4 boobs without using more energy than a small hospital. Very exciting stuff.

Spice Rat and Sugar Ghost was one of my favorite Hannah-Barbera cartoons.

This isn’t about internet. This is about landline telephone service and being able to call 911. For those that don’t remember, landline phones work even when the power is out. No big deal if you have a cell phone and service. Very big deal if you live in a mountainous region where you rely on WiFi at home due to bad phone signal and would have to get in a car to drive somewhere with service to get emergency help or, say, report a forest fire caused by power lines snapping.

In the landline era, AT&T agreed to be the provider of last resort and they didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts. They got something in return. And even if “superior” technology exists, it’s not superior for “last resort” situations. One day, maybe we’ll all have satellite internet as a fallback on our mobile devices and landlines really will be obsolete. But that day isn’t today.

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.

And party on dudes!

My favorites are cocktail sauce and creole mustard. Cocktail sauce has ketchup in it and creole mustard is a type of mustard but it’s pretty different from typical yellow mustard.

Both also have horseradish and I also love “horseradish sauce” (sometimes aka “prime rib sauce”) which is basically mayo, sour cream, and horseradish. So, I might just really like horseradish.