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?

Now you can finally relax and enjoy repaying your $100K+ loan!

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!

I’m curious, any advice on that? How does one do “good” telemetry? I’m the first to complain about Microsoft, Apple, (even worst) Google, Meta and now OpenAI collecting data to sell me stuff… but it’s true that also some data is needed to get some kind of introspection in terms of usage. Developers need to understand what is actually happening with the software they develop.

Now I’m wondering specifically about 2 side :

• how to do the data collection correctly (e.g local only, only send on crash, only send without PII, store only aggregate)
• how to get informed consent from users (e.g off by default, UX that supports understanding of why it’s done and how)

I’m genuinely glad that the mindset around privacy have changed since the last few years but I’m wondering how, when it’s a genuinely positive good case (to truly make better products), to do it.

I forgot the exact number but while installing Debian (Bookworm and Sid) this weekend I was shocked by how small the base install, with a window manager (“big” one by your standards, i.e KDE), was. Maybe 2Gb, definitely less than 4Gb. It all worked fine, I could browse the Web, print, edit rich text, watch video, etc.

I installed a ton more stuff since, e.g Steam, Inkscape, Python libraries for computer vision, etc and it’s still not even 10Gb.

So… my suggestion is the same as I shared earlier in https://lemmy.ml/post/20673461/13899831 namely do NOT install preemptively! Assuming you have a fast and stable connection I would argue stick to the bare minimum and all add as you need.

In fact… if you want to be minimalist I would suggest to do another fresh install (it’s fast, less than 1hr and you can do something else at the same time) and stick to the bare minimum right away.

TL;DR: don’t get rid of, just avoid adding from the first place.

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.

It’s a tricky situation to navigate.

There is the technical aspect, namely is it actually feasible, but itself wrapped within an economical and political context, as I’ve highlighted in another thread on this post.

On one hand we learn from Snowden’s leaks about an entire surveillance apparatus, we might also have a conceptual understand of limitations via articles like “On trusting trust”, plain incompetence and shortcuts for large companies, so all that and more invite us to be very prudent. Those are actual justifications for questioning what hardware, if any, can be trusted.

Yet… one can’t go from those justifications to speculate. Yes there might be flaws, intentional or not, in both the design or the production or both of chips. Still, it’s not because it’s conceptually possible, or even that it happened before, that it does happen today and at scale.

Your System76 is an interesting example and it’s a bit like my Banana Pi tinkering, or even more limited (yet exciting IMHO) the Precursor. Namely it’s a very costly trade off today to “work” with hardware one can (at least try to) understand better, hopefully itself leading to better privacy and security. In the end most of us believe the trade off for more affordable performances trumps that deeper understanding.

I must express myself quite poorly. It is not a point about technical knowledge, in fact if you were to know more about the topic than I do, I would expect you to even more be upheld to higher standards and thus not promote a bad solution, even more so assume it’s the only one. I can’t imagine that even a PhD student who is supposedly at the frontier of knowledge in their very narrow field would assume no alternative is possible, or will ever be. This even more the case without having both a complete understand of the landscape but also about OP’s actual needs, which is probably hard to express clearly and thus leading to a lot of assumption. Here maybe a simple loud alarm from a BT speaker going out of range might be enough.

My whole point is that abandoning hope, and leading others to do so, is worst than actively finding for a barely OK compromise.

Anyway I don’t want to invest more energy on this discussion unfortunately so simply wishing you the best, thanks for the clarifications.