Take your pick from the Linux family tree

I’ve not come across Arteck, thanks for the tip.

I use a trackball regularly. What’s the make + model and how well does it work for you?

I’d not considered that, thanks

Thanks for the comprehensive rundown, adding LP switch keyboards to my search

Nice, thanks

Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll look into these.

Looks very neat! Not sure I could fit it in my backpack though 🤔

Good question. Too large would be something larger than the deck itself. I need it to fit into a regular day backpack with other stuff.

Too small would be one of those Rii style keyboards with built in trackpad that you need to hold in your hands and type with your thumbs.

Let’s not be too hasty to call it garbage when it could in fact turn out to be rancid dog shit.

There are many days when I feel exactly how this looks.

This was also my first Linux distro after having used Sun’s Solaris while at uni. I think I tried out Slack and Suse at around the same time, but stuck with RedHat and related distros for about 6 years.

Crashing has not been an issue on my deck. I’m 3 days shy of my 2 year anniversary with my steam deck. I can recall it crashing maybe 3 or 4 times, each of those linked to some custom game launcher and all in the default mode rather than desktop. For a while it used to hang when woken from sleep, but that hasn’t happened in 6 months so I assume was fixed in an update.

I’m using desktop for emulation and games from GOG and Epic.

If you’re not using GNU/Hurd are you even trying?

One of the critical differences between FOSS and commercial software is that FOSS projects don’t need to drive sales and consequently also don’t need to immediately jump onto technology trends in order to not look like they’re lagging behind the competition.

What I’ve consistently seen from FOSS over the 30 years I’ve been using it, is that if a technology choice is a good fit for the problem, then it will be adopted into projects where relevant.

I believe that there are use cases where LLM processing is absolutely a good fit, and the projects that need that functionality will use it. What you’re less likely to see is ‘AI’ added to everything, because it isn’t generally a good solution to most problems in it’s current form.

As an aside, you may be less likely to get good faith interaction with your question while using the term ‘luddite’ as it is quite pejorative.

I don’t get the RCS hype. I already have apps for rich messaging and RCS offers nothing for me over those apps. What I do appreciate is SMS, which is posed to be killed-off by RCS. I can rely on SMS even when there is no data signal, can’t say that for RCS. I wish I had a way to permanently disable RCS on my Pixel 6a, instead I have to keep rejecting the ‘upgrade to RCS’ dialog.