I get what you are saying, but unless you buy a specific linux phone with some semblance of professional support (e.g. Pinephone) this won’t really get better. The best time to buy a Linux phone was a bit over 10 years ago when Canonical still actually supported Ubuntu Touch. That was pretty much the last time there was any serious effort in that regard. Since then it’s just been hobbyists doing hobby things in hobby quality.

Tbh, unless you want to suffer A LOT, the best option is to get any Android phone, install Termux and on top install any Linux distro you like (if you want easy mode, pay for Andronix which helps with installation).

Then you just run your Linux distro in a container on Android and view its virtual screen using a VNC viewer app.

That way you get a fully-working Android phone that can run most Linux apps without breaking your main phone use case. The only thing you are really lacking is low-level access because it’s running in a root-less proot container. So no hardware acceleration or other fancy hardware stuff.

I’m very open to being an early adopter of mobile Linux phones.

vs

the rest of your post

What you are trying to say is you are very open to be a late adopter of mobile Linux phones, adopting a Linux phone when it actually works.

Early adopters are those who tough out the crap. The issue with Linux phones is they’ve been stuck in early adopter land for the last 20 years.

Judging by the fact that I have never heard of the game or the company before, I guess it’s tiny and obscure, meaning it would have either been completely ignored by hackers or some hacker would completely flatten it with hacks.

Probably nothing about that has hanged by open sourcing it.

Tbh, immigration isn’t the worst “solution”.

We do have an overpopulation problem. Well, an overconsumption times overpopulation problem, really.

We could fix that by either consuming less (which we apparently, as a species, really don’t want) or by having fewer people (which we apparently really want).

So, in the end, reducing population isn’t a real problem. Even if the population shrinks by 50% each generation (~25 years, for the sake of the argument), there will still be 250mio people left even after 5 generations. The trend should probably be reversed sometime then, but until then it’s really not an issue on the species survival aspect and it would actually be really good for the planet and our long-term survival.

But until then we have mainly one problem: our economic system is based on infinite growth, which can’t work. So again there are two main solutions: either we bring in people from other countries, who benefit from a higher standard of living here while supporting our economic system, or we get rid of the real parasites and freeloaders in our societies: the ultra rich. And again, for some reason we really don’t want to get rid of the rich.

When two men love each other very much, they host a freetube instance where they upload their videos.

Beware, what you are comparing vsync off with vrr.

You have four options when it comes to screen refreshes:

• Vsync off, VRR off: you get frames as fast as possible, no latency, but also tearing
• Vsync on: the frame rate gets synchronised with the screen refresh rate. That means, sometimes the game will wait for the screen, leading to a lower frame rate (limited to the refresh rate of the screen) and slight latency, but no tearing
• VRR: the game can lower (not raise) the refresh rate. Compared to Vsync maximum refresh rate it will lower power consumption and do nothing else
• Triple buffering. Needs to be implemented by the game, not by the OS. Provides maximum frame rate and no tearing with minimal latency.

because all games on PC are free if you want them to be

If you include piracy, that’s available on the Switch too. Worst case you have to chip in €10 for a mod chip, but that’s it.

Lmao so you include all the deals for the switch with your “mario kart upgrade”, but not the steam deck?

Yeah, find me a deal to get Mario Kart for the steam deck legally.

Then you consider it’s also your laptop/main PC too…

You want to use a steam deck as a laptop? Do you really have no self respect?

That also isn’t the point I was even disputing, it’s precisely that the ownership is more expensive because PC gamers buy more games, but either way you’re wrong.

That was exactly my point. Steam Decks/PCs and consoles are used differently by different people, and in the end a Steam Deck is not cheaper than a console, even if you never pay a cent for a game (but then again, why are you buying a Steam Deck?)

But if we keep going

I get the feeling you don’t actually want to discuss or talk about the topic, you just want to win. So yeah, no point in continuing the discussion.

If it’s too much for you, then don’t pay it. It’s not like there are no alternatives.

I usually just buy games years later for a fraction of the price. Or wait until a platform becomes abandonware and I can’t buy a game in retail any more (meaning the publisher doesn’t want to take my money), and then I pirate it.

There are a couple hundred of thousands of great games, I don’t need the flashiest, newest thing.

I’m just saying that the €80 pricing isn’t that crazy, it’s just inflation adjustment. In fact, the €60 price point for full-price games has been around since at least 2005. Adjusted for inflation, that’s around €100 in today’s money.

In fact, SNES games even cost up to €80 in 1993, which would be ~€180 in today’s money, and even the cheapest titles back then (akin to our current low-budget indie titles) started from €40 (~€90 today).

So, the price is really not that bad. And, as I said, you can just wait for the sale and get it cheaper anyway. Full price is only for people who need exactly this game exactly right now.

Price of the middle version of the Steam Deck: €569

Price of the middle version of the Switch 1: €284

So we got a price difference of €285 here.

€50 for the bundled Mario Kart upgrade plus 3 other full price titles, leaves us €55 to spend on another 5 indie titles, and then you got the average total cost of ownership for a switch for just about the price of the Steam Deck with a whopping 0 games on it.

The difference becomes starker if you go for the top-spec version: €679 for the Steam Deck, vs €329 for the Switch, a whopping €350 difference. For that difference you can afford Mario Kart plus 4 full-price titles and have another €60 remaining for a few indie titles.

You are fighting windmills, capische?

You made up an argument that I never made and now you are fighting against it.

Well done, Don Quijote, the windmill is destroyed and you can go home claiming you defended the land from evil giants.

That is true, of course. But that’s a vulnerability from Nintendo’s perspective, not from a customer’s perspective. As in, if this exploit gets improved on, it might lead to people running unlicensed or pirated software on the switch, thus potentially hurting Nintendo.

It’s not something that might lead to people getting their Nintendo-accounts hacked or stolen or something like that.

On a Steam Deck, the former concept doesn’t even exist. There’s no Steam Deck vulnerability that might lead to people running non-steam software on the Steam Deck, because it’s allowed usage.

What I’m trying to say is that vulnerability is not negative for the user or indicative of bad platform security for the user.

Never heard of a steam backlog? PC is the number one piracy platform, but it’s also the only platform where people buy whole bundles of games in a sale or where you get at least one game for free every week.

Have a look at Nintendos sales figures: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/hard_soft/index.html

Take for example the switch: 152 mio devices sold, vs 1391 mio units of software sold. That’s roughly 9 titles per device since 2017, or roughly one game per year.

Compare that to your 435 titles over 12 years, which equals roughly 36 titles per year.

You are a heavy buyer of games, in the order of 36x of what’s the average for a switch user. You just proved my point.

Btw, these 9 titles would have cost a switch user just €540, if all of them were AAA games at full price. That too doesn’t factor in that the figure from Nintendo includes massively popular cheap indie titles or the fact that even Nintendo games sometimes go on sale.

Let me rephrase that:

I mean, especially as a parent do I want to waste hours setting up the system, fixing misconfigurations and trying to keep my elementary school kid from watching porn or heavy violence on the system?

€80 is a lot, but not nearly as much as the time you spend on the device if you factor in your hourly rate.

And for most non-techy parents the choice doesn’t even exist. They don’t even know how they’d setup parental controls or fix issues on a PC.

Also: if you put €60 from 2017 into an inflation calculator and convert that to 2025 money, you get €82. Yes, it sucks that everything gets more expensive, but that’s just how inflation works.

My grandma also always complained that when she was young she could get a whole bar of chocolate for 0.50 Schilling (€~0.04).

As an asexual person, you get just as much sex as most developers get documentation.

Last week I spent a day trying to figure out why the thing in the damn documentation doesn’t work.

Turns out, for that project “latest” doesn’t point to their latest release, but to what they currently have on their dev branch. And apparently they changed the whole module around since the last release.

Unless you are actually using your PC. Setting up everything involves much more than just installing the OS. If I want to get all my apps working and my data transferred to where it needs to go, and all my peripherals and stuff running, it takes me a day or two.

That’s why I’m still stuck on a distro with more issues than things going for it.

That sounds more like a bug than just bad performance.

Be really careful with Fedora or Bazzite.

I’ve been using Fedora for the last few months, because of all the recommendations, and it’s been a constant struggle. Fast updates means I can always enjoy the newest bugs and issues. That’s ok for a toy system I use to tinker, but not for my main system that I just need to work.

Ubuntu was much more stable and worked better. People hate on it because of their semi-proprietary app delivery system (snap). They feel that Canonical is betraying the open source spirit with it. If you don’t care about that, Ubuntu is pretty nice.

Btw, Bazzite is immutable, Fedora is not.

You know the PC vs. Console debate isn’t new. That one has been going on ever since PCs and consoles existed.

When I was a teenager, I, too, didn’t understand why anyone would buy a console over a PC because the PC can do so much more than a console.

Then I got kids, and I understood.

There are two main angles:

• Parental controls

On a console, a kid can only play what I allow. I get the games, I can disable features (e.g. browser or social features) that I deem risky. It’s all easy, it just works. My 7yo won’t be playing Fortnite or Doom without my approval. Try locking down any kind of PC (Windows or Linux) to a child safe level so that the kid doesn’t have access to age-inappropriate content. It’s borderline impossible. My dad tried and failed, and if I tried, I’d most likely fail too.

• Ease of use

Every second time, my wife and kids want to play something on the living room PC they call me to fix some issue. The controller isn’t pairing. The controller is pairing, but the game doesn’t recognise it. Steam link to the gaming PC doesn’t work. Or it does work, but the resolution is crap. Or all sorts of other issues. With consoles, you don’t have that. It all just works.

A PC is definitely the more capable system, and a power user will get more out of it than out of a console, no question about that.

But claiming there is no use case for a console is entirely wrong, too. A look at sales numbers for Switch (152mio sold) vs Steam Deck (3.7mio sold) should clear the question up whether there’s a use case for a switch.