Great article. I’ve used my Steam Deck as a very capable desktop PC. I do about 85% of my work on an iPad I take around with me, but whenever I bump into more friction than I’d like with it, I just pop over to Desktop mode on my Steam Deck.
Flatpaks seem the future for Linux as they simply abstract away the dependency hell that can get less knowledgeable users in big trouble. Having used macOS/OS X for many years, user agents as an alternative to system daemons are familiar to me, but I didn’t realize that SteamOS supported them; good to know!
I think that immutable operating systems are going to become more and more popular purely for the various security benefits that can come with them. Hopefully we continue to see the tools adapt to let us do more and more in user-space so we can get the benefits with few drawbacks.
Snagged one with little trouble, but I was early – checked at XX:57 and the sale had gone live already, and I had put the money for it in my Steam Wallet last week as I wanted as few failure points as possible.
These things don’t usually work out for me, so I have plenty of sympathy for those who got hung-up on the ordering page or just came a bit too late. For myself, I’m quite excited and it seems like it could even be here by the end of the week!