I mean not really, Appimage has been around since 2004, flatpak/docker for about a decade now. But at any rate I don't see your point, the person I replied to said it's hard to run old applications on Linux and I gave him solutions on how to do that. What does their age have to do with anything?
If it isn’t a Microsoft sanctioned solution, then multiple third party solutions exists that fix it.
That's not how this works. If it's not a Microsoft-sancioned solution, it literally cannot be fixed no matter how much effort you put in. You need an API to work with Windows. If Microsoft does not provide you with an API, you can't do it. And even if you find a way to hack together something, you have zero guarantee an update won't just come along and fuck it. Linux distros are open source, you can change quite literally any thing about them. That is what that person was talking about.
Trying to use proprietary drivers and NTFS on Linux is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. People work hard to make it work and maybe it does with a little effort but the proprietary model and Linux distros just don't mesh well together. If you make it a point to purchase hardware that has open source drivers and use open source software (and as a consumer, you probably should anyway), everything does just work. Obviously this may not suit your use case and Linux may just not be for you.
Not with windows you can’t, which is the OS the overwhelmingly large majority of people want to use.
Most people don't replace SteamOS on their device so I don't think that's true. Plasma is a perfectly suitable replacement for Windows unless you really need access to Adobe products or something.
There’s more that work and work better on Windows than Linux than there are the other way around though.
True but It's a number that is shrinking every day. We are down to about 100 games at this point that explicitly cannot work? I play a lot of games and I can't remember the last time I tried to play a game and it didn't work because I was on Linux.
There's a surprising amount of older PC games that don't work on Windows anymore, but work fine on Linux. I remember trying to play New Vegas a few years ago on Windows 10 and needing four separate mods just to get it to play properly, and even after all that it would still crash every 15-20 minutes. I've since played it all the way through on Fedora and SteamOS with zero tinkering and no crashes.
It also allows you to use the device as a pc replacement via displaying the screen on a tv/monitor
I've tried upscaling with ESRGAN as well and it has similar problems. It messes with the original textures too much. For example, it made carpet look like a solid surface. Skin looks too smooth and shiny. That kind of thing.
I hate how AI upscaling looks and I really don't get why everyone seems to be gaga over it. In addition to the artifacts and other weirdness it can introduce, it just looks generally like someone smeared vaseline over the picture to me.
Ok, not a typo. Other than the title of these patch notes, is it referred to as "Steam Deck OS" anywhere else? On Preview branch the distro still says "SteamOS Holo".
The fact is that they are rebranding it to Steam Deck OS.
As far as I know they've said nothing about that. It's reasonable to say that the title is a typo for a couple reasons.
They've stated they want SteamOS on third-party devices before
There's also the rumored VR headset running SteamOS as well
Two use cases for the OS that have nothing to do with Steam Deck, so "Steam Deck OS" makes no sense as a name. I personally think they are waiting for Plasma 6+HDR support+VR support before they ship a desktop version, it's important to have feature-parity with Windows out the gate for good word-of-mouth.
You are talking about hardware deficiencies more than anything, you can get those on PC too if you just run low-powered hardware. I'm more talking about bugs. Maybe it's changed since I used Windows years ago, but I remember having issues from time to time with PC games. Crashing, weird behavior from alt-tabbing, some games just running at low GPU usage for no reason even though framerate is uncapped, and various glitches. There's a reason there has been a growing interest in sandboxing for software with docker, etc. Software is deterministic, if you give it a consistent environment it will do the same exact thing every time.
It's the principle of "do one thing and do it well". There's nothing wrong with running games in a desktop but there are limitless ways of customizing a PC and it's impossible for developers to account for everything. It would be nice if you could just write some code and have it work flawlessly for everyone's setup but that's not how it goes. For the use case of the Steam Deck where you are dealing with a low-TDP gaming device it makes more sense to have something like gamescope which can just cut out all non-gaming processes entirely. Maximize performance and battery life with a nice interface to boot, and the desktop is still there if you need it. At the very least it makes troubleshooting super easy when stuff does go wrong because there's very few external things to factor in.
Why don't tech reviewers every talk about gamescope? Gaming on PCs has always been finicky because PCs have to serve so many use cases at once and games often have to compete for resources. Gamescope completely circumvents all of this overhead by being solely meant for the purpose of gaming. It's the closest you can get to a "PC Console". Third parties can never make something like gamescope for Windows, Microsoft themselves would have to ship it and maintain it.
...why would it cost less? It's $60 everywhere else.