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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 5th, 2024

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  • Here are the things I love about Mint:

    • Everything is doable with a nice GUI, sometimes more than CachyOS+KDE Plasma
    • Very stable, very reliable
    • Mint’s Update Manager is great
    • Matches my personality/philosophy a bit more
    • I installed it for my mom after her old drive died, and it just works for her (she is not a computer person so this is a big win)
    • I quite like Cinnamon, though my feelings on this aren’t that strong, I’d be happy with just about any sane desktop environment

    Here are the reasons I switched to CachyOS:

    • My hardware is new enough that it really benefits from being up to date on everything upstream. On Mint, it’s not hard to switch to a newer kernel and stuff like that, but the more I stray from Mint’s defaults, the more I have to do to maintain my PC rather than just using Update Manager.
    • I could not get VRR (FreeSync) to work on Mint Cinnamon. I think it might be impossible.
    • I wanted to try other desktops like KDE, and see if Wayland makes any difference to me as a user (it doesn’t). Mint’s supported desktop choices are quite limited (just Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE) and I didn’t want to screw around getting an unsupported desktop to work, defeating a lot of Mint’s advantages.
    • Generally wanted to be on the bleeding edge of software updates, just because.

    I do have some qualms about CachyOS, specifically I feel like Shelly (their choice of GUI package manager) is undercooked and not ready to ship as default. You don’t have to use it though.

    I’m going to stick with CachyOS for now, mostly because it’s just working for me and I don’t feel a strong reason to switch. I hear that Mint/Cinnamon is getting closer to Wayland, which might make for a good time to switch back to it. Or I’ll just stick with what’s working for me until it doesn’t.




  • One might say the Deck still isn’t fully baked. I got mine a few months ago, so well after it launched, and there were still some rough edges. For example, I wasn’t able to redeem the OLED goodies (startup animation and keyboard theme). Steam Support advised me to switch to the SteamOS beta at the time, which worked. So the release version of SteamOS had a known redemption bug for months, likely to affect a large number of new users? Sure it’s a small thing, but exactly what I mean by not fully baked.

    I have some other nitpicks with it but overall I’ll admit it works quite well.





  • The company may be big, but their hardware orders are nothing compared to the orders for compute farms. They’ve gone on record recently about the Steam Machine saying there are some components they could not secure at all, for any price. Their service contacts are just not attractive when the world-ending AI farms are happy to pay more per unit and ordering more units total.

    I do think they really should try their hardest to keep those replacement parts coming, but from the outside it’s impossible to know how hard they actually tried. The only question is whether you give them the benefit of the doubt. You don’t seem to, and that’s fine (honestly I’m not sure I should give it either), but what I’m saying is there is doubt, the market is so fucked right now that this is actually believable.








  • I haven’t tried it on the Deck yet, but expect it to work:

    Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons. Lean the Deck (or Switch) on its side on something, such that with your head on the pillow you can look at it. With one joy-con in each hand, you can reposition your arms however you want and independently of each other.

    This method with Ace Attorney games on the Switch is my sleeping pill. Works amazingly well for me. After I finish my current Ace Attorney game, I plan to finally try it with the Steam Deck and a different visual novel.

    Foreseeable caveat: charging the joy-cons will be annoying. If you put them in a Switch to charge (which is my only charging solution right now), they get paired to it automatically and will need to be re-paired with the Deck.

    Also, leaning the Steam Deck on its side won’t be as easy as it is for the Switch. Might have to improvise something for that.



  • In the Steam hardware survey, under Video Card Description, you can find: Steam Deck GPU - 0.45%.

    Random sources online for which I cannot find a source (though I didn’t really look much) say Steam has 132 million monthly active users.

    If we take both of those figures at face value, assume being a monthly active user on Steam is a good proxy for “in use”, then that makes 594,000 Steam Decks in active use.

    This is far less than the sales figure that @breadsmasher@lemmy.world cited, which could be a combination of a lot of factors:

    1. Steam Decks which have been sold but are not in active use for whatever reason.
    2. The monthly active users figure for Steam seems low to me for a platform as big as Steam. It could be wrong.
    3. It is possible that Steam Deck users are under-represented in the Steam Hardware Survey, and they make up a bigger percentage of Steam users. Maybe they are less likely to participate in it?
    4. People might be using Steam Deck for other purposes besides Steam, so they are not active Steam users. Personally I doubt this is a significant factor.
    5. Some users might participate in the hardware survey more than once, causing the calculation to be wrong. I’m not sure how the hardware survey works, but this could be a huge factor.
    6. Who know what else I didn’t think of.



  • If you’re in the CachyOS Discord and have a lot of patience, this is where I dumped all of my complaints and feedback on the day that I really tried to use it: https://discord.com/channels/862292009423470592/1500254688380063934

    Keep in mind I was pretty new to Cachy/Arch and coming from Linux Mint, make of that what you will.

    More specifically, this is what raised the alarm for me: https://discord.com/channels/862292009423470592/1500254688380063934/1500507281840668852 and following messages.

    Basically, I tried to install openrgb-next-git from AUR using Shelly. The operation failed but was reported as successful. And the Shelly dev I was chatting with didn’t really seem to acknowledge the severity of the issue. After many more attempts, I eventually gave up on Shelly installed the package using paru. I don’t remember if there was any problem during that installation, but it did get installed in the end, which is more than I can say for Shelly.

    This exchange was 2 months ago, so it’s possible that things have improved since then, but that’s not enough time for me to give Shelly another chance yet.

    What I’m about to say is pure speculation, and I have no concrete evidence, just my gut: I think Shelly, or at least its GUI, is vibe-coded. Too many things about it are half-baked but with the appearance of polish. Windows and dialogs that look pretty but are too small for their contents. No way a human developer would push that if it was tested even once.

    A Shelly developer explained to me that it’s not a wrapper for pacman or any other tool, instead they re-implement the functionality provided by pacman using a lower-level library. To this I say: Shelly has not earned my trust in their code to manage packages on my main PC. When it’s more mature, when it has more eyes on it, and when it doesn’t give me the half-baked vibe, I’ll happily give it another chance.