Even a potato can run Linux so regardless of a distro it should be all fine.
A potato with a GPU only compatible with deprecated Nvidia drivers would still be just that and a hard pass for Linux.
Luckily this notebook is AMD-based, so should be fine. Maybe the WiFi card could cause trouble.
there’s more to an operating system that a program needs other than the kernel(?)
Yes, and the other parts have other names, like the toolkit GTK or the C standard library glibc and all those things make up a Linux distribution, like Fedora.
android just uses the kernel
Yes and the kernel’s name is “Linux”. No other software is named “Linux”. Ask Linus Torvalds if you don’t believe me.
not doubtful, a lot of compositors, kwin included can run nested.
It’s not a question if some of Plasma Mobile could run in that VM. It’s a question if anything usable is possible. I highly doubt Google will make it possible to call phone numbers etc. in that VM.
With diffs sometimes around 5m lines of code (in case of qcom)
Nobody’s denying that. Many embedded distributions targeted special hardware are like that.
Phones don’t really have that
Can it run x86_64 programs
The article sound like it will work for x86 devices running Android as well. I don’t think this is about emulation.
Plasma Mobile for Android? 🤔
Doubtful. A VM doesn’t have access to the underlying hardware (unless explicitly passed through).
I’ll just run Linux shit on…Linux
Android is a variant of Linux, just not GNU/Linux because of not using glibc.
Is gtk not backward compatible with older version?
New main versions of software usually is not compatible with old versions. That’s one of the points of new main versions. You cannot load Qt 3 themes into Qt 6 either.
Sometimes it’s not so easy to fire up a GUI, like when you ssh into another machine.
CLI text editors have their specific use cases. For all other cases GUI ones (Kate, VSCode,…) exist.
Hopefully tongue-in-cheek.
No.
Because sure. Microsoft Word is the best IDE.
Learn the difference between a word processor and a text editor.
Have you tried GUI text editors? They’re like the CLI ones, just from this millennium. We’re no longer etching runes into rocks any more either.
I tried Alpha 1 and it was completely unusable
You mean like an alpha version?
There’s more hardware in a notebook than just the CPU. It’s pointless without network and GPU drivers, for example. Also the ARM DeviceTree stuff is BS.
Internet surfing
Forget web browsing with 4GB RAM. You can completely disregard the comments recommending a “lite DE” when merely opening a modern web site will put the whole PC into crawling. The 150 MB more or less for different desktops are completely irrelevant then.
The best “newbie friendly” distribution is just plain Fedora Workstation but with only 4GB RAM it will be a pain to use no matter what.
Edit: If you’re a KDE user yourself, you’re best equipped to answer KDE-related questions.
Any way to break down that “Other” and see what it contains?
No, not without lobbying Valve.
there might be some more Ubuntu versions hiding in there.
Certainly because non-LTS versions are not in the main table as well but neither are Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, NixOS, etc.
I looked at the August 2024 results and SteamOS was not mentioned anywhere in the OS version section.
Probably because everybody with a Steam Desk shows up as Arch in the survey.
Had you looked up the current stats, you would have known that this is completely false. SteamOS is in massive lead and I used the phrase “general purpose distribution” for a reason.
https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube