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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Again, I agree with the majority of what you’re saying, and yes, I think most of us might suffer from https://xkcd.com/2501/ but in this particular instance Linus only needed the terminal because of the bug, otherwise he should have been able to install it via the GUI, so the bug was even more disastrous to the UX.

    I think that nanny features are okay on the GUI, which is exactly what happened here, but I should be allowed to do what I want on my system if I have the know how, and I’m okay with danger style messages to let me know I’m about to do something potentially dangerous, but I’m against being forbidden from uninstalling X (which is the short version of what Linus did).

    Flatpacks/snaps/etc are great, and I agree that there should be a push for user space to be mostly there. Also I know it’s not for most users, but you might be interested in checking out NixOS which allows you to rollback almost anything, so while not a solution for the majority of people if this is something you have problems with and have the time and energy to learn Nix language it’s a great distro for having a system that’s almost impossible to break.


  • I agree with lots of what you’re saying, this was a serious bug, it wasn’t the user’s fault, and users can’t be expected to learn bash.

    My point is that the message tried to be as scary as possible, because if that message shows then something is about to uninstall critical components from the system, the bug here was that trying to install steam triggered that. I agree that it wasn’t Linus fault, but I think that most users would stop at that message, he didn’t because he thinks he knows what he’s doing, but he doesn’t, he’s in that middle ground where he knows enough to be confidently wrong.

    Let me ask you, how would you have given that message in a way that would make people stop?, remember that the message is valid, the bug was installing steam doing that.


  • You’re completely missing the point. People can buy steam machines and use them as a PC without ever opening steam, or worse, use them as servers or parts of a cluster. If Steam Machines were sold at a loss they would , by definition, be cheaper than equivalent hardware, so companies would buy 10k of them to put into a warehouse to run stuff because it would be cheaper than buying the same thing from other places. This is what happened to the PS3, non-blocked systems can’t be sold at a loss because you can’t guarantee that whoever is buying it will use them for your intended purpose.


  • Nope, the PS3 was just an example of why you can’t sell at a loss with an open platform. Selling at a loss was the central point of the discussion, if that flew over your head it’s fine, but don’t try to make it my fault that you jumped in the middle of a discussion about why Valve can’t sell at a loss and said:

    The Steam Machine is a standard x86 computer that can’t match the ubiquitous ThinkCentres in price/performance.

    Which implies that even with the Steam Machines being sold at a loss a ThinkCenter would have a best price/performance which is just impossible.

    This is going in circles and bringing nothing constructive.


  • It wasn’t a standard accept/continue/yes prompt, it wasn’t something that he could just press enter or something easy and continue without noticing, he had to have read the message to know what to do, it was something akin to:

    WARNING The following essential packages will be removed. This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you’re doing! … You’re about to do something harmful, if you’re sure of what you’re doing type the phrase “Yes, do as I say!”

    The message couldn’t have been more clear about it. Plus most users wouldn’t need to use the terminal, he just happened to use the distro during the brief window that that bug existed.

    As a Linux enthusiast I can definitely tell you I never encourage people to just type words in the magic box and get it over with, and always tell them to understand what they’re typing.



  • I never said $800 would be selling at a loss, in fact I said that there’s a good possibility that they can sell it cheaper than 800 and still make a profit because they buy things in bulk. You were the first one who even mentioned it being profitable for them selling at a loss:

    They could totally make money selling it at a loss.

    Which is completely false, if they sold at a loss by definition they would lose money on each sale, and because it’s an open platform people would just buy the cheap hardware to be used for any project which would make Valve bleed money like Sony did with their PS3 until they closed the system.




  • I hold a very similar view, I usually express it like so:

    If you were to develop a simulation of a universe you would have to make some concession to be able to run such a large simulation:

    • You would have to limit causality, since the communication from one part of the cluster to the next would not be instantaneous you would need to limit the speed at which those communications can happen, that way you guarantee that one part of your cluster can’t interfere with another, think of it like a loading screen.
    • Speaking of loading screens, you could make the vast majority of the thing empty, that would limit stuff going over from one part to another.
    • You could gain lots of performance by only simulating the micro stuff when required, so an electron could be a wave of possibilities until they need to be somewhere, think of it in the same manner as current games don’t draw what’s not on screen.



  • No, it won’t. $800 will get you a machine that’s around 50% faster. Controller included.

    Care to share a link to a PCPartPicker with that? Here’s a link on the same thread of someone building a similarly speck machine for 800 https://lemmy.world/comment/20649777 and that is without the controller. In case you haven’t noticed, RAM prices are a bit crazy at the moment.

    It’s literally a laptop CPU with a laptop GPU.

    It’s literally not, they custom developed it for the product, similar to the Steam Deck one, it is based on the architecture used on laptops, but so are Playstation and Xbox AFAIK.

    Also not true. A 1k prebuilt is around 70% faster. Controller not included, though.

    Can you provide a link to such a prebuilt? Here’s the first prebuilt I could find with similar specs, and it’s 1k https://periphio.com/gaming-pcs/firestorm-7600-prebuilt-amd-gaming-pc/

    Sure, but that’s an argument in favour of it costing less.

    Yes, that was my point, the top of what this should cost is the same as a prebuilt with similar specs since Valve buys stuff in bulk it should be cheaper than that.

    Yeah, and the best selling console of the generation is $450 for the digital-only version.

    And the other one is 700, your point is?

    Stop this delusion. If this was an actual possibility, it would already be happening with the Steam Deck. Yes, I know you know someone who did it. I know someone who bought a Surface to put Linux on it. There’s dozens of us!

    It didn’t happened with the Deck because it’s not sold at a loss, so it’s cheaper to assemble a similarly built PC for you. But I definitely saw several posts through the years recommending people just buy a Steam Deck as their machine in certain conditions. If the Steam Deck costed 300 I guarantee you people would be using it as their daily drivers or building clusters of them.






  • It’s a lot more than that, it’s:

    • Knowing what parts to buy, I don’t think most average people can cite every piece in a desktop
    • Selecting parts that are compatible, try plug-and-play an AMD CPU on an Intel MOBO.
    • Selecting parts that fit the chassis you selected, unless you went with a full ATX that’s a concern.

    Now that you bought the components:

    • Knowing to ground yourself before doing anything, currently I’m getting static shocks daily where I live, if I didn’t know about this I could very easily fry a RAM by picking it up wrong.
    • Cable management is not easy, most cheaper chassis don’t have enough or dedicated space for it.
    • Correct amount of thermal paste is something lots of people get wrong.
    • Some pieces require strength to lock in place, others break if you even look at them sideways.

    Now that you’ve assembled everything:

    • Installing OS
    • Installing drivers
    • Installing Steam
    • Depending on your OS and controller of choice pairing controller and getting it to work could be difficult

    I’m not saying that assembling a computer is hard, but is definitely far from plug-and-play, and not something I would recommend for someone without technical knowledge who just wants something to play games.