I tried Alpha 1 and it was completely unusable

You mean like an alpha version?

Yeah, now idea how news sites and people claim this is somehow news.

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.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux

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.

Latest non-LTS Ubuntu could be high up the Steam Survey list but isn’t. The strongest general purpose distribution is Arch Linux.

Interesting how the numbers between “computer pros” and hobbyists (Steam Survey) diverge. Unsurprisingly for Steam gamers the Windows numbers are way higher but for Linux specifically Ubuntu is crashing hard since a few years from absolute domination to all Ubuntu versions + derivatives (Mint + pop_OS) combined barely making up 20% of the Linux user base whereas at Stack Overflow there’s a clear lead of Ubuntu over the rest.

Edit:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux

• KDE Plasma has currently better upstream development (a side effect of Steam Deck) but the integration of KDE into Fedora is done by volunteers.
• Gnome is integrated into Fedora by Red Hat employees but upstream development lags a bit behind in adopting some newer technologies Red Hat isn’t that interested for RHEL.

I used Fedora in the past and found the KDE Spin a little less polished. I don’t know the current situation but there was a time Fedora KDE shipped out of the box with three web browsers because the volunteers couldn’t agree on one, whereas the RH employees just decided that they want Firefox and not Gnome Web for RHEL, so in Fedora they just did the same. Updates were rolled out in a timely manner (and I heard nothing that indicated anything changed in that regard), so the volunteer squad didn’t do a worse job there than the paid Gnome people.

Seems like Luxembourg is no data?

I didn’t compare the shades of grey, I just assumed that Luxembourg is the only “other brands” country in Europe.

Belgium

You probably meant Luxembourg.

An old (now decommissioned) notebook of mine had a broken headphone jack. I didn’t have BT headphones then. Audio output worked technically but the detection whether headphones were plugged in or not did no longer work.

I wrote a very short amixer script to force unmute the jack, set the volume to 50 or so percent and set the speaker volume to 0% but not “mute” state. I could then use my wired headphones again.

Weird that the drivers are that dramatically different for the OLED version.

The WiFi and BT modules are completely different (the OLED’s product page says this since the announcement), hence new drivers required.

Why did you subscribe to services you couldn’t use?

I’m convinced that is about bringing Oculus/Meta Quest VR games to the next Valve VR headset which is rumored to be stand alone and run SteamOS.

I would prefer the official YouTube client and web browsers properly developed for touch to be available in game mode. The best touch browser is currently Angelfish and that’s not a robust browser.

I don’t see anyone doing it, honestly.

Brainwashing can achieve so many things. Surely people thinking paid FW employees are their friends and it’s merely doing their friends a favor (and in return they get stickers, some to keep, most to hand out).

So for me it does not really feel like profit is their sole number one priority.

Considering that they get paid their monthly salaries either way, the amount of profit is surely not on their mind all the time. According to Framework investor LTT Linus, the company is very successful. Why doesn’t he promote Linux on Framework then?

Unpaid Linux ambassadors?

No, unpaid Framework PR people at Linux events.